Every few years, the Junior League of Toronto invites designers from Toronto’s design community to contribute to a showhouse makeover.  Each designer and firm will take over a room, and it offers them the opportunity to show off their styles and abilities in a unique environment.  This year, the project at McLean House, at The Estates of Sunnybrook, is opening for public showings as of May 8, running through May 31.  Laurie Bildfell of Ideal Spaces asked us to provide a contemporary closet for the Kid’s Room she was working on.  We installed white and silver aspects of our Element-System.  Tickets for attendance are $25, ($20 for seniors and students), and proceeds support St. Alban’s Boys and Girls Club, the Women & Babies Program at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and other initiative supported by the Junior League of Toronto.  For more information, visit http://www.jltshowhouse.org/.

Here’s a great example of what you can do the get the most out of a small space.  Our client lives in a 500 square foot condo in Liberty Village.  The rooms of course are tight, and the existing closet was not working for him.  While the room has a 9 foot ceiling, the doors were of standard height, which meant the upper space in the closet was inaccessible.  The builder had provided lightweight sliding panel doors, which further hindered the access, and the interior had a set of wire shelves which did not work well with the sliding doors - you could really only access clothes hanging from one side, and the result was an unattractive, inefficient mess.  We needed to find a way to make this closet work better and look better, too.

The first step, was opening up the space.  The client removed the doors, shelves and even the header above the doors, which then gave us full access to the entire space.  We created cubby storage up above with lift up doors for long term storage.  We increased his clothes hanging capacity by double hanging his clothes in cabinets at either end.  We added drawers to the center, where he can store ties and belts and other small things, and then some open shelves.  Not only are open shelves useful for quick access, but they also make the space feel roomier.  In the original closet, the plain white doors were dreary and overwhelming.  The open shelves help make the room feel a little bigger.  Click on the thumbnail below for a closer look.

The noteworthy details here are the framing, doors, and hardware.    By applying a simple face frame molding between the sections, we not only obscure the places where cabinets meet, it also beefs up the look.  These frosted glass doors are a beautiful detail that really make the closet, completing a hip, urban look.  Similarly, the stainless steel handles provide the perfect accent to cap everything off.

Watch the video below for a tour of the space, so you can see first hand exactly what we did.

We’ve had some exciting projects lately, and will soon have artwork to show you just what we did.  In short, we have recently done:

• a Murphy Bed with a drop-down desk surface on the outside of it, so that the space is still functional when the bed is closed
• a Built-In closet, where we replaced the existing plain sliding doors by filling the space with cabinets, and accented the work with some fabulous frosted glass metal framed doors
• a beautiful walk-in closet with a lit vanity counter and crown molding treatments

We plan on showing you some Before and After presentations of some of these projects soon.  Also, be on the look out for a Space Solutions youtube channel.  We’ll post videos from time to time highlighting interesting details on some of our projects, tips and even tours of some of our design concepts and ideas.  Stay tuned for updates!

It may still be winter, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to think about sorting out your garage.  You may think of us mostly for our closets - well, think of the garage as a closet for your car.  Everyone will have their own assortment of miscellaneous things in their garage: workshop tools, sports gear, lawn and garden equipment, automotive parts.  We can help with all of these things and more, with a variety of solutions for you.  Our RedLine garagegear system offers heavy duty powder coated cabinets for stashing away all those things that you need, but don’t want left out in the open.  For the “grab-and-go” items - rakes, brooms, hoses, etc - a wall system of hooks and racks will usually suit the bill.  Schulte’s Activity Organizers system offers the ability to interchange a variety of organizers on a metal grid.  For a larger wall space and a more finished look, StoreWALL slat wall panels are a great alternative to traditional mdf slat wall.  Stronger than mdf, StoreWALL panels are made of a heavy duty PVC to prevent warping.

We recently did a cabinet installation with RedLine garagegear that posed an interesting challenge.  The customer’s garage had a jog in the corner, and the request was to build cabinets on the adjacent walls around the jog, and leave a small counter space next to the door to the house.  If the cabinets are too close on either side, the doors won’t open.  Similarly, if the cabinets are too far away from the jog, a deep space is created that things can get “lost” in.  So we put a filler panel in between the cabinets, to create the proper spacing and to complete the look.  Closer to the garage door, the customer installed some of our StoreWALL panels and hooks, for the grab-and-go things.  You can see the finished installation by clicking on the thumbnails below.  The cabinet color is called Sandstone; the slat wall color is Cedar.  You can get more information about our garage offerings by viewing our Garages page.  We also have examples of all of our offerings installed at our Eglinton showroom.

We do 15 to 20 installations per week. Most of our work is custom. This allows our designers to be creative around awkward spaces. Recent jobs include: a basement wall unit that worked around angled walls, a water meter, uneven floors and ceiling; a gorgeous floor to ceiling, wall to wall wardrobe built-in on the 45^th floor of a beautiful condo development; a built-in home office incorporating 3 separate work spaces, complete with file storage/computer/paper binder storage for each child in a family.

Elfa closets and our Eurostyle doors can be seen at the Designer’ s Walk showroom.  In the distillery district see Elfa at the model suites for the “Clear Spirit” condominium development.