This infill is from Toronto.
At first glance, it is a normal looking mod infill:
Gray and wood … pretty normal. Look closer and you can see a lot of basement windows … must be a rentable apartment or at least finished space down there.
A bit closer up reveals some other details. The exterior is festooned with lights — each side of the dormers, beside the front windows …
There is the curious metal strip over the front door breaking up the horizontal wood line … the curious pattern of wood around the windows, the curious butt joints in the wood boards all lined up under the main windows. And the stickers, still on the windows. And why horizontal sliders?
The front door, its pull, and its surrounding trim don’t seem to work well together.
And then, in the picture below, a different message may be appearing. Notice that further down the left side of the house the pattern of siding changes to horizontal clapboard, scarcely something going on a mod infill. I wonder if this is just a new exterior put on an older home, or a new addition put on the front of an older home?
The house seems to have many of the elments of a modern infill, but with a decided cut-and-paste or amateurish feel to it. I was just left uncomfortable about this house. Money was spent, but it would be like sending me with money but otherwise unaccompanied into Holt Renfrew. All the clothes would be nice in themselves, but the finished wardrobe would be … suboptimal.
I agree it doesn’t quite look right. There are two houses in the Golden Triangle that have had a contemporty facade just stuck on the old exterior front. It looks ill considered because the new facade sticks out almost as if you just “glued” a new front on the place. Both places I am thinking of did not wrap the entire house in the contemporty cladding so the sides and back look very much out of place. I suppose in a perfect world everyone who does this sort of thing would be able to afford to do the whole house like this place in Toronto, if indeed, that is the case here.
I just learned a great new word – ‘suboptimal’ – and I plan to use it at the first opportunity!
Yup, this is definitely a house that looks good from 50 yards away. Kind of like a picture on an online dating service.
An idea is a dangerous thing. Evidently, so is a secured line of credit.