This outdoor area channels Mondrian

Amantea Architects modernised a lush and casual urban residential landscape with a Mondrianesque composition of deftly planned spaces

An overview of the well-connected landscaped pavilion and green — An overview of the well-connected landscaped pavilion and dining terrace.

Clad in black to contrast with the surrounding brown, black

This new dining terrace replaces an existing balcony-like brown

The use of continuous walking surfaces throughout the brown, gray

As part of this renovation and addition, oiled

Elegant connections – from dining terrace to pool, brown

This new pavilion is part functional out building black

Taking a beautiful approach at the Toronto residence. brown

This landscaped garden and pool and dining area brown

This pavilion takes on a lantern sensibility in black

This new pavilion's moiré-like effect is especially striking black

The pavilion’s core, finished with a warm and brown

Designed by Amantea Architects

From the architects:

Amantea Architects has transformed the landscape of a single-family home in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood, clarifying its purpose while maintaining its lush, layered character. The project comprises a fully redesigned backyard including dining terrace, patio, sports lawn, swimming pool and pavilion—all efficiently planned within a 560m² space—as well as a new front garden and entryway.

The exterior project began with Amantea’s collaboration on an extensive renovation of the primary residence, led by Toronto firm Reigo & Bauer. The homeowner wanted to preserve elements of the existing landscape — notably the mature trees along the rear garden, which add to the backyard’s leafy seclusion — while extending the material palette and language of the home’s now-modern interior.

The landscape’s focal point is a new 47m² pavilion spanning nearly the entire width of the backyard and pushed as close to the rear property line as permitted. Hovering on piers to mitigate its impact on the adjacent trees, the pavilion’s linear form is configured to preserve the existing vegetation.

Clad in black to contrast with the surrounding foliage while visually receding into the background, the pavilion functions like a screen, creating the illusion of limitless space beyond.

The house-facing elevation is an assembly of vertical cedar battens that gradually transition from being wide and shallow at the building’s ends, which house storage, to being narrower, deeper and more widely spaced at its centre.

The resulting moiré-like effect is especially striking at night when the pavilion is illuminated like a lantern, with warm light filtering through its screen and full-height translucent glass walls.

These glass panels admit ample daylight, limiting the need for artificial lighting while still providing visual separation; after dark, daylight is supplemented with tunable LEDs integrated into the ceiling.

The pavilion’s core, finished with a warm and natural palette of marine-grade ply with cedar veneer and oiled cedar boards, is given over to a washroom, a changing room and a shower next to an opening in the roof that frames a birch tree and a view of the sky. The zones are deftly partitioned yet open to the surrounding landscape and pool activity.

From the interior of the pavilion, ipe flooring connects to the oiled ipe decks that frame the swimming pool. Mirroring the pavilion’s geometry, the new rectangular pool is lined with Algonquin limestone that extends horizontally on one side to form a deck wide enough for lounge chairs; nearest the house, the same limestone acts as a bridge to the dining terrace. The pool’s remaining sides are flanked by decks of oiled ipe, which sit flush with the level of the lawn.

The use of continuous walking surfaces throughout the backyard unifies the pavilion with its setting—an effect enhanced by a planted roof that visually extends the lawn to the perimeter vegetation when viewed from above.

Opposite the pavilion, the new dining terrace replaces an existing balcony-like platform framed by a masonry wall and accessed by a narrow set of eight stone steps; now, an extended sequence of wide platforms elaborates the transition from ipe dining terrace to limestone patio below, dispensing with the need for a guardrail and enhancing the feeling of openness.

Raised to meet the level of the main floor interior, the new enlarged terrace also includes a generous custom barbecue station set against horizontal black-stained cedar lath, or strips, with a powder-coated aluminium heat guard.

From dining terrace to pool, the elevation change is managed by a berm which is sandwiched between two low limestone retainers, further subdivided by black aluminium planters and densely foliated to negotiate its steep descent.

The berm inserts a middle-ground to create a sense of distance between pool and terrace. Here and elsewhere, plantings (selected in collaboration with Tina McMullen) are structured for a modern look that nonetheless retains the loose, shaggy feel of the original garden.

In the front yard, Amantea updated an existing horseshoe driveway and intersecting front walk with new heated surfaces of concrete and limestone. The entrance, too, is modernised, with a new square stoop, orthogonal limestone bench and corresponding planting box framed in blackened metal; here, as in the areas flanking the front walk, a carefully proportioned composition of shrubs and low plantings replaces turf.