Wood Residence
Wood Residence is a minimalist residential renovation located in Montreal, Canada, designed by Vives St-Laurent. The project begins at the threshold – a checkerboard floor of Alpi Verde and Bianco Carrara marble announcing the dual logic that governs the entire house: classical architecture read through a restrained contemporary eye. Westmount homes carry a particular typological weight, their generous bay windows, ornate moldings, and staircase-centered plans defining a domestic grammar that demands respect rather than erasure. Vives St-Laurent’s renovation accepts these constraints as a generative brief, preserving the layout intact while systematically replacing every material and detail with something sharper.
The oval window punched into the facade gave the design team an unusual starting point for the entryway furniture – a seating unit and vertical storage piece whose geometry responds to the window’s curve, lending the otherwise resolved composition an element of architectural wit. This kind of careful call-and-response between existing fabric and new insertion runs throughout the project, most plainly in the living room, where built-in bookshelves flanking the fireplace frame the original stone mantel without competing with it.
Pale-toned white oak throughout the floors marks the clearest departure from the house’s period character. The timber reads warm against the marble elements while its tight grain maintains the project’s commitment to surface restraint – a choice that aligns with the broader Scandinavian-influenced renovation language that has dominated Montreal residential work since the mid-2010s. More telling is the staircase treatment, where a deteriorating banister was rebuilt with new moldings integrated so they read as original, and a painted steel handrail was recessed into the stringer in a move that rewards close inspection. The steel-into-wood junction is the kind of detail that distinguishes a renovation with genuine architectural ambition from one that merely updates finishes.
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