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DESIGN I ARCHITECTURE I ART
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Infill housing and warehouse retrofits are two ways of transforming an old site. Montreal architect Natalie Dionne’s U House does a bit of both: a warehouse and vacant lot have become the ultimate urban live/work space
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BY DAVID THEODORE PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC CRAMER
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The orange-hued ipe deck marries with weathering-steel cladding and brick in Natalie Dionne’s U House, the architect’s home and office in Montreal. SEPTEMBER 2008 AZURE
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VISITORS ENTER A FLUID ENVIRONMENT DOUBLE THE WIDTH OF MOST MONTREAL HOMES
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Architect Natalie Dionne walks up a steep industrial staircase with alternating treads. She pauses to point out a sculpture recently installed on the wall of her Montreal home. “It’s made from old aluminum shoe moulds,” she says, adding that the steel stair was another find. One more step, and her partner and co-conspirator in the project, Martin Laneuville, interjects that the floor is also reclaimed material: 40-year-old Douglas fir recovered from one of the pavilions at Expo 67. The pleasure of this house comes through in these intimate details. The home, which includes Dionne’s office, sits on a grimy, busy artery of the Plateau, Montreal’s hip residential district. Carefully inserted in a rambunctious neighbourhood of single-room housing, mini-storage and car repair shops, U House is a thoughtful essay on finding sensual gratification in contemporary urban life. Just entering the home is delightful. The concept inverts the typical Plateau house, once celebrated in the work of renowned Quebec writer Michel Tremblay for its enclosed rooms and street-facing balconies. Instead, visitors enter a calm, introverted, fluid environment, double the width of most Montreal houses. “Even the more private, closed rooms, such as my daughter’s bedroom, have at least two doors,” says Dionne. She deployed polished concrete floors with radiant heating throughout. “It’s one of the few luxuries we permitted ourselves, but I love it,” she says. “I recommend it to clients all the time.” After Dionne graduated from the Université de Montréal in 1989, she worked on public projects around the city, with artists including the late sculptor Pierre Granche. Not coincidentally, his studio used to occupy the 1926 industrial building that is now one half of U House. Dionne was able to buy both the two-storey structure and the empty lot next to it. She built a two-storey addition containing a dining room on the ground floor, and a master bedroom suite above. She also built a one-storey addition for her office at the other 124
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OPPOSITE MIDDLE The living room
features one of Martin Laneuville’s lamps fashioned from assorted junkyard finds and topped with a part from an old Steenbeck film editing machine.
TOP U House blends into east
Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, an area of mixed residential and commercial use. ABOVE LEFT A seamless flow exists
between the indoor spaces and the generous 60-square-metre courtyard. The dining room’s four-part folding doors are twoand-a-half metres high, letting in ample light.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM Garage doors separating the living room from the courtyard lend U House some of its urban charm. The original brick structure dates back to 1926. OPPOSITE FAR RIGHT Montrealbased artist Lucie Duval’s dress, composed entirely of made-inChina work gloves, stands on exhibit in the living room. It heads to Paris in November for a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Galerie Isabelle Gounod.
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BEDROOM WORKSHOP OFFICE TERRACE AND GARDEN MASTER BEDROOM CONDOMINIUM SUITE
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end of the lot, creating a U-shaped house, hence the name. The living space surrounds a 60-square-metre courtyard, enclosed on the fourth side by a stuccocoated shared firewall. Putting the office in the rear compromises the layout, although it’s perhaps more of an inconvenience for her employees than for Dionne. “Architects provide a service, so I usually visit clients rather than receive them here. But it is a good thing they have to pass through the house to get to the office,” she says.The office connects directly to the back of the old building, where Laneuville, who trained as an architect but works in cinema, has a workshop. A 170-squaremetre condominium is located on the second floor of the original building. The house is an experimental lab, a calling card for clients, and a manifesto. Dionne and Laneuville were responsible for the design as well as the construction, which began in 2003. It shows off Dionne’s design philosophy – her belief that strong architecture is anchored in a careful analysis of existing materials and
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U HOUSE CONTAINS AN ARRAY OF INDUSTRIAL OBJECTS AND FINELY TUNED DETAILS
TOP Acid yellow paint throughout the house echoes the colour of the locust tree in the courtyard. Electromechanical shutters in the bedroom are one of the architect’s many industrial touches. ABOVE Polished concrete floors
with radiant heating are a favourite indulgence of the architect. The L-shaped kitchen cabinet is custom crafted from ipe. RIGHT Aluminum shoe moulds
are used in the wall-mounted dining room sculpture. The staircase is another example of an industrial find Dionne incorporated into her design.
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site conditions. But more pragmatically, working on it allowed her to reinforce her budgeting skills, and to consolidate her relationships with a network of craftspeople and subcontractors. Dionne has directed her firm, NDA, for 10 years. She designs mostly houses but also works on furniture, a breadth that reveals her Bauhausian notion of the architect as artisan-builder. Indeed, U House contains an array of industrial objects and finely tuned details: electromechanical shutters, four-part folding doors between the dining room and courtyard, a custom ipe cabinet in the kitchen, and lamps crafted by Laneuville from found objects. The house has a facade clad in sparkly black and orange bricks and suspended weathered steel panels. The panels, in fact, serve a dual purpose. They signal a change in function behind the wall, marking the upstairs master bathroom. But they also inaugurate a philosophical game involving materials and colours that continues throughout the house. Most of the wood, for instance, is united by an orangeyred stain that’s found on the plywood walls and cedar shutters in the master bedroom. This consistent approach to materials is Dionne’s way of concentrating and directing her architectural gestures. And U House is still a work-in-progress. Next up is a courtyard water feature that will heighten the contrast between inside and out, to make this home an eclectic contrast between urban bustle and domestic oasis.