Architect Elmar Tampold, 91, is selling his modern house at 16 May Tree Rd., in Hoggs Hollow, a remarkable house I recall visiting with his son, Thomas, soon after we'd both graduated from architecture school. I was envious of Thomas, as he'd designed the house with his father and it not only turned out well, but the experience was positive for both of them. In painful contrast, my parents had just moved into a house in British Columbia that I designed, sort of, and the results didn't make them, or me, very happy.
Thomas's father was a well-known architect, and with a partner, John Wells, established a firm in 1959 that designed more than 1,000 buildings. They eventually had offices in Halifax, Montreal and Toronto. The firm specialized in designing university residences, including the notorious - at least for a time - Rochdale College on Bloor Street. Less controversial and enduring today as an elegant address a few blocks farther east is The Colonnade. Tampold Wells designed this homage to Le Corbusier with Gerald Robinson; it was completed in 1964.
"His friends couldn't understand why he built a new house when he was in his sixties," Thomas says. "But he lived in the house for more than 30 years, so he won that argument. I worked on the design with him after I graduated. It was a wonderful coming together for us. Being alone in it after his wife died is difficult, though."
My father wasn't an architect and even if he had been, I don't know if we would have agreed on anything aesthetic. Unlike my childhood, Thomas and his sister grew up with a Scandinavian sensibility at home. His father was from Estonia, and this commitment to design on a day-today basis was not your usual WASP idea of style being regulated by practicality and budget, not refinement. "It was a different way of looking at things than most people I grew up with," Thomas says. "It was always important how things looked, and to understand buildings in a total sense, of all the components that needed to make them work."
It's not that my parents didn't try to instill their good values in me, it's just that talking about what made cutlery well designed was not a dinner-table topic.
Thomas and his parents were in design sync. When I arrived back in B.C. filled with ideas about modern architecture, I confronted a mother who thought I'd been learning how to design the best Cape Cod house, and a father who thought I'd learned something about how to save money on heating and air-conditioning.
"The house is still interesting to me, and I'm more aware of the influences now than I was then," Thomas says. "There's a strong Bauhaus and Alvar Aalto contribution, and the floor plan is particularly interesting. It's quite Adolf Loos. Like many of Loos's houses, it has a similar footprint on each of three floors, but each floor is very different spatially. As well, the rather mask-like front the house presents compared to the other perspectives is intriguing" (see it at mls.ca, # C2207349).
The design for my parents' house didn't look like Thomas's place, but it came from similar influences. However, the house my parents realized from my plans was embarrassing. (I was thrilled it was in B.C. and none of my classmates could see it.) When I arrived for my summer break 35 or so years ago, the house was already under construction and I could have driven right past it, as it didn't resemble my plans: "We had to make a few changes for your mother," my father said. "And to make it more practical for me." Changes like - the list is endless. They sold it 18 months later at a profit (this being the proof their version was better), and it was never referred to again.
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