The Contemporary Tudor: The Details
The Contemporary Tudor home by Jesse Sahlani offers a refreshingly contemporary take on an elegant and historically entrenched design style. Nestled in a quaint neighborhood in Etobicoke, otherwise known as Princess Anne Manor, this 90 foot wide lot gave us the opportunity to design a home with sprawlingly wide proportions. Measuring in at almost 70 feet in width, this stunning custom home offers proportions that both do justice to the original design style, while dampening the height of what is a grandly large home. Of course, we started the design process for this home with a sun study, observing its position at different times of day in order to align each room with the suns path during the average highest time of use for each space. From this point Jesse sketches the floor plans and exteriors, an explorative, collaborative, and ever changing process that is the single most important practice behind any timeless house design he is responsible for.
The parlor room of our Contemporary Tudor home is a stunning two story space designed for entertaining guests and business partners. Jesse designed this room in a way that makes the finishes secondary to the unique architectural details. For starters this room is almost entirely lined with windows, serving as a great example of the traditional charm Jesse brings to his designs in place of the typical modern window curtain walls that have become so popular. In addition to this the proportions of this space, as a function of the two storey height, are absolutely stunning when you enter the space. Lastly, the large windows absolutely flood this space with natural light!
The vast majority of the exterior walls of the structure are clad with two inch by five foot long custom cut, rough faced Indiana limestone. This stone will be specifically sourced and selected based on the time of year harvested and the minerals within the stone itself, which both contribute to the taupe or yellow hue commonly associated with this material. Jesse’s selection of this material was centered around imitating the look of brick, in a far sleeker, longer, and more contemporary manner.
The garage of this stunning estate was designed by Jesse to ensure it does not consume the front facade. To mask this effect Jesse designed a step in the footprint, allowing him to utilize a black paneling to clad the facade of both the home office and garage. Jesse also designed the mullions in each of these windows to resemble one another to make sure that the viewers of his design would have to take a second look. The result is just as functional, while adding a certain feeling of “lightness” to the overall facade quietly adding to a viewer’s visual understanding of this home offering a contemporary nod to a historic and timeless design style.
The roofline is almost perfectly proportioned, featuring tall peaks that are a welcomed balance to what is very much a dauntingly wide footprint. Standing proud of the roofline are three large chimney stacks, offering a nod to the historic origins of this timeless design style by mimicking the use of fireplaces used to heat the interior rooms before central air was invented. The wide proportions of these chimneys are also a historically accurate detail that made Jesse fall in love with this design style in the first place, which he took the opportunity to clad in the same smooth limestone as the front vestibule is. Alongside these features Jesse drew on the use of authentic cedar shake roofing, adding to the historic significance and charm that this timeless home has to offer. He selected this material because of its ability to age gracefully, comparing the splitting of these shakes over time as well as the growth of moss to that of a coveted copper patina or fine wine.
