In the world of real estate and residential design, trends and fads come and go quite often. Whether it’s a certain kitchen colour, flooring pattern, wall adhesive, or any number of other superficial interior or exterior design craze, the industry is constantly brimming with new looks and hot takes.
However, when you start talking about more substantial home design features, especially those within luxury homes, these character-driven design components tend to be executed with a much more long-term purpose.
When constructing or renovating a luxury home in Toronto, costs can be steep. From architects and designers to builders and contractors, the best of the best aren’t cheap — and neither are their ideas.
To learn more about what Toronto’s luxury housing market is spending its money on to bring their homes into the modern era of design, here are the top five luxury design features we admire most.
1) Interior Courtyards
While front and backyards are quite commonplace in Toronto homes, there are precious few structures that can claim to have a courtyard within the interior of their home.
Simultaneously, interior courtyards also achieve a design concept that has long been sought after within the luxury modern home market — blending interior and exterior spaces. We’ve all heard the term “bringing the outdoors, in,” however we’ve never been closer to being able to execute that concept in a literal sense before the implementation of interior courtyards.
Just like many cutting-edge design concepts, the domestic use of interior courtyards can be traced back to the Japanese, who were among the first to harness the design within residential structures.
Interior courtyards instantly provide a dramatic point of interest as few visitors suspect to find an outdoor space within the middle of a home’s floorplan. While interior courtyards provide a stunning visual display, they’re also highly functional. Since the invention of the window, there’s been almost no other design feature that has been as effective at including vast amounts of natural light into a space.
What good is a bright, beautiful interior courtyard without some stunning landscaping to match? See how we’d take advantage of a dramatic interior courtyard by reading our related posts below.
2) Statement Staircases
Anyone who’s visited the AGO at some point or another is sure to have spent just as much time gazing up at the thoroughly impressive spiralling staircase as they did any other work of art in the gallery. As avid lovers of both art and architecture, we knew quite some time ago it wouldn’t take long until staircases with the same design inspirations would start to appear at the residential level.
Today, many of Toronto’s most luxurious modern homes have implemented statement staircases into their designs. We love this design concept for two reasons; its form and its functionality. Homes with multiple stories require staircases, but why stop at just making stairs, ‘just stairs’? Why not make them beautiful, sculptural talking points too?
And, in the case of spiral staircases, a beautifully designed modern staircase that spirals directly upward is actually a highly efficient saver of square footage too. While this particular concept isn’t exactly a new idea (spiral staircases have been around for hundreds of years), they haven’t been utilized in modern practices as elegantly as they have been recently.
Want to see some of the finest examples of Toronto’s luxury modern homes currently on the market today? Check out my Featured Listings here and see if you can find any of your favourite modern home design features there.
3) Thermal Mass Concrete
While energy efficiency might not sound like the sexiest item on this list, minimizing your environmental footprint in 2021 is very en vogue. And, when building green can have a direct correlation to reducing your monthly heating and cooling bills while making your home look sleek, modern, and stylish, there’s nothing more you can really ask for.
One of the most popular materials we’re seeing a lot of in luxury homes these days is concrete. When it comes to why, the reasons are almost endless. Whether it’s through a wall, a floor, a ceiling, a beam, or almost any other application, concrete immediately injects a sense of rustic, earthy materiality into a space. And, when polished, this organic and raw industrial material reflects light into rooms, making them appear brighter, lighter, and larger than they were before.
However, the top modern architects and luxury designers of today also love concrete for its thermal mass capabilities. What does thermal mass mean? A material’s thermal mass is defined by its ability to absorb, store, and release heat into a space — or in this case, a home.
By implementing large slabs of concrete into the design of a home (for example, as an enormous block of flooring), the material will absorb heat from natural elements like the sun and slowly radiate it back out into a home as temperatures drop into the evening and night. This helps regulate temperatures within modern homes to keep them comfortable year-round, thus cutting down on the need to rely as much on heating and cooling systems.
Love luxury home designs as much as we do? Read through these related blog posts for more amazing luxury home design inspiration.
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- 5 Luxury Home Trends For Your Next Remodel
4) Full-Height Doorways
While full height (read: floor to ceiling) doors might not sound like a groundbreaking design idea, we’ve seen an increasing amount of modern architects and designers include them in their domestic works recently — and for good reason.
Like no other doorway design, full-height doorways provide a sense of drama and spatial continuity between rooms and spaces, most notably within modern, open-concept homes. Not only do full-height doorways allow for significantly larger amounts of light to pass through a home, but they also create an optical impression of more open spaces as the eye is drawn upward toward the full height of the ceiling.
Additionally, full-height doorways present a very natural sense of flow between rooms that are equally welcoming as they are functional. Acting more like organic passageways between rooms, full-height doorways feel much more like portals into new rooms and spaces rather than binary appliances as doors are used in their traditional function.
Yes, while all of this sounds very abstract and high-brow, being welcomed into a home complete with full-height doorways has an almost spiritually calming effect that can be challenging to put into words. What’s easier is to simply take a moment to enjoy the effect for yourself.
5) Residential Garage Lifts
The chances are, if you’re the owner of a luxury modern home in Toronto, you probably also own a few luxury vehicles as well. Especially if you’re a larger family or you and your partner both drive daily. However, owning several vehicles in Toronto can come with its challenges, notably in terms of parking space.
Even within the most luxurious of modern Toronto homes, space is at a premium. And, due to the mass pandemic-prescribed Work From Home movement over the past year or so, we’ve almost never placed more value on the efficiency of space.
However, the fairly recent application of residential garage lifts systems has solved this domestic dilemma with a highly sophisticated, highly impressive approach. Just as you might’ve seen in an auto shop or professional garage before, residential garage lifts now allow homeowners the ability to stack their cars atop one other.
The main difference with residential applications of garage lifts implements sleeker, more modern designs, which drop the bottom vehicle downward into a sub-garage level rather than suspending the top vehicle into the air.
Whether it’s to save you from sacrificing any beloved members of your fleet of luxury vehicles or to save you from sacrificing square footage to accommodate a larger garage, these lifts are a thoroughly impressive alternative. Plus, they reliably prove to be an engaging talking piece for any motor-headed guests you may have.
Thinking about finding a luxury modern home to call your own? We specialize in matching homebuyers with luxury homes that suit their unique lifestyles seamlessly. Learn more about how we can help you by taking a look at these: