In transforming this 150-year-old row house in a gentrifying neighbourhood, the architects applied a contemporary approach to space planning while retaining character elements inside and out. Atlantic Canada?s economy has never matched that of richer and more populous parts of the country. This is why Halifax still has a fair supply of 19th-century wooden row houses: flat-fronted little abodes, snugged up to each other and to the sidewalk, often brightly painted, but not in any other way showy. Agricola Street, the hippest avenue in the city?s once-scruffy North End, is where row houses, trendy shops and restaurants and at least one medical marijuana dispensary now comfortably ?coexist. In the middle of one of its tidy blocks, the new chartreuse-coloured door on the cedar-shingled residence painted charcoal grey signals a more radical transformation within. Sallyway House is emblematic of a contemporary approach both to heritage and to compact living. In transforming the 150-year-old Sallyway row house in a gentrifying neighbourhood, the architects applied a contemporary approach to space-planning while retaining character elements inside and out.
Its architects, Jane Abbott and Alec Brown, spent much of their youth in Nova Scotia and worked in places including Copenhagen, New York City, London and Berlin before returning to Halifax and founding Abbott Brown Architects in 2013. They are unabashed modernists with a deep love of Atlantic Canada?s traditional architecture. ?If...