Painter’s Studio
A highly functional but also beautiful workspace, serving an established painter.
Location: Toronto, Canada
Status: Built
Date: 2022
A painter and writer wanted to build a new studio space behind their house, while also opening up their kitchen to the back yard and creating a new master bathroom in the basement. Working within a very constricted urban lot, this new studio, as with some of our previous work, takes a common building type - the detached garage - and finds new ways to use it. The studio maximizes working and storage space, taking full advantage of the maximum allowable height for a garage. The structure is highly insulated and air-sealed, and is heated and cooled with a discreet heat pump system, hidden above the bathroom. A compact energy recovery ventilator also maintains a safe airflow for dealing with paints, without major loss of energy.
The studio is finished in carefully detailed, hard-wearing materials: a polished concrete floor, hard maple veneer panels for the bathroom, and laminate shelves. Lighting was selected to provide the highest standard of colour rendering, and shaded skylights bring in controlled natural light. The new cedar fence, and cedar siding of the studio create a warm and natural environment in the back yard. By relocating the basement bathroom’s window, we were able to expand the rear deck, creating a seamless transition from the kitchen to the yard. The new master bathroom in the existing house adds some luxury, with terrazzo walls and floors, and a custom white oak vanity.
General Contractor: Khoi Design Build Inc.
Photography: Michael VanLeur
National Children's Museum of Korea
Along with winning the competition to masterplan the new National Museum Complex of South Korea, Office Ou was awarded the design of the first three buildings on site, including the National Children’s Museum of South Korea.
The Children’s Museum is designed to be a place for kids to enjoy being kids to the fullest, but also for kids to learn and grow up surrounded by values of civic and environmental stewardship. Thanks to the museum’s forecourt and rear landscape, the experience of the place can change drastically from season to season, making it enjoyable and exciting regardless of the time of year and weather.
Location: Sejong, South Korea
Status: Built
Date: 2018-2024
Local AOR: Junglim
Along with winning the competition to masterplan the new National Museum Complex of South Korea, Office Ou was awarded the design of the first three buildings on site, including the National Children’s Museum of South Korea.
The Children’s Museum is designed to be a place for kids to enjoy being kids to the fullest, but also for kids to learn and grow up surrounded by values of civic and environmental stewardship. Thanks to the museum’s forecourt and rear landscape, the experience of the place can change drastically from season to season, making it enjoyable and exciting regardless of the time of year and weather.
The current design of the first step of construction em- bodies many of the decisions and requirements established during the past three years of work. We hope that the Children’s museum will be a playful space for kids and parents to explore, while being flexible enough to accommodate changing exhibitions and varied programming.
The final facade design iterations led us to exploring the use of terracotta extrusions for the National Children’s Museum. The terracotta facades were designed as uneven triangular extrusions that would only be glazed on one side, creating an alternatingly soft or vivid look as one walks around the building.
The landscape of the forecourt is a crucial piece of the design as it welcomes visitors to the museum. This landscape began as a friendly orchard for children and while its design evolved over time with the input of the client body, the aim of creating an immersive, interactive landscape for children to play within nature remained.
Filmmaker's Studio
An extremely efficient back-yard workspace, nestled into a lush rear yard garden.
| Location: | Toronto, Ontario |
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| Status: | Built |
| Date: | 2022 |
This small project was designed to serve primarily as an office space for a filmmaker / editor, and packs a lot of functions into it’s 26 square metre footprint. Cranking the building 10 degrees away from the side lot line created just enough space to pack in storage shelving, a fold-out bed for the occasional family guest, mechanical space for a ducted heat pump, and a compact bathroom. Its interior is visually expanded by windows or sliding doors on 3 sides, which look into a lush garden. Surprisingly, the yard feels larger than it did before - the new office creating a variety of distinct zones within the back yard, sheltered by a deep roof overhang
Materials are simple but harmonious: polished concrete floors, birch veneer custom millwork, and 2” ceramic tile with coloured grout in the bathroom. The roof is galvalume corrugated steel, and vertically arranged pine siding.
General Contractor: Vanderwall Builds Inc.
Millwork: Laneway Millwork
Photography: Michael VanLeur
Caledon Residence
A multi-generational luxury home in the Ontario countryside built to Passive House standards.
| Location: | Caledon, Ontario |
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| Status: | Built |
| Date: | 2023 |
The owners of a beautiful plot of land in Caledon wanted to create a passive house-level multi-generational luxury home for themselves, their children and other family members. The land was home to a large area of carolinian forest, and to a small apple orchard. The house was to be placed in an existing clearing on an escarpment, providing views and connections to both the forest below and the adjacent orchard.
The nearly 10,000 ft2 home is built as an assemblage of shared and private spaces, where people can find privacy or come together.
General Contractor: Caledon Build
Photography: Ben Dickey
The Garage Gem
This small structure re-imagines the detached laneway garage, often an under-utilized storage space, and makes it into a true extension of the home.
| Location: | Toronto, Ontario |
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| Status: | Built |
| Date: | 2019 |
This small structure re-imagines the detached laneway garage, (often an under-utilized storage space), and makes it into a true extension of the home. The 'Garage Gem' strikes a balance between between precious and utilitarian to support a wide range of uses: it is a functioning garage, occasional workshop, a three-season space for entertaining guests, dining, writing, and simply enjoying the quiet seclusion of the leafy rear yard.
The building features hardwearing terrazzo floors and countertops, an exposed douglas-fir structure, black-stained OSB sheathing, and meticulously detailed steel-framed windows and doors. The cedar exterior cladding will, in time, weather to blend in with the fence. In the yard between garage and house, a new outdoor kitchen repeats the theme of cedar and terrazzo, and custom designed globe lights tie the entire space together.
General Contractor: Derek Nicholson Inc.
Structural Engineering: Kieffer Structural Engineering
Photography: Adrian Ozimek
K-House, Net-Zero Strawbale Home
To reconcile the client’s needs for a home that is both familiarly comfortable yet sustainable, this house develops sustainable living practices within accepted notions of domestic comfort. The house explores how we can harness our understanding of culturally-ingrained lifestyles in order to affect change, reforming perceptions of suburban comfort from within, and making the adoption of widespread lifestyle changes as seamless as possible.
| Location: | Ancaster, Ontario |
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| Status: | Built |
| Date: | 2015 |
K-House reconciles the client’s needs for a home that is familiarly comfortable, luxurious yet sustainable and affordable. The house explores how we can harness our understanding of culturally-ingrained lifestyles in order to affect change, reforming perceptions of suburban comfort from within, and making the adoption of widespread sustainable lifestyle changes as seamless as possible.
The house imbues every element of the traditional house with new opportunities, from its spatial layout to the construction of its walls. The well-beloved massing of the local split-level home (part bungalow and part multi-story house) is augmented to promote connection to nature, spatial efficiency and accessibility. The house, while true to its beloved domesticity, becomes an active agent of change within its context. It interacts with the natural flows of the site, sun, water, wildlife and flora, framing the changing character of its setting, making seasonality integral to the experience of the home. The traditional walls of the house are also no longer simply spatial dividers, but highly efficient yet breathable straw by-products of local farming practices. The house uses the beloved image of the suburban home to unsuspectingly become the first electrically net-zero straw house in Hamilton (thanks to 36 solar panels located on the roof), rethinking the traditional spaces and features of the suburban home to create opportunities for sustainable mechanisms (like proper cross-ventilation and high-efficiency fireplaces to drastically reduce heating and cooling loads).
The house is composed of 16” thick prefabricated strawbale walls clad in magboard, plaster and shou-sugi-ban (charred eastern white cedar to replace suburban vinyl siding, insuring longevity and protecting against rot), creating a breathable yet optimally insulated building envelope (R-40). To replicate the versatility of traditional construction methods and replace straw construction’s mandatory large overhangs with recessed gutters, a different type of breathable wall was developed. While most straw construction clads strawbales directly with plaster, the house’s strawbales are shielded by magboard, covered in a rainscreen that acts as air gap, and then clad in plaster or wood. The plaster was additionally coated with a silicate paint rendering it hydrophobic. While the plaster invariably gets exposed to water, it is able to fully exhaust absorbed moisture thanks to the continuous air gap and the hygroscopic properties of the plaster.
The house is located right on the Dundas conservation area and the landscape design, composed of native and non-invasive species, cradles the house as if embedded within the conservation area itself. The planting scheme uses native species from the conservation area, including ferns, river birches, sedges and pawpaws.A system of channels, concrete dams, swales, and porous pavers manages stormwater from on-site and uphill neighbouring properties, replenishing the aquifer, thereby reducing strain on the municipal drainage system and the conservation area. The flat rooftop is home to a pollinator garden offering a habitat for birds, bees and butterflies.
Sejong Central Operations Center and Storehouse
A new central operations center, offices and central storehouse for the new National Museum Complex of Korea
| Location: | Sejong, South Korea |
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| Status: | Built |
| Date: | 2024 |
| Local AOR: | Junglim |
Office Ou was awarded the contract to design both the central operations center (COC) and the central storehouse of the new National Museum Complex of Korea.
Initially, the COC was solely to be home to the the office spaces of the new National Museum Complex of Korea. Yet, due to its prominent location at the entrance of the museum complex, we believed that it could serve a much broader purpose, becoming a core part of visitors’ experience:
1) It is an orientation beacon for visitors arriving to the site, a place where people can plan their visit and learn about the history of the museum complex.
2) A connector that provides access between the office spaces, flexible event spaces, cafés and restaurants above grade, and the parking as well as storehouses below.
3) A flexible event space at grade, opening both onto the complex’ entry plaza and its central plaza, that can welcome a diverse range of changing exhibition (that may or may not be related to the individual identities of the complex’ many museums.)
The storehouse is home to both highly specialized conservation, preservation and storage spaces, and to flexible spaces that can change over the years as the exhibitions, collections and aims of the cultural institutions of the Museum Complex evolve.
