Location: Toronto, Canada

Design Team: Studio Maignan Architects

Area: 353 m²

Year: 2026

Lead Architect: Stephanie Maignan

Design Team: Stacie Vos

Structural Engineering: Blackwell Structural Engineers

MEP Consultant: Hayward HVAC Design

General Contractor: DJP Homes

Photography: Maxime Brouillet

Design Features: C+C House is an adaptive reuse project by Studio Maignan Architects in Toronto's Humewood-Cedarvale neighbourhood. The renovation works with a 1930s brick house whose cellular rooms and limited daylight no longer suited contemporary family life. Rather than replacing the existing home, the project retains its familiar street presence, reorganises it from within and extends it toward the garden and roof.

The house is tailored to a family of four whose parents, a filmmaker and a technology entrepreneur, both work from home. Cooking, hosting, creative work and rest therefore unfold as overlapping rhythms rather than isolated programmes. Kitchen and dining become the centre of the main floor, stepping down toward the garden to connect the living room, shared table, terrace and lawn. Broad openings and a frameless glazed corner pull the rear landscape indoors and make the narrow urban lot feel more expansive.

The addition remains clearly distinct from the original masonry house. Dark framing, glass and vertical timber screens form a lighter contemporary rear elevation, with a transparent ground floor supporting the upper volume. Exposed hemlock rafters give the kitchen and dining room a strong overhead rhythm. Their warmth is set against black steel, pale cabinetry and glazing, lending the family's gathering space an open yet tactile character.

Work and retreat are distributed vertically. A new third floor provides a creative studio and terrace, where rooflights and a glazed gable bring daylight into the uppermost workspace. Bedrooms remain quieter, while the principal bathroom is organised around a screened jardin. Bath, vanity, planting and outdoor light remain in visual conversation through timber slats, giving an ordinarily enclosed room the depth of a small private garden.

From the retained brick frontage to the glazed garden corner, and from the continuous main floor to the studio above, C+C House is shaped less by a singular object than by acts of preservation, addition and reconnection. The old house continues to belong to its street, while the new spaces return light, garden, work and shared meals to the centre of family life. Adaptive reuse becomes a framework capable of accommodating change rather than fixing the household into one arrangement.

Design Team: Studio Maignan Architects is a Toronto-based practice led by architect Stephanie Maignan. For C+C House, Maignan served as lead architect with Stacie Vos on the design team. Blackwell Structural Engineers, Hayward HVAC Design and DJP Homes contributed structural engineering, building services and general contracting respectively.

Maignan studied at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning and is registered to practise in several North American jurisdictions. Her earlier career included work with Weiss/Manfredi in New York and the co-founding of 29 Design with Amanda Teh in Kuala Lumpur in 2005. She has since worked across residential, mixed-use and large community projects in North America and Asia. Be-landa House in Malaysia brought her work to a wider audience through its appearance in the film Crazy Rich Asians.

Her approach treats constraints as sources of architectural possibility, using listening, collaboration and close attention to detail to connect an idea with everyday occupation. C+C House continues that method. Existing brickwork, a narrow lot, working-from-home routines and the rear garden are not obstacles to be erased but active authors of the project, allowing the house to retain its neighbourhood scale while becoming more open, luminous and adaptable.