dream house Tag

5 years ago today on a rainy afternoon, perched on a cliff at the edge of paradise, I married my best friend.  Although we'd been together as a couple for many eight years prior, that day was the beginning of a new chapter for us.  Today marks the anniversary of what I like to call the "grown up" phase of our life together and in celebration of the pride I feel in reaching that milestone, I thought I'd offer you a glimpse behind the Dreamhouse.  We'll be taking a look back at some of the moments that have made the

We've walked you through the main floor, as well as the upstairs, so now we figured it's only fair to show you how it all came together from the outside. Front exterior view Rear exterior view It's one thing to see it on paper, but now to actually have the structure up & be able to grasp the scale & depth of things, only then do you really see the beauty of the angles of the design

We're blogging from Barbados today as we're on vacation celebrating Tash's grandmother's 90th birthday.  The other night we decided to pop by one of our favourite spots on the island for an impromptu dessert. Tapas Restaurant is a great little place that you can sit right on the water's edge and enjoy the fantastic food and ambiance. We were enjoying our desserts (apple crumble tart & tempura banana kebabs - soooo good!) when we realized that it was in this very restaurant one year ago that I first pitched the idea to Tash of selling our home & going after our

Well Design Week is coming to a close.  In case you missed it be sure to check out the rest of this week's posts. We first took you through our search for inspiration, then outlined how we focused in on our full wish list and created our look book. Today we're finally revealing The Dreamhouse on paper as we go through Kevin's design and it's evolution from rough sketch to colour rendering. We sat down with Kevin to get an understanding of the process he goes through when he approaches a design project. As complex and technical as his job is,

Once we got through the initial research, we took a more in-depth look at the photos we had compiled. What we figured out is that overall we love modern contemporary architecture and we want our house to reflect that in its design both inside and out. That said, we'd still like to maintain a bit of neighbourhood charm because let's be honest, we're not trying to create an art installation in the middle of the suburbs! We tried to categorize the photos into 'wants' and 'likes.' From there we could focus in on the elements of each photo we actually wanted

Today we're kicking off Design Week - or probably what will become the first of several recurring 'design weeks' as a project like ours just has so many different phases of the design process. This week we'll be focusing on the architectural design. When we decided to chase the dream, our goal was to create a home that embodied the feel of the open-concept, urban contemporary loft, while satisfying our need for the larger living space generally only found at affordable prices outside of the city. To get started, we took to the web to figure out our likes and dislikes in

So after expanding our search area, we've found an interesting property in the West Shore neighbourhood. The house itself isn't much to look at. In fact it probably hasn't been updated much since it was built in 1962. Now in saying that we don't mean the cool 'retro chic 60s', we mean circa 1962 textured plaster walls, parquet & vinyl floors, avocado tub in the bathroom - we're talking full on time machine the second you walk through the door. Not exactly what you might envision us looking for in our dream house. So what, pray tell is so 'interesting' about

Being that we're young creative professionals it sort of fits that we'd be attracted to the urban contemporary loft aesthetic. The problem being, the 'urban contemporary loft' generally comes with inner city living - downtown core, smaller square footage, higher prices, etc - which is fine when you're in your 20s and focused on your career. When the time comes to raise a family though, you tend to re-evaluate the things you want in a home; things like proximity to schools and family, having a backyard, and overall wanting a bigger living space. Having both grown up in the suburbs, we