Hotel de Ville Residence

Project Description

Located on the Plateau Mont-Royal, a centennial home welcomes a family who wish to breathe new life into their space and establish a new dialogue with its surrounding environment. With a vision to respect the home’s original character and preserve the large poplar in the backyard, Microclimat designed a low-impact intervention involving an addition that would occupy a small portion of the garden. This new space would blossom from the home through two new large openings in the existing brick wall.

The expanded architecture – an intermediate area between the yard and the living quarters – offers a new flow of space and light in the home, without compromising privacy. Despite the fluid transition, there is a sharp contrast between the modern addition and the original design of the home from 1885, which is accentuated further by the addition of a light steel staircase that serves as a filter between the interior and exterior spaces.

The Hotel-de-Ville Residence shows the potential of considered architectural interventions to rethink the purpose of a space by establishing a new connection to its surroundings, in this case the shared roots between a centennial home and a poplar tree.