Home design: A mid-century refuge, heavy on the modern

A Lorne Park house built in the late 1960s and overhauled by Orangeink Design — a project that won the firm a 2025 Architizer A+ Award — is a perfect illustration of how ideas about modern design evolve over time.  

The leafy Mississauga enclave of Lorne Park is dotted with a number of similarly remarkable MCM houses. Blessed with wide and deep mainly ravine-edge lots, some have been sensitively updated, and others torn down and replaced.  

“Personally, I think it’s a shame when lovely old houses like this are knocked down,” says Orangeink principal architect Tony Diodati about the property; it was originally shown to him as a real estate listing by the client, a good friend in a design-adjacent industry with great taste. “So we looked at how we could work with the bones to update it, while respecting the original context.” 

In its day, the house had clearly been designed with care. It had a spacious ranch-style interior, with a fireplace as a focal point connecting the living and dining rooms, a design-forward idea of its time. But it also had low ceilings, inward-facing rooms and surprisingly small windows considering the beautiful setting. (It also had a classic, swinging-sixties indoor pool, which the client had no interest in retaining.) 

There was another wrinkle to the assignment. In the GTA, ravine-home improvements are strictly controlled by the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority, and with only very slight variations, expanding the house — even adding a deck or patio — was out of the question. The building would have to stay within its original footprint. 

In the end, however, the TRCA guidelines were only a minor hindrance. By focusing on a number of important principles, Diodati was able to reinvent the house for twenty-first-century living while maintaining, and celebrating, a sense of the original concept. 

First up was to better incorporate the house into its surroundings. The original roof was removed and replaced with a series of roof and ceiling planes with different heights, stepping down in areas of intimacy and connection, such as the kitchen, then rising to a soaring, loft-like vertical addition above the main living area, fully glazed for maximum exposure to light and views.  

Because it’s set back from the road, the house only becomes visible as you approach up the driveway. “When we were considering the rooflines and the views, we wanted to continue that sense of the house slowly revealing itself,” he explains.  

You arrive at the front to a boardwalk, which invites you to stroll around from the front elevation to the front door, tucked away at the side. The boardwalk cantilevers over the top of the slope as you round the corner, offering a view of the ravine over the railing. 

It’s also here that you get the sense of the materials used throughout, another way of blending exterior and interior. Vertical surfaces (painted brick in the original sections, charred cedar in the “new” areas) are mainly black, while horizontal surfaces (ceilings, stair treads) are clad in natural cedar. The effect is to visually organize the planes of the house, but also to play up its woodside setting; especially in the evenings, the house seems to nestle into the shadows. 

There’s a choice of outdoor seating areas. A top-level outdoor gathering spot, with seats arranged around an outdoor woodstove, is covered and can be used in four seasons. And just where the house overlooks the lip of the ravine, two of the walls enclosing the former groovy indoor pool were blown out and a hot tub installed; it’s almost like hot-tubbing in a treehouse. 

The front door opens up on a two-storey-high foyer that illustrates how the ceiling heights direct the mood: just in the front vestibule, the ceiling is about nine feet or so, but step forward to the centre of the foyer and it soars a good 20 feet or more to the top of the loft. At one side, pocket doors enclose the entrance to the bedroom wing, where the homeowners’ university-age kids, now on their own, stay when they visit; on the other is the entrance to the great room. Tucked past a hallway behind the fireplace at the other end of the house is the primary suite. 

But one of the most dramatic installations is straight ahead: a “living wall” that goes up one side of the stairwell, extending from the lower level to the roof, discreetly irrigated by pipes fed by a small indoor pond at the foot of the stairs. The trickling sound of the pond, the fresh scent of greenery, the wash of sunlight from the loft windows high above and, especially, a huge glass curtain wall that takes up the entire rear wall of the stairwell and the full glory of the ravine beyond, is exhilarating and also somehow calming. 

The great room, which comprises kitchen, living and dining areas, is just as dramatic, but in a different way. On days when it’s just the couple, or perhaps when the kids are home and hanging out, dinner is casual, at the dining table or stools at the island. (For larger gatherings — the couple are frequent and enthusiastic entertainers — the table seats 12 or more with ease.) 

The Bulthaup-designed kitchen is intimate and welcoming, like any family kitchen should be. But just past the outer island, its ceiling opens, like a box seat at the opera, to a wide view of the great room and the ravine beyond. The living area at the far end is deliberately unpretentious, with its cheerfully upholstered lounge seating; the fireplace here, moved from the original spot, provides a gathering point of a different kind. 

For Diodati and the clients, the house became much more than just another beautiful luxury project, or even a masterclass in functional design.  

“We always start a project with the best intentions, a home that everyone is happy with and that meets the homeowners’ needs,” he says. “But as this house was being built, everyone became more and more invested in it; the trades understood and appreciated what we were doing. So it was a great collaboration. 

“But actually, as nice as the photos are, it’s even nicer in person. Until you are walking though it with all your senses engaged, you don’t get the full experience of it. And once you’ve arrived, you don’t ever want to leave.”