Mr. design mogul Niels Bendtsen of Vancouver
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The light s o h u e Natalie Dionne Architecte crafts a Montreal residence with staggered floors and Âa generous use of maple, to emphasize views and maximize the sun’s rays By David Theodore | Photography by Marc Cramer
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Go for a walk along the residential streets around Jean-Talon Market, and you’ll see
that modernist design is alive and well in Montreal. You won’t be amazed to come across a sturdy but elegant two-and-half storey townhouse, crisply clad in extra-long bricks and stucco. The interior, though, reveals a big surprise. The architects capitalized on the house’s east–west orientation, arranging 3.7-metre ceilings, skylights, and expansive windows to allow deep penetration of sunlight. The E3 House gets its name because Natalie Dionne Architecte, the husband-and-wife team of Natalie Dionne and Martin Laneuville, organized the design in cross-section, using a strategy that recalls modernist Viennese architect Adolf Loos’s influential Raumplan, with its staggered rooms and fluid transitions between floors. The 300-squaremetre house divides into two volumes, front and back, separated by an 11-metre-high atrium, so that in section it resembles an upper case E connected to a blocky numeral 3, via criss-crossing wood and steel staircases. Laneuville calls this atrium a “vertical corridor,” because the stairs provide the only means of moving from space to space. In essence, E3 is a six-room house, but what rooms! Each living area occupies its own level and spans the full width of the lot. At ground level, you enter a dining area, and a custom kitchen centred on a large walnut and steel island that leads through sliding glass doors to an outdoor terrace lined with torrefied wood. The ceilings are staggered at 2.4 and 1.2 metres high; from the kitchen, you can go down six steps to a bedroom suite, or up the same distance to the living room. The staircase connects the living room to the master suite 12 steps above, and continues up another six steps to a third bedroom suite,
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↖ The architect and her daughter in the kitchen, with its 3.7-metre-long custom island in walnut and steel, and maple-veneered pantries that also conceal a powder room. ↑↑ Situated in the Jean-Talon Market neighbourhood, the house has a modest yet handsome facade, which features thin bricks and generous apertures. ↑ The view extends out to the pink maple tree beyond the garden terrace.
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E N ZI G A A M E R A ZU F O TY R PE O PR ↖ A window above the front door frames the sky. ← The criss-crossing staircase connects floors staggered 2.4 and 1.2 metres apart; wooden cabinets extend along multiple tiers to provide storage. ↑ A view from the living area to the kitchen and out the back door. → The top-floor office, with its generous skylight.
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The E3 house in section
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↗ The light-filled washroom features a maple-wood counter. Sink by Rubi. ↓ The back entrance, with wooden shutters on the upper window and espresso-stained plywood cladding. ↙ The master bedroom, with a large pivoting door and a view through the stairs.
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1 Office 2 Bedroom 3 Living area 4 Kitchen
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floor plan
then another dozen up to an office, which opens onto a roof terrace with a view of Mount Royal. The split-level design affords extraordinary interior vistas: from the living room, you can gaze through the staircase, across the atrium and the kitchen, and out to the pink maple tree at the back of the garden terrace. Natalie Dionne Architecte designed the E3 House for a well-known actress and director with deep roots in the neighbourhood; their two children are now making the transition from high school to college. Dionne and Laneuville can sympathize with a desire to have a single-family home amid the bustle of city life, which perhaps explains the obvious complicity between the client and the architects, who designed and live in a comparable urban house with party walls on either side (named the U House because its living spaces wrap around an interior courtyard). In both projects, modest materials applied in precise combinations underscore a luxuriousness of light and space. “We work closely with artisans, our metalworkers and carpenters,” says Dionne. “Martin and I have built a lot with our own hands, so we both direct and collaborate with them. We consider them part of the team.” They deployed each material generously, in built-in features and finishes that convey an architectural scale and
quality. “We use maple veneer plywood on the interior, but in abundance, so you feel that it’s part of the architecture,” adds Dionne. “It’s monumental.” Hence, enormous pivoting maple-clad doors give on to the upper bedrooms, and the cabinets and wardrobes combine into multi-floor wooden objects. For instance, the closet in the lower-level bedroom extends up – through the ground floor and then some – to become an entrance closet on the ground floor, and a shelf in the living room that doubles as a guardrail; overall, it gives the impression of a giant timber monolith. Even on the exterior, the pattern of espresso-stained plywood cladding on the front and back entrances is composed, where possible, using full-sized sheets. Rather than monumentality, the overall goal is generosity and expansiveness. Dionne emphasizes the importance of keeping the architecture neutral. “The pure forms just capture the light,” she says. “Human life and the urban and natural environment provide the colour and texture.” This sanguine attitude clearly inspires E3 House, even in its simplest gesture; when the sun comes out in winter, sliding wooden shutters break up the raking sunbeams, creating patterns that move dreamily across the polished concrete and wood floors and the white walls. This way of designing also bodes well for the studio’s future explorations. june 2012 83