H4 | REAL ESTATE O THE GLOBE AND MAIL| FRIDAY,APRIL3,2020
M
uch of the country is stuck at
home this month and there’s
nothing like being cooped up to
make you examine your sur-
roundings.
What makes a domestic space beautiful
and comfortable? The designer Andrew
Jones has been thinking about these ques-
tions for years. When I visited his 1880s To-
ronto row house before the pandemic hit, I
was struck by how well Mr. Jones had found
a balance between beauty and comfort.
So, I called recently to ask him what
makes a good home. His answer: both ar-
chitecture and the stuff within it. “I’m
trained as an architect, but I’ve always been
interested in the full range of scale, from
the urban scale to architecture to furni-
ture,” he said, speaking from home. “I
think they all contribute to making a space
feel resolved and beautiful.”
In his own house, you could easily get
stuck on the furniture. A Hans Wegner Shell
Chair, which he bought vintage 20 years
ago, sits next to an Alvar Aalto stool; both
modern classics, and very comfortable.
“They are very human, very welcoming,”
he says. “They ask you to take a seat and
stay a while.”
Mr. Jones is best known as a furniture de-
signer; he studied architecture at Universi-
ty of Toronto and then furniture at Univer-
sity College London. He designed the pink
umbrellas at Toronto’s Sugar Beach –
which are not actually umbrellas at all, but
highly engineered steel-and-fibreglass fix-
tures – and won a global design competi-
tion for chairs for Battery Park in New York.
His most recent line of furniture is the Lay-
out outdoor collection from manufacturer
Barlow Tyrie.
So, he has chosen his objects carefully.
But not just for how they look. “You need to
live with furniture for a while to really un-
derstand it,” he said. “The things that don’t
work, that aren’t comfortable, tend to
leave.”
His dining table is a George Nelson table
for Herman Miller (“extraordinarily versa-
tile”). But when people come over – which
they do a lot, usually – he lays down a piece
of fir plywood on top to make more space
for guests. This balance between fine and
found also applies to the things around
him. On a set of display shelves are objects
he’s picked up at flea markets and thrift
shops.
There is a cake tin, from somewhere in
Eastern Europe, “that looks like a piece of
Futurist architecture,” he says. There is a
pair of paddles, each painted half red and
half white, once used for signalling air-
planes. These things all have “some kind of
mysterious sculptural quality,” he says.
And they’re all well made out of ordinary
stuff.”
The house itself, similarly, is ordinary –
almost. It’s an archetypal Toronto Victor-
ian, a type known as the bay-and-gable. But
it has an unusual floor plan; the main floor
rooms open into each other, rather than
(as is more typical) onto a narrow corridor.
It apparently has always been this way, and
when Mr. Jones first went to see the house,
he was struck by the quality of the space: “It
had a sense of rightness about it,” he re-
calls. “For one thing, it allows a lot of light to
penetrate right to the centre of what is usu-
ally a dark and narrow space.” So he left it
more or less alone, restoring the original
mouldings and exposing a pine sub-floor.
Mr. Jones did rebuild the back of the
main floor, redesigning the kitchen to be
more open. Yet, he chose not to connect the
house to its backyard with conventional
large windows. Instead, he installed two
narrow sets of double doors. This is a device
borrowed from English Georgian architec-
ture, which (as he admits) this house is not.
The ceiling is covered with glossy white
wooden slats and the floor with terracotta
tile. It’s all vaguely English, slightly idiosyn-
cratic and personal; these details are for-
eign to the history of this Toronto house,
but you wouldn’t know it.
“My goal as a designer was to be as quiet
as possible,” he said.
There is a lesson in this. Mr. Jones is a
professional with extremely fine taste and
his house is carefully considered. But this is
a good house not because it’s perfect; it’s a
good house because it is straightforward
and personal. And, he told me, the biggest
thing wrong with the house is that it’s not
full of friends, as it usually is.
“Design is a human endeavour,” he says.
“It has to be about people, never more so
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OPINIONTORONTO