The Dragon

When their existing laneway garage was nearing end of life, PLANT founding partners Lisa Rapoport and Chris Pommer decided to replace it with a larger structure that, in addition to housing their car and bikes, would provide more workshop space for art projects. Through the deft deployment of colour and texture – and one well-placed curve – they were able to achieve the maximum zoning-permitted volume (a footprint of 20 × 20 ft, with a 14-ft height) on a garage that animates, but in no way dominates, their compact urban backyard.

PLANT has used off-the-shelf cedar shingles on several residential renovations, often combining multiple standard shapes to create unconventional, eye-catching patterns. “For our own garage, I wanted to come up with a pattern that looked as complex as possible, while actually being simple to build,” says Pommer.

On a trip to Finland several years ago, he was struck by a pine tar finish commonly used to waterproof wooden buildings, both old and new. It’s environmentally responsible and low maintenance. (One coat is applied to a new structure, and five to ten years later, a second coat is added. At that point it becomes permanently bonded to the wood.) After years of searching for a North American supplier, he found someone who had recently begun importing pine tar to Canada from Sweden.
“Gnarly old dragon” became the PLANT partners’ term for the repeat pattern they’d developed for the garage façade, using three shingle shapes. Green is, of course, the go-to dragon colour, and a striking shade of it happened to be available from the pine tar importer. “The colour is exactly the same as grass,” says Rapoport. “It’s bright, but it blends into the garden. It’s loud and quiet at the same time.”

The garden-facing ‘Dragon’ elevation is an infinity façade: it reduces the structure’s apparent bulk by curving back and merging into the flat roof.

To maximize usable interior space, boxes of supplies are stacked on loft-height shelving; hooks provide space-efficient tool storage. An operable skylight augments natural light access and supplies the ventilation needed for many art-making materials and processes. Electrical infrastructure installed during construction will facilitate the planned addition of a charging station for an electric car.

While the Dragon façade has a Victorian folly’s whimsy, the structure’s two sides abutting neighbours’ garages and its ‘public’ laneway elevation are sensibly clad in plain, unremarkable galvanized siding.