<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nIn their influential 1897 book, The Decoration of Houses, which helped sweep the Victorian clutter out of American interiors, Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., deplored the mid-19th century's separation of architecture and interior design. Most architects, observed Wharton dryly, \"looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field to the upholsterers.\" She and Codman fervently believed that \"interior decoration should be considered a branch of architecture\" and that \"the interior of a house is as much part of its organic structure as the outside.\"\n\nThat principle informs all the work of the Toronto designer Katherine Newman and her architect partner, Peter Cebulak, who configure a project's exterior and interior simultaneously, in an organic dialogue between structure and d\u00E9cor. The partners were delighted when clients they had worked with on a number of projects bought an Arts and Crafts-style house on a large corner lot in one of Toronto's oldest neighborhoods, with the intention of tearing it down and building something new.\n\nThe clients had \"a strong vision of what the new house's aesthetic would be,\" says the designer.\n\nThe clients\u2014a couple with three young children\u2014had \"a strong vision of how they wanted to use the new house and what its aesthetic would be,\" recalls Newman, who has been close friends with the wife since childhood. They wanted to keep the exterior in the Arts and Crafts vernacular, \"so the building would fit into its surroundings,\" Newman continues. And they had three mandates for the interior: First, the living room and dining room should be connected; second, people entering the front door should not be able to see all the way through to the rear of the house\u2014the family's private life would not be visible from the entrance; and, finally, the primary living spaces should open to a terrace. \"These are outdoor people,\" says Newman. \"They like spending summer days in the gardens, on the terrace, by the pool.\"\n\nWorking closely with the clients, Newman and Cebulak drew up plans for an 8,000-square-foot house, clad in Indiana-cut stone and rubblestone, with 15 rooms and nine baths. The Arts and Crafts idiom allowed the team to exercise what Newman calls a \"disciplined eclecticism\"\u2014to integrate a variety of architectural and aesthetic styles, inside and out. Cebulak designed a series of jogs for the north elevation, the longest stretch of the fa\u00E7ade, because, he says, \"we did not want the building to make a statement in terms of scale. We wanted it to make a statement about finely articulated materials and respect for the neighborhood.\"\n\nThey more than succeeded. The handsome limestone structure nods to a stone-clad Tudor-style building across the road. At the house's east-facing entrance, a wide Italianate portico frames the front doors, and a visitor mounting low steps passes through an entrance hall, on Nero Portoro\u2014gold-veined black Ligurian marble\u2014flooring, into the main hall. Directly opposite the entrance, a tall fireplace with a Nero Portoro outline dominates the space and fulfills the owners' second mandate: People coming in the front doors cannot see the active family life inside. They do see evidence of the couple's photography collection, in two works by Robert Polidori leaning on the mantel. And moving to a cloakroom at the left of the entrance, they can look through the main hall and a central groin-vaulted gallery to the family room at the west end of the house, a distance of 70 feet. In summer, the view extends through the family room's French doors to the terrace and the lush gardens beyond (the third mandate).\n\nAnother symmetrical enfilade runs the width of the house, along a north-south axis off the central gallery. Two vestibules with a crimson silk wallcovering lead out of the pale, sculptural gallery: one south to the wood-paneled library, the other north, to the octagonal dining room, where a dye-transfer print by Irving Penn, Italian Still Life, and a pair of fine 19th-century Chinese ancestor portraits suggest the range and quality of the owners' taste. Throughout the house, the choice mix of periods and genres, materials and textures, lights and darks, sharpens the eye and gives rich color to the experience of the rooms.\n\nA wide doorway connects the dining room to the living room (fulfilling the first mandate), where a faux-parchment wallcovering with a subtle iridescent pink glaze sets off rich Bordeaux-colored silk taffeta draperies. Cebulak's mantel, made of honey-colored, bleached and inlaid burl walnut, frames a white-onyx fire surround and serves as the focal point of the room.\n\nUpstairs in the master suite, French doors let in natural light from the south and west, and a fireplace flanked by lounge chairs faces the bed. (In winter, the house's six fireplaces help take the chill off arctic Toronto nights.) The master bedroom's palette of crisp whites and pale shades of beige and gray\u2014with occasional accents of dark wood\u2014perfectly complements black-and-white images from the owners' collection of contemporary photography and art.\n\nThe wife played such a major role in every aspect of the house's creation, reports Newman, that \"she noticed even the thickness of the grout lines! She's very confident of her own aesthetic. Once we were finished, Peter and I got the ultimate compliment when someone said, This house really reflects her.' \""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/newman-article-052007>