In a Victorian Semi, A Home Atrium Takes Centre Stage

When photographer Stephanie Bonas first laid eyes on the semi she eventually bought in West Queen West, the place was in rough shape. “It was as though Wes Anderson redirected Grey Gardens in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland,” she says. The heritage-listed Victorian had been given over to the raccoons for years, then a false start by a developer left a disjointed jumble of stray Ikea kitchens and crumbling walls. Its bright future, which featured a film-ready kitchen and soaring home atrium, seemed unlikely.

For Bonas, after two years of losing bidding wars, a massive overhaul was better than staying in a too-small laneway house with her seven-year-old son, Lennox. “I was committed to a full gut,” she says, standing in her now exquisitely remodelled ground floor – an open-plan, maple-and-brick-lined space where a living-dining area can easily be reconfigured into a photography studio. The kitchen, across from her office, is bathed in light, ideal for filming cooking and nutritional videos for children at a graphite marble island (her son has type 1 diabetes, so she’s working on a series showcasing low-carb recipes).

Bonas hired StudioAC on the advice of contractor James Aikenhead of Whitaker Construction, which specializes in contemporary builds. “When I saw a photo of StudioAC’s Richview kitchen, I was like, ‘Oh, those are the designers for me,’” she says. In 2019 the studio won the Design Exchange’s prestigious Emerging Designer Award, in part for its miraculous ability to convert small homes into gracious spaces, often by smartly reconfiguring the floorplans. Bonas’s place was comparatively large at 400 square metres, “So we decided to experiment with section,” says founding partner Jennifer Kudlats. “Walking through in its original state, it was very compartmentalized. But we could still feel the scale and understood that there was a monumental opportunity.”