A lot that once held a single-family home now has five units in total between the main house and the laneway.Doublespace Photography
Architects Janna Levitt and Dean Goodman, partners in life and business, have always been ahead of the curve.
Two decades ago (almost to the day), The Globe’s John Bentley Mays visited the intrepid duo at their sparkling new residence at 328 Euclid Ave. and gushed that it was “tough and proud … without being at all noisy or uppity” since it deferred to its elderly architectural neighbours. Praising its innovative, sustainable features, Mr. Mays was taken aback in the upstairs bedroom, where he encountered a “tour de force,” a corner window that “almost seamlessly joined” to a “sunny private garden” on a flat roof.
Curve, you’ve been conquered again.
“Want some raspberries?” asks Ms. Levitt in 2025, to which this berry-greedy writer thrusts out his hand.
The raspberries in question come not from a sunny rooftop this time, but from a corner-lot garden made possible by entering into an easement with the city to “basically double the width of [the] garden.” And it’s not just a garden: here, the semi-retired Mr. Goodman and Ms. Levitt (LGA was founded in 1989) have created a trellis-covered, inner-city oasis with a shipping-container sauna, an outdoor dining area, and a heated walkway between the wedgelike, three-storey building fronting Ulster Street and the two-storey laneway house situated off Lippincott Street.
And to get the project built, the pair performed another tour de force, but this time vis-à-vis planning and legal. A few years before the City of Toronto amended bylaws to allow “four-plus-one” multiplexes to be built “as-of-right” in single-family neighbourhoods, the veteran architects were presenting a plan for just that, and then jumping through bureaucratic hoops for the green light to create, And to start construction with a healthy bank balance, the duo condo-ized the five units and presold three of them, the two on the second and third floors and the single lower-level unit, while keeping the two ground-floor units for themselves.
A Toronto multiplex that tests the limits of urban density
Despite all of that chopping-up of space, the building presents itself in much the same way as their former residence: tough yet quiet, a single artistic piece, and one that’s unassuming except for, perhaps, its slightly taller stance than the immediate neighbour to the east. However, the breathing room the corner lot provides and the bespoke suit of rusty-coloured brick tile from Denmark give it a pass. It’s a handsome, understated and elegant prototype that should be repeated elsewhere.
“It’d be really great for the city,” says Mr. Goodman. “It’d be like those British mews houses, which [are] in lanes.”
Inside, the Levitt-Goodman residence shines just as brightly. As Ms. Levitt tends to some squash, Mr. Goodman leads me to the foyer while describing the next hurdle the couple had to face, the COVID-fueled construction delays and price increases that reared their ugly heads in 2020 and 2021, but credits Vlad Berezovskiy of Desar Construction Studio for running a tight ship.
Interestingly, the ‘front’ door to their unit has been spun around to the side because “it works for the layouts. … You only have so much frontage, so you play around with it as an architect,” says the affable architect. No matter – with enormous windows facing front, the foyer is a joy, and it leads visitors down a tiny corridor that opens up to the formal dining area and kitchen.
Similar to the Euclid bedroom and roof garden that pleased Mr. Mays so much, in this house, Mr. Goodman can turn a handle and slide a wall of glass aside to reveal a Juliette balcony that gives diners the impression they are seated in the woods. And if it looks as if the dining table and matching bench – designed by architect Omar Gandhi and Mjölk – fits perfectly under the massive sliding doors, that’s because it was planned that way.
The long kitchen island is reminiscent of the Euclid house as well, with its big, stainless steel-covered island “that we live on,” quips Mr. Goodman, although here the necessary twin stairwells overhead have been turned into a feature wall/ceiling curve clad in warm wood panels. “It’s part of when you live in a building with other people, you’ve got to [say], ‘Okay, there are things that are different than having a private house, you’re in an apartment, [so] we have to accept that,’” says Mr. Goodman.
The twin stairwells over the kitchen have been turned into a feature.Doublespace Photography
Walk into the tidy living room, and one is drawn, moth-to-flame, to the oasis outside and, beyond it, to the little building – unit five in this five-condo building if one is counting – that the couple uses as their bedroom and home office; with the addition of a small kitchen it could easily be turned into an independent house … or “cottage” as Mr. Goodman calls it.
With heaters under the path, in the winter months, the couple can walk (quickly) with slippered feet from the main house to the bedroom. To get the couple up with the sunrise, there is a greenhouse-like window over the bed and a cool, blue-tiled bathroom (with tiles on floor and ceiling) is a lovely place to perform morning ablutions. Up a curved stair is an office with a massive desk, couch, and postcard-perfect view of housetops on Lippincott Street. And if an overnight guest needs to use the big bathroom in the laneway building (there’s a tiny powder room in the main building), a hidden wall can be utilized so “guests don’t feel like they’re walking through our bedroom.”
Now that the curve has caught up with Ms. Levitt and Mr. Goodman, it would be nice to see a forest of these multiplexes pop up, and especially owner-occupied ones, since those face less opposition: “We went and knocked on I don’t know how many doors,” finishes Mr. Goodman with a smile, “and the neighbours were incredibly supportive.”