By Farzad Esnaashari, M.Arch, Quadrant Architects
A lot of the best-located land in Toronto is narrow. The older residential streets in Willowdale, North York, and across the city were subdivided long ago into lots that are deep but not wide, and a narrow lot scares off buyers who assume it means a cramped house. It does not have to. A narrow lot, planned properly, can hold a home that lives far larger than its width suggests. The catch is that most of the important decisions get made before the design starts.
We designed a modern custom home on a narrow lot at 101 Byng Avenue in Willowdale. Here is how these projects work, and what decides whether a narrow lot gives you a great house or a compromised one.
There is no single number, but in Toronto a lot under about 30 feet of frontage starts to drive the design in a way a wider lot does not. Under 25 feet, width becomes the single biggest factor in the whole project. The Byng Avenue lot is 20 feet wide and 120 feet deep, narrow and deep in equal measure, and typical of the older streets across Willowdale and North York now being redeveloped.
What matters is not the width on the deed but the width you are actually allowed to build on, which is always less. That comes down to the setbacks.
A setback is the distance the zoning bylaw requires you to keep between your house and each property line. On a wide lot, side-yard setbacks take a small bite out of a large width and nobody notices. On a narrow lot, they can take a quarter or more of everything you have.
On a 20-foot lot, the side-yard setbacks on each side can leave a buildable width in the mid-teens of feet. Every design decision then has to happen inside that width. This is why the setbacks are the first thing to establish on a narrow-lot project, not a detail to check later: they set the real dimensions of the house. On lots this narrow, the required setbacks sometimes call for a minor variance from the city, which is something to plan for from the start rather than discover partway through.
Often yes, but it is one of the harder things to fit and it has to be planned from the start. A single garage door is roughly 8 to 9 feet wide, so on a buildable width in the mid-teens of feet, a garage takes up a large share of the ground floor before you have a front door, a hall, or a stair.
The usual answer is to build the garage into the body of the house rather than treat it as an add-on, with living space above so the footprint does double duty. The Byng Avenue home uses an integrated garage, which keeps the street elevation clean and puts the rest of the ground floor to better use. Whether a garage fits, and how, is one of the first questions to work out on a narrow lot.
You work with length and height instead of fighting for width. A narrow house is long and tall, and the design leans into those dimensions.
An open-concept plan does most of the work. Interior walls that would divide a wide house into rooms make a narrow house feel like a corridor, so the main floor is usually kept as one connected space. Height adds what the plan cannot: a double-height entrance or living area brings a sense of volume that the floor area alone does not provide. And circulation has to be efficient, because a narrow lot has no room for hallways that exist only to move between spaces. You can see this approach in the 101 Byng Avenue custom home, where an open plan and a double-height entrance help a narrow footprint feel generous.
A few questions decide whether a narrow lot will work, and they are worth answering before you commit:
Working through these with an architect before you buy is the difference between a narrow lot that becomes a great house and one that fights you the whole way.
Quadrant Architects designs modern custom homes on narrow and infill lots across Willowdale, North York, and the wider Toronto area, including Bayview Village, Lansing, Leaside, and the Bayview corridor. We start with the zoning and the site, so the plan is grounded in what the lot can actually support. Related services: custom home architect · residential architect services · interior design.
Farzad Esnaashari, M.Arch, Quadrant Architects.
416-835-0053 · farzad@quadrantarchitects.com