Easy summertime condo living – Janet Rosenberg in The Globe and Mail
Posted June 6, 2022
Janet Rosenberg shared her insights and expertise in “Easy summertime condo living: Generous, beautifully designed outdoor spaces and proximity to nature are coveted by pandemic-weary buyers” in The Globe and Mail on June 3, 2022. Janet discussed designing outdoor spaces for urban condos and JRS’s landscape design work on No. 7 Dale, a recently completed four storey luxury townhome development.
From the Globe:
“COVID really made people aware of how important it was to have outdoor space,” she says. “Our world was so small, for so long. Toronto has become very urban, and we really aren’t building that many new parks, so having green space and access to green space is really critical in terms of how we socialize and spend time with people; also for our well-being.”
In the past, Rosenberg says, outdoor space tended to be just a place for a bunch of plant pots and some chairs.
“Now you see these very integrated, beautiful terraces,” she says, “with the outdoor carpets and the sofas and incredible armchairs with ottomans.
“The units at No. 7 Dale are in this incredible garden,” she adds, which means you don’t just get the greenery and the fresh smell of nature, “but you also get the ecology and the birds and the squirrels; all the things that are really becoming important to us.”
Yet these homeowners don’t want the garden maintenance headaches that come with a big single-family home. They want the best of both worlds, she explains.
“[No. 7 Dale] is about the integration into the neighbourhood, including rebuilding some of the old stone walls, some of the iron details,” Rosenberg says. “It has the residential feeling that the other houses there have. It’s about scale and intimacy. It feels like a low-rise [building]. It doesn’t pop out as a tower.”
Her designs include common areas, as well as private terrace spaces, which can be further customized with the owner. The focus, she says, is on herb gardens, fountains and water elements for ambient sound, comfortable furniture, pizza ovens and barbecues.
“The layering when you’re decorating inside a house is the same type of layering that you do outside,” she says. “Everything is hand-picked to co-ordinate with what’s going on inside, so [the outdoor space becomes] that extra room.”
All images: No. 7 Dale, renderings by Caramel.