The Globe and Mail

As far back as his university days in the 1980s, Graham Smith -- now a partner in the Toronto firm of Altius Architecture Inc. -- always wanted his first home to be his last and only one. Tightly knit into the downtown urban fabric, but with big windows opening toward nature, with enough open space to raise a family in the summer of life, but with enough coziness for the autumn years after the kids have gone -- Mr. Smith's perfect house would have it all. As things stand now, this house for all seasons is nearly finished, or at least roughed in enough to reveal what's fine and wise about it. The 4,300-square-foot building is a work of warm brilliance -- more humane glow than intellectual flash, I mean -- that embodies modernism's best ideas about spatial flow, while acknowledging and carrying forward venerable Ontario traditions of domestic design. The story of this extraordinary structure began in 1998, when Mr. Smith and his wife, Dinah Hampson, paid $230,000 for a vacant lot above Wendigo Creek, on the west side of High Park. Situated on a very steep slope of sandy ravine, the 105-foot-wide site had long been considered unbuildable. Not so, decided Mr. Smith.