Bellwoods Residence organizes its interior around a literal seam between two materials, splitting wood from white surfaces at the vertical light slot that cuts straight through the house. Designed by StudioAC, a Toronto-based architecture practice led by Andrew Hill and Jennifer Kudlats, the West End residence uses that split as its structural and experiential spine, letting daylight travel from a rooftop opening down to the ground floor. The house treats material contrast not as decoration but as the plan’s organizing logic.
A vertical light slot slices through the building, drawing daylight from a second-level roof opening down into the ground floor and establishing a clear organizational spine for the whole home. Wood wraps the ground floor as a singular enclosure around the primary living spaces, while the light slot itself is flanked by white material intentionally set apart from that wood — a deliberate distinction between solid and void.
The sunken living room sits on concrete floors that anchor the space and tie it to a sunken exterior patio beyond. As daylight moves through the vertical light slot over the course of the day, it animates both the wood and concrete surfaces, producing shifting patterns of shadow and light across the ground floor.
A white metal stair descends from the second level directly through the light slot, conceived less as circulation than as a sculptural stair design suspended within the void. The stair’s treads saw-tooth into the wood guard below it, marking the exact intersection between the white, light-filled zone above and the warmer material palette of the ground floor.
The third-level primary bedroom continues the material language established below, enclosed by a wood ceiling that echoes the ground floor’s timber wrap. Soft white curtains draped along the room’s perimeter filter daylight and provide privacy, mirroring — at a smaller scale — the same warm, tactile balance found downstairs.
Rotated brick cladding wraps the residence’s exterior, introducing a third material into the contrast established indoors between wood and white. Variations in brick orientation trace the building’s form and echo the interior’s spatial diagram, creating subtle shifts in texture and shadow across the facade as the day progresses.
Brick continues indoors in the primary bathroom design, juxtaposed against smooth, soft floors and countertops rather than left as a purely exterior material. A high triangular window brings daylight into the room, paired with a smaller operable window positioned at the tub for fresh air and a view out.
A laneway house at the rear of the property extends the residence’s material and formal language into a second structure, combining brick with sculptural massing — an approach not unlike the material dialogue StudioAC set up between two volumes at Devil’s Glen House in Ontario. A garden wall conceals pool equipment while doubling as a textural backdrop for swimming, washed in western sun through the day.
The stair’s saw-tooth edge is the one place in the house where the two material languages actually touch — everywhere else, wood and white stay in their own zones, meeting only at that single jagged line where someone climbing down from the third floor has to step from one into the other.
Bellwoods Residence by StudioAC | Location: Toronto, Canada — Year: 2026 — Key materials: wood, concrete, brick