Before the renovation, the semi-detached townhouse in Toronto’s Deer Park neighbourhood was already notable for its jutting walls, recessed entryways and half-moon windows.Scott Norsworthy
Whether designing a skyscraper, a running shoe, a chair, or a floral arrangement, the principles are the same: There is symmetry and asymmetry, tension and relief, colour theory to consider, as well as balance and juxtaposition.
Which means that, if a person happens to be a highly skilled running shoe designer, there should be a strong sense of what’s needed in a house renovation. But that doesn’t mean that the running shoe designer would know all of the steps (pardon the pun) to get there.
“Design is very personal,” begins architect Maria Denegri of Denegri Bessai Studio. “When you’re handed a 20-page manifesto, you have to know yourself in order not to feel threatened.”
The Architourist: An ‘Earthship’ that parlays old tires and big windows into a warm home
After a big laugh that echoes off the foyer’s mirrored walls, her client, running shoe designer Richard Kuchinsky of the Directive Collective, adds: “Everything we picked was super important to me, and my whole concept that went into that 20-page brief – I got a lot of comments on that when I was looking for architects – was that I wanted the renovation to not look like a renovation; I wanted guests to walk in and think, ‘maybe this is original and really well preserved or restored, or maybe it’s new?’”
Looking at Mr. Kuchinsky’s brief/manifesto (it’s only 18 pages long, for the record), and slogan-like phrases such as “clean but warm” or “minimal but rich,” along with sentences stating “[w]e don’t want retro, pastiche, kitschy or cliché,” appear alongside photographs of Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist 1972 Burroughs Wellcome headquarters, a tactile and sexy terracotta wall by Toronto-based Partisans at Gusto 501, and John Lautner’s famous 1963 Sheats-Goldstein residence in Los Angeles.
It helps that Mr. Kuchinsky bought something with good 1970s bones to begin with. Winner of a 1983 honourable mention by the Canadian Housing Design Council, “Oriole Villas,” a set of three semi-detached townhouses designed in 1977 by Winnipeg-born and Toronto-based architect Bernard Rasch (1943-2025), have been a notable architectural anomaly in Toronto’s Deer Park neighbourhood with their jutting walls, recessed entryways and half-moon windows.
And despite being a dyed-in-the-wool downtowner, when Mr. Kuchinsky saw the listing he was smitten enough to wander north of Bloor to take a look: “Immediately, it had that warmth, and the fact that it wasn’t renovated. … Not everything was totally original, but the [interior] brick wasn’t covered over [and] it wasn’t that we would have to come in and rip out someone’s 10-year-old reno.”
Indeed, even after a massive renovation by Ms. Denegri and work/life partner Tom Bessai, it’s difficult to separate 1977 from 2025. Open the original, and hefty front door, and the foyer sports new terrazzo tile underfoot, but leaves that mirrored wall intact. The original archway over the door has been given a lick of salmon/orange paint that glows like neon.
Straight ahead is the swoon-worthy, Brady Bunch-esque staircase, set perpendicular to the wall rather than parallel for full sculptural effect. “Some of the neighbours that I’ve seen have updated and modernized it,” says Mr. Kuchinsky, adding that he might not have purchased the house had that been the case. The stair also, says Ms. Denegri, “functions in creating that pivotal point” where all of the volumes in the house – double-height foyer, stairs to basement, living room with skylight – all connect. That pivot makes it easy for the family – the Kuchinskys have two young children – to communicate from upstairs bedroom to main floor, or from main floor to Mr. Kuchinsky’s design studio in the basement.
To add some levity, the main-floor powder room and the completely redesigned kitchen both feature tiles with overscaled terrazzo in salmon and greys; in the powder room, the aggregate pieces are so large that it’s like one is looking at a terrazzo floor through a microscope.
And that kitchen, although dark and sexy and worthy of a big chef’s kiss, was designed with practicality and sticky-fingered children at top of mind: “It’s a family house, not a museum,” says Mr. Kuchinsky. “So everything is either picked [because] it can be cleaned super easily, or if it wears, it actually wears in, not wears out [such as] the wood, the unlacquered brass, it gets patina on it.”
A patina that will reveal itself with all of that glorious natural light that pours in. And, ironically, while organizing full window replacement, a small portion of the dining area window had to be filled in due to size availability; however, with the lack of multiple panes and chunky muntin bars, one would never notice (only a close examination of the rear exterior wall gives that compromise away).
Climbing the stairs, one is struck by the tiled platforms originally meant for plants (there is a faucet), and, next, the size of the principal bedroom – the architect’s comments in the 1983 CHDC booklet were that the townhouses were meant for “professional, middle-aged, empty nesters” – despite Denegri Bessai Studio ‘borrowing’ a pokey part of the bedroom and manipulating the hallway to add a third, child-sized bedroom.
“So a super simple reworking of the rooms without changing wet walls,” says Ms. Denegri. “It was a way of collaborating cleverly and achieving the wish-list quite affordably.” And affordable it was, as Mr. Kuchinsky “went down a rabbit hole” to source many sale items, end-of-lines, and asked his team to come up with Ikea-hacks where possible (closets, mostly).
Richard Kuchinsky, shoe designer and client on the project.Scott Norsworthy
“A running shoe might have 30 to 50 parts in it, all different materials from multiple suppliers – meshes and foams and rubbers and laces and whatever – and it’s the same thing [here], everything has to come together and work … everything has to look good from far away, but also in detail,” finishes Mr. Kuchinsky.
Here, too: groovy, tactile 1970s or 2020s sleek, it all comes together as a harmonious, family-friendly design.