Mix of fir, rattan and oak gives Calgary home a woody warmth

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5036 Vanstone Cres. NW, Calgary

Asking Price: $1,295,000

Taxes: $4,350 (2023)

Lot Size: 613 square metres

Listing agent: Jake McIntyre, associate, Maxwell Capital Realty

The back story

Vanstone Crescent is a typical 1960s Calgary suburban street full of bungalows and split-level homes. But if you spend a little bit of time looking at 5036 Vanstone from the street you’ll start to see it’s a little atypical: For instance, the cladding of the second floor has some asymmetrical shapes, and there are little flourishes like an inverted semi-circle painted onto the broad brick chimney.

It’s okay if you miss these touches, because they are just the introduction to a set of recurring and intentional design moves that will become much clearer and present as you move through the newly renovated home that was envisioned and completed by Calgary-based design-build firm Studio North.

Mark Erickson and Matthew Kennedy met at Dalhousie’s architecture school in Halifax and founded the company 10 years ago after graduation, and their work has made an impression in Calgary and beyond. The company has had its work appear in shelter magazines, design websites and in architecture books and they have won awards for heritage preservation, missing middle design and entrepreneurship from western cities and organizations. They have done everything from restaurants to cabins to laneway houses, but until now it’s always been in service to clients. Now, they’ve branched out into renovations on properties they own.

“We decided to take on our own little projects and be our own client, hopefully that could be a new aspect to our business,” Mr. Erickson said.

The cheap and cheerful version of this business is called “flipping” but Studio North is adding a bit more than spit and polish to their flips.

“When we walked into this house it felt really familiar, it’s a very common archetypal sixties four-level split, it’s one of the models you get off the shelf,” Mr. Erickson said. “We hadn’t seen anyone do anything special with one, and we thought how can we take this model and rethink it; to challenge ourselves to make it work in a nice way?”

The result is an interior that blows away the common expectations of a sixties split-level.

The House Today

The first thing that’s evident when you walk in the foyer is that this is a house that’s built to celebrate wood in all its forms. In fact, that’s a signature of Studio North.

“Wood is our favourite material, there’s so many ways you can use it,” Mr. Erickson said. “It’s very warm, very Canadian … it’s widely available and it gives us a lot of room to play and be experimental.”

The foyer is all wood floors and pale walls with a bold timber-clad planter that’s like a stage next to the short flight of stairs. There’s a pocket-sized office behind the main closets to the right, and a simple powder room at the head of the stairs leading to the basement. Just beyond that is a mud room with a built-in lightly varnished floating bench and side entrance. The last space on this level is a sort of lounge space with access to the rear deck and another short flight of wood stairs to the second-level kitchen.

To really appreciate what Studio North wanted to do in the main living space, it’s wise to move directly to the far wall between the painted-brick corner fireplace and the groovy polished plywood pantry storage and look back toward the entrance (plywood though accurate is too meagre a descriptor for the handsomeness of the finishes here, look at the pictures).

This floor is unrecognizable from its bog-standard former form. Not only is the ceiling vaulted to follow the roofline but the gigantic hidden LDL beam – which anchors the soft central curve, covered not with plaster but carefully bent and shaped drywall – allowed Studio North to remove a load-bearing central wall that separated kitchen from living room, and left the stairs a dark box to the third level.

The stairs are slightly off centre, and the floating Douglas fir treads are supported by chunky bollard-like ovals that flow from the upper floor – with its three bedrooms and two bathrooms – all the way to the basement rec room.

“With this central staircase, you’re constantly turning the corner – main floor, turn a corner, basement, turn a corner – instead of being a harsh square corner, you’re constantly doing circles as you move through the house,” Mr. Erickson said. “It’s this idea of creating ovals that are little peekaboo moments: If you’re standing in the kitchen, you get a peekaboo to the sliding doors, to the backyard or mud room. That arc or curve … that establishes this idea of bringing that motif through the whole house.”

The curve reappears in doorframes, above the fireplace, but is most significant in the huge rattan screens with oval cutouts that flank the main floor staircase.

“Those screens are the threshold between public space and private space … considering how often you’re moving between those spaces, we wanted to make that moment special,” he said. “We started thinking of materials of that time and rattan was pretty common – especially in furniture – so we wanted to reinvent it.”

Those screens

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The screens took the most time in terms of research, labour, hunting for materials, and trial and error on making it work, but figuring out how to do things has been the labour of Mr. Erickson’s life (indeed, a trip to his dad’s woodshop helped him sort out the techniques to create the oval cutouts).

A few things he learned about rattan mesh: Because it’s a natural fibre derived from palm plants (of which there are many grades and types), it has to be soaked in water to make it malleable enough to be stretched onto whatever frame you’re using. Studio North had to do this on-site because the frames had to be assembled inside the house, so they dunked 24-inch-wide rolls of the weave into barrels of water and then had to build a specialized stretching rack to pull the material tight as it was stapled. The mesh dries so tight that you typically need furniture-grade hardwood to avoid bending and warping the frame.

“It’s at a scale where it’s much bigger than furniture,” Mr. Erickson said. “We had to use clear Douglas fir: It had to be perfectly straight, no knots, really tight grain, coming from an older tree. I spent a week going to every place in Calgary, and each board cost an arm and a leg.

“We had to do a lot of problem-solving, it took a lot of tests. Unique things just don’t come easy and, at the end of the day, it’s what sets this project apart and that’s what we strive for: we put something into a project that people have never seen before.”

The rattan and ovals make a few more appearances: In the primary suite as a built-in headboard, on the facing of the bar seating in the kitchen island, in some of the art hanging on the walls. This mix of fir, rattan and oak floors arranged in contrasting patterns gives the whole home a warm natural feeling, even the permanent planters are curated to encourage keeping green growing things in the house.

The changes have erased much of the interior’s stodgy sixties squared-off engineering, making it difficult to assign a stereotypical look to the home.

Which is, of course, the point.

“We really strive to be timeless,” Mr. Erickson said. “Is it modern, is it mid-century? … It kinda makes you question it, and that’s how something becomes timeless. It’s always going to feel good.”