Peninsula North, also known as the Old North End, is located at the foot of Halifax’s Citadel Hill. It is the oldest suburb of the original colonial grid town and was developed in the early 1800s. This dense, working class neighbourhood seems appropriate for this live/work infill experiment. This project, which involved the architect as the developer, combines the reuse of a 1940s gas station to house an architect’s office with the addition of four new infill townhouses. Three of these houses were designed to be sold. One was retained for the architect and his family. This affordable, mixed-use project was built at a cost of $65/ft² on a small corner lot of 3,500 ft² by exploiting a development agreement process. It achieves a density that is higher than many of Halifax’s high rise developments by providing ground-related units, parking and rooftop open space. The office and each of the townhouses have private individual access with separate street addresses.

The wood row houses continue the residential grain of Falkland Street and extend it into a block where the original houses had burned down. The gable-roofed rhombus containing the row houses refers to an archetypal idea of ‘street’ and is built of light, timber frame construction. Given the structural plasticity of platform framing, holes are punched freely in the façade resulting in an informality which recalls vernacular building. The units are generic, side hall row houses built directly on the street line like their neighbours. Raised sit-com entries allow the units to be sunken below the intersection between the wooden box houses and the concrete box of the office.

The concrete gas station containing the office is treated as a found object on Maynard Street. This open plan studio reverses the typical front-of-house/back-of-house organization of professional offices, by placing the administration at the back and the drawing studio at the front. There are no enclosed spaces.

Highly finished totemic elements, including a black lacquer box which supports three 3”x3’x12’ floating maple slabs that form desk tops, contrast with the raw concrete shell of the office building. A narrow stair, hidden in the black box, provides access to a meeting room placed within a rooftop shed. The resulting roofscape with its red doghouse, yellow swing set, and turquoise shed resembles a rural Nova Scotia ‘dog patch’ landscape, brought into town, and protected by the wall of row houses.