DESIGNLINES

Team DL’s home-improvement wish list Who are you? Cristian Ordóñez What have you done for us lately? Art direction and design. I like a challenge and joining a new team, and learning from and adapting myself to new processes. If you were given a buck

1 GANGBUSTER Breaking up the posse of steel and glass condos on Toronto’s skyline takes a visionary. Luckily, Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang is here with her first Toronto high-rise near Yonge and St. Clair – and it looks nothing like the status quo. For

Grant van Gameren and partners’ new high-level pan-Mexican spot is defined by its ceiling, dropped as much as a metre in an undulating rhythm of panels reminiscent of the billowing cloth coverings of a Mexican market. Alex Josephson, co-founder of Pa

Nearly a quarter of a million people circulate through Union Station each day, mostly in a rush, and mostly still under the impression that there’s nothing much to see as they stride through and under John M. Lyle’s Beaux-Arts monument. But that impr

LOWDOWN: Before interior design firm Mason Studio came aboard, this Bloor Street hotel was a generic Holiday Inn with little connection to the city. “Tired, dated and dark,” according to the designers, it required a complete overhaul. Mason Studio be

by Batay-Csorba Architects Inspired by the playful sport of picking out shapes and silhouettes from cloud formations, the facades of these paired duplexes by Batay-Csorba Architects are a treat for the imagination. Nestled within a row of bay-and-gab

A young family of three was looking not only to renovate their 348-square-metre, two-bedroom loft in the city’s east end, but also to change up their lifestyle. “I started to learn more about minimalism and to think this would be a better fit for us,

WHEN EDWIN AND MELISSA SANTIAGO’S TWO ADULT CHILDREN moved out in 2014, there was no need to downsize. The 1950s bungalow in south Etobicoke that they had lived in since the late 1990s was already tiny, with three bedrooms plus a kitchen and living s

If you’re looking for a high-design renovation, a nearly 30-year-old traditional house in Summerhill seems an unlikely place to find it. And yet this house, with its improbable combination of a mansard roof and built-in garage, proved fertile ground

The year is 1902. A 20-year-old farmhand arrives in Toronto from nearby Dufferin County. His name is William John Hughes; friends call him Jack. He settles in the city’s then-industrial Wychwood neighbourhood and becomes an artisan glass cutter, lear