To fill a home with wares, many Canadians once turned to the catalogues of big-box retailers. Now, a new catalogue is offering something more — glossy renderings of the kind of homes that could be built in your neighbourhood.
The federal government’s new housing catalogue, a collection of nearly 50 standardized designs for multiplexes, townhouses, backyard suites and more, was unveiled Friday. While full details are still to come, the database is now replete with idyllic drawings and floor plans for homes that — in the eyes of federal officials and architects — could offer a modest boost to housing density in lowrise neighbourhoods across Canada.
Like a Sears catalogue, the idea is vintage. Canada offered this kind of catalogue after the Second World War, when the country faced a serious need for new homes. The idea is that offering publicly available, standardized, pre-vetted designs can speed up the development process and lower costs.
The catalogue, conjured by architects around the country at a cost of $11.6 million in 2024, offers different designs according to province or territory. For example, homes meant for Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut were designed to work in cases where a property’s water and sewage is located in above-ground tanks, recognizing the reality of servicing in some communities. The catalogue also offers more compact backyard unit options for those regions — as small as 430 square feet — to make shipping to the north easier.
Architect Janna Levitt, whose team at LGA Architectural Partners was behind the seven designs for Ontario, says they prioritized wood-framed buildings — thought to be fast and inexpensive — with no basements, a heavy emphasis on energy efficiency, and accessibility modifications for individuals with physical disabilities as well as those looking to “age in place.”
She sees the catalogue as more than cookie-cutter homes, saying it offers thoughtful architectural design, including built-in places to park baby strollers, and consideration to how noise travels between stacked units.
Speaking to the Star about the Ontario designs, Levitt said she’s hopeful the catalogue will result in tangible changes to neighbourhoods, and soon: “I would hope within the year.”
The sixplex
Where every other housing type in the Ontario catalogue offers two variations, LGA prepared just one standard design for a six-unit multiplex — a form of denser lowrise housing the federal government has encouraged, though cities like Toronto are still studying their potential legalization across the map.
With six apartments across three storeys, the design includes five two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom suite, with the one-bedroom designed to be “barrier free,” along with an alternate design option for that suite that would make it more accessible to those with physical disabilities.
The 4,842-square-foot design, like several of LGA’s other models, embraces an asymmetrical style with an off-centre peaked roof and a combination of balcony styles, with walkouts on one side and a Juliet balcony on the other.
Levitt said the asymmetrical design wouldn’t cost any more to build than a symmetrical design and came with functional benefits, such as the ability to put larger windows on one side for a dining room, kitchen and living area.
The walkout balconies were placed next to living areas like the kitchen — where someone might “set a little table in the summer” — while the Juliet balconies were placed in bedrooms for better ventilation a spring day without needing to flick on the air conditioning. “You get a great breeze. And again, it’s those kinds of things that go back to this is why an architecturally designed house is more conducive to a better quality of life,” Levitt said.
The fourplexes
The LGA architects offered two standardized fourplex designs — one clocking in at 3,897 square feet and three storeys, and the other at a slightly smaller 3,264 square feet spread over two storeys.
Each unit would have between one and three bedrooms, and include either one or one-and-a-half bathrooms. There are, again, variations available to make the units more physically accessible.
“We’re at a different time than the 1947 catalogue, where we recognize that from an equity perspective, people with a range of disabilities are not having the same level of design attention when it comes to housing,” Levitt said.
In the face of an aging population, she also sees accessible design as a way to allow Ontarians to grow older without being displaced from their communities. “If you design something that is either currently barrier-free or can be transformed into an accessible unit very easily and at low cost, then all of a sudden, you have a unit or multiplex where you can age in place.”
Fourplexes have been a contentious housing type in Ontario, with the federal and provincial governments sparring over whether cities should allow them as-of-right. The feds dangled billions of dollars in infrastructure funding last spring if Ontario would require it; Premier Doug Ford rejected the idea.
But in Toronto, city hall in 2023 greenlit fourplexes on any residential lot in a bid to crack open areas long shielded for detached and semi-detached houses.
The townhouses
For Ontario communities, the federal catalogue offers two variations of stacked townhouses, bearing many of the same hallmarks of the multiplex designs — from the asymmetrical roofs to the different types of balconies.
The homes were designed so they can be repeated, side-by-side, to fill any width available to build on. Each segment of stacked townhomes offers two units across three storeys. The larger model is 2,549 square feet per double unit, while the smaller design clocks in at 2,165 square feet.
Levitt said the two stacked units were arranged specifically to blunt noise concerns, with one unit on the first floor, then the second floor occupied by bedrooms for the upper unit, and the living space for the upper unit on the third floor. The thinking was the bedroom floor would be a quieter space and serve as a buffer for their lower neighbours.
Conceptual drawings include three of these stacked townhome designs — or six total units — nestled between other lowrise homes. The stacked townhouse designs in Ontario are meant to be the province’s own version of the row house designs suggested for builders in areas like Alberta, Levitt said.
The backyard suites
As cities such as Toronto have introduced new options for backyard housing such as laneway housing and garden suites — sometimes called granny flats — the housing catalogue offers two standardized designs for Ontario.
The first, more modest design is a single-storey, one-bedroom suite, just over 13 feet tall, offering 634 square feet of living space. The second, larger design is a nearly 20-foot tall, two-storey model, with a car port at the base. It offers three bedrooms and one bathroom in 1,017 square feet.
The two designs can be adapted as either garden suites or laneway housing, Levitt said.
“They can be used for either, and that’s the value of them. It really depends on what your goals are and what the site is that you have,” she said. They were a housing option for multi-generational families with aging parents or grown children priced out of the housing market, she said, or to use as rentals.
As the full details of the designs roll out this spring — free for anyone to use, Levitt noted — she hopes to see the catalogue met with enthusiasm. “I would hope that there’s a large uptake in building these houses.”
