Omar Gandhi has recently undertaken works of national significance — he’s part of the team behind the winning design for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and just completed a magnificent promenade at Peggy’s Cove — but he first became known for his rural residential projects, vernacular-informed structures set within dramatic landscapes. His first personal residential project, however, is something of a departure: a three-storey live–work space on a 242-square-metre plot in an unassuming North Halifax neighbourhood.
“It’s a place I’ve always enjoyed spending a lot of time, and the kind of place I wanted to raise my son — living around different kinds of people,” says Gandhi, who moved from Brampton, Ontario, to Halifax to study architecture, and has since grown his business between Toronto and the East Coast.
The site was an overgrown empty lot next to a building that for decades housed an African–Nova Scotian barbershop. “For our rural properties, you start with nothing, and it’s about playing with the view and the landscape. Here, it was about starting with something, then sculpting it from the inside out,” says Gandhi. “There were serious constraints — this was a property that allowed for only so many kinds of moves — and it gave me a starting form for a skinny, long house.”
The home Gandhi built here for his family has a solid brick cradle topped with a two-storey box clad in eastern white cedar. A horizontal band of glazing delineates the ground-floor workspace from the two floors above, which are screened with a facade of vertical wooden slats to create a private living space. The materials and forms he selected jibe with the neighbourhood’s aesthetics and heritage. Buff clay bricks — often used in local multi-unit housing — were laid in a traditional common-bond pattern.
Scattered custom bronze brick lights provide illumination at night yet disappear into the texture of the brickwork by day. And the home’s cedar-clad facade had already faded by the end of the build, echoing the weathered wood typical of north-end properties. “On the East Coast, there’s an appreciation of natural materials and how they age. I like using materials that look more beautiful over time; it adds richness to our rural projects, and I wanted that for this project as well,” says Gandhi.
The original plan was to house his business on the ground floor, with the top floors reserved for living. However, his firm expanded as construction progressed and quickly outgrew the space. Ultimately, the ground floor will be a studio for neighbourhood-based projects, with huddles happening at a custom-built 6.1-metre-long conference table. “We’re doing a major renovation to a dilapidated historic house in the North End that will be housing for 11 homeless men, and we have some local landscape projects too,” says Gandhi.
To define the living and working spaces and give everyone privacy, a tall capsule-shaped closet clad in raw steel creates division at the entryway. This attention to discretion is everywhere: The rooftop garden is a relaxing place to gather round the firepit, where there’s a feeling of connection with the street, yet neither the people up there nor passersby down below are in sight of one another. A long and low slot window in the second-floor living area looks down onto the courtyard — but not beyond it. “It’s about selecting views,” says Gandhi. A red cedar veil over the floor-to-ceiling windows in the second-floor kitchen and third-floor main bedroom lets in filtered light while obscuring the family indoors and the people in the neighbourhood as they all go about their day.
Roland Hudson of Lacunae, a specialist in parametric design, helped to optimize the property for natural light and acoustics, as well as to predict how light would hit artwork. “He had free rein, playing with the angles of where the light’s coming in, and also the shape of the volume itself, to give the most consistent quality of soft light, so you don’t have blasting heat and then darkness.” For instance, the window over Gandhi’s son’s desk looks out from his third-floor bedroom to the dramatic double-height light well in the living area.
“It reflects all the light bouncing off the wood. Again, we can’t see each other through the window. It’s just about letting in more light and connecting the two spaces,” says Gandhi. Skylights in the main light well and the two monochrome bathrooms on the third floor also let in other East Coast elements: “We really feel and hear the sound of the rain and the snow, and it alters the interior space.”
Meanwhile, white oak lends warmth throughout the interior. “I love the palette and tones — it has a real soft quality and you can get a lot of variation,” says Gandhi. This wood shows up in the living area’s panelling, in the long, curved kitchen island and its 4.27-metre-long dining table, and in the cylindrical handrails of the stairwell, which rest in bespoke bronze brackets that emerge from the gaps in the panelling. (The statement piece in the second-floor powder room — where a brick wall is dotted with custom bronze brick lights — is also wood: a carved white oak butcher-block sink.) Creating textural contrast with the white oak, swathes of granite in the living area’s fireplace surround and in the kitchen backsplash provide visual continuity between both zones.
An avid home cook, Gandhi is especially taken with his new “dream kitchen.” “I purposely designed the island to have no place to sit, because I don’t like backseat drivers when I’m cooking. You don’t get away with that type of thing with clients, but when you’re designing for yourself, you draw on your peculiar personality traits more.” He revelled in the degree of control he had over this personal project. “This opportunity allowed me to custom design anything I wanted to, and to decide where I wanted to put money to do something really special,” he says. “The only person I had to answer to was me.”
That this was a first — no one in his extended family has ever designed and built their own home — was of special significance. “I obsessed over it day and night,” he says. “I tried to go as far as I could with everything.” And now that he’s moved in and put his hard work to the test? “There’s not a single thing I would have done differently.”
Omar Gandhi Designs His Own Light-Filled Home in Halifax
The architect’s tall, skinny home extols East Coast materials and elements.