Canadian firm Ancerl Studio has teamed stark white-painted brickwork walls, weathered wooden beams and black steel windows in this renovated house in Toronto.
The Euclid Residence renovation was designed to modernise the early 20th-century property while keeping elements that allude to its history, and also provide ample space for entertaining guests.

"The client's brief was to create a bright and fresh contemporary environment," Maxime Bocken, studio director at Ancerl Studio, told Dezeen. "It had to be modern yet warm and inviting featuring storytelling design detail."
"To do so, we looked at the original early 20th-century floor plate and really asked ourselves what was worth preserving and what needed to be evolved."
The firm restored the brickwork facade of the house to keep it in line with the aesthetic of its surroundings on Euclid Street, located in the Canadian city's Little Italy neighbourhood.
"Euclid is such a quaint and lovely residential street in Toronto that we absolutely wanted to preserve its romantic streetscape," Bocken said.

The main intervention was to open up the floor plan by stripping out a number of partition walls inside the four-storey property.
Existing brickwork walls that were preserved were painted white, giving a modern and fresh touch to the past.

"Brick is such a wonderfully emotive texture; we loved to bring it back to life on the facade but also expose it on the ground floor," Bocken ...