Couple with three kids and expecting another wanted something different from their home

When Peter and Jolene Gianakas first set foot inside their new home in Kleinburg, north of Toronto, they knew they had a project on their hands. “It was an older home with great bones, but needed a lot of work to make it what we wanted,” said Peter Gianakas. “We had three kids at the time and our fourth on the way.”

They contacted Frank Di Sarra, principal architect at FrankFranco Architects in Kleinberg, Ont.

“After I gave him my thoughts and he showed us his previous work, I just wanted him to run with it,” Gianakas said. “Jolene my wife wanted to be a part of it.”

The 7,000-square-foot home was a traditional limestone-clad house north of Toronto. Di Sarra describes it as a builder home. “The home was original, with faux paintings on the wall, but no architect or designer was part of the process.”

The renovation, completed in 2019, consisted of reorganizing the interior spaces and updating the colour palette, and relocating a secondary staircase and redoing the main staircase. The main bedroom was made smaller and cosier, as Di Sarra added wood, warm metals and natural stone. He said, “The bigger challenge was getting both clients on board and trying to harness these ideas.”

Casa Cascade is three storeys and has a gym, wine cellar, golf simulator and rec room on the lower level. The first floor holds the dining, kitchen and living areas. There are four bedrooms on the second floor and one over the garage. The home also has a pool house they call “the Sinatra Cabana.”

Frank Di Sarra explains what the project consisted of:

What input did the owners have? The house was actually quite large and they didn’t know how to interpret it or what to do. It was kind of an initial dialogue that was more open and free. They didn’t want to enlarge the home. They said the bedrooms upstairs were adequately sized. We didn’t touch those at all. We just changed door locations and … finishes in the bathrooms, we redid the windows.

The circular opening at the top of the stairs was something you got rid of? It was the original opening to below. It’s a concept used in traditional, Mediterranean homes, but it was compressed. It didn’t have the room to function properly; the opening was not wide enough, the hallways were compressed and they kind of forced you to play “Ring Around the Rosie” essentially on the upper floors. We decided it was in the best interest to close that up. We went with an English approach … very wide halls between the rooms.

Was it a lot of work to change the staircases? The one staircase that we did change was a tricky set of stairs because it was kind of a structural illusion. The second set of stairs, the main set, was a tremendous amount of work onsite. We had to build a parapet wall, build it straight, build the curvatures, tie in everything, build the wood on the one side and the white laminate on the other and get those curvatures correct.

What were the challenges when you were designing? It was hard for them to picture it all and see it all, so we did a lot of work to make them comfortable with all these ideas we had. That was a (delicate) moment.

How did you increase light into the home? A lot of windows had window coverings and the colours of the original house were very sombre. Once we changed the windows, we got rid of any excess mouldings and were able to make the total glass bigger. The entire back room we really opened up and that filters into the main floor.