The Contemporary Tudor home by Jesse Sahlani offers a refreshingly contemporary take on an elegant and historically entrenched design style. Nestled in a quaint neighborhood in Etobicoke, otherwise known as Princess Anne Manor, this 90 foot wide lot gave us the opportunity to design a home with sprawlingly wide proportions. Measuring in at almost 70 feet in width, this stunning custom home offers proportions that both do justice to the original design style, while dampening the height of what is a grandly large home. Of course, Jesse started the design process for this home with a sun study, observing its position at different times of day in order to align each room with the suns path during the average highest time of use for each space. From this point Jesse sketches the floor plans and exteriors, an explorative, collaborative, and ever changing process that is the single most important practice behind any timeless design he is responsible for. The result is an almost perfectly proportioned home featuring tall peaks, and a dauntingly wide footprint that features three large chimney stacks. Standing proud of the roofline with their wide proportions, these chimneys are the historically accurate detail that made Jesse fall in love with this design style in the first place, alongside the authentic cedar shake roof of course.

When it came to exterior cladding selections, Jesse drew on the use of a combination of rough cut and smooth face natural Indiana limestone, a material that offers a far more refined aesthetic in comparison to the fieldstone or cobblestone accents synonymous with this design style. The smooth face limestone is used as an accent on the front entrance vestibule, as well as the chimney stacks, while the vast majority of the exterior walls of the structure are clad with two inch by five foot long custom cut rough faced indiana limestone block. These blocks were designed to imitate the look of brick, in a far sleeker, longer, and more contemporary manner. In place of the traditional wood detailing that would normally be seen in the format of dark wood accents over lath, Jesse chose to replace this detail with a far more contrasting, sleek black exterior MDF material.

The windows on the exterior of this home are a notable feature on their own, aiding in the creation of both the proportions of this structure, the softening of the contemporary features through the use of square mullions that offer a touch of traditional design, and adding a contemporary flare through their sheer size in several areas. The front facing two car garage is integrated into exterior walls that each utilize different materials, meaning that each door serves a different purpose in characterizing Jesse’s design. On the left is a sleek black garage door that nicely contrasts the limestone cladding in the same manner that the wall cladding and window headers in other areas do. On the right is a glass garage door that has been specifically designed to mimic the same window mullion pattern as the window above it, an intentional effect on the part of Jesse to sleekly reduce its impact on the front facade while continuing with the contemporary theme. On the rear facade, the windows grow in size significantly, offering views to the backyard pool, harnessing a wealth of natural light, and creating a seamless connection between the interior and exterior entertainment spaces.