Georgia 
From the sidewalk, the Montrose Sixplex reads as a single family home scaled up just slightly — a pale cream brick volume with a pitched gable roof, dark-framed windows punched deliberately into the facade, and a low concrete stoop that feels domestic rather than institutional. Nothing about it announces six separate households. That restraint is exactly the point.
It sits on a low-rise residential street in Toronto where the neighbours are red-brick Edwardian semis and mature trees that close the sky in autumn. The building does not fight that context. It joins it, quietly and precisely.
The Project
Montrose Sixplex — A New Housing Model For Gentle Density On A Residential Street In Toronto is the work of Gabriel Fain Architects, a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary design studio founded in 2016. The firm has built a focused practice around what principal architect Gabriel Fain calls missing-middle housing: the typologies that sit between a detached house and a tower and that Canadian cities have historically struggled to produce with any design ambition.
The brief here was direct: six rental units on a lot in the Montrose neighbourhood, delivered without the visual bulk or institutional character that mid-density buildings often carry. Construction was managed by Reside Properties. The design response organises the units across two building forms — a two-storey street-facing block containing four units (Units 1 through 4) and a pair of laneway houses (Units 5 and 6) tucked behind along the rear property line. The material palette — cream horizontal brick, white standing-seam metal roofing, and dark aluminium window frames — holds the ensemble together across both forms.
SaveThe Spaces
The Street Facade Up Close
Standing closer to the front building, the decision to use a light, finely-coursed brick becomes more legible. The mortar joints are tight and horizontal, giving the wall a textile-like quality that softens what could easily have been a blunt mass. The gable is clean, capped by the white metal roof that wraps over the top floor. A shallow canopy over the entry is formed from the same brick, projecting just enough to mark the threshold without becoming a decorative gesture. The dark window frames — large at the upper level, more modestly scaled below — give the facade its rhythm without relying on ornament.
SaveThe Gable Detail and Metal Roof
From a tighter angle, the conversation between the brick body and the standing-seam metal roof is clearer. The roof plane is simple and steep-pitched enough to read as residential from the street, while the metal material keeps it from looking like a heritage pastiche. A strip of glazing runs along the upper edge of the gable, tucked under the roof overhang, letting light into the uppermost rooms without interrupting the roofline from outside. It is a modest technical move with a significant effect on the interior quality.
SaveThe Rear Block and Laneway Context
Viewed from the laneway, the rear faces of Units 2 and 4 and the separate laneway houses (Units 5 and 6) read as a compact, coherent cluster. The same cream brick carries through to the rear elevations, so the building does not have a front-of-house and a back-of-house in any pejorative sense. The laneway houses have their own pitched metal roofs with dormers that bring light into upper-floor rooms. Autumn shrubs along the laneway fence soften the base, and a cedar privacy screen on one of the ground-floor terraces introduces a warm timber note against the pale masonry.
SaveLaneway Houses in Context
The laneway houses — Units 5 and 6 — are the quieter half of the project. Seen from the lane, they appear as a compact two-storey form, brick below, white metal above, with small dormers cut into the roof slope. They are sized and scaled to read like the laneway coach houses that exist in older Toronto neighbourhoods, which means they feel at home in a context that has largely been ad hoc and informal. The relationship between the main block’s gable and the laneway houses’ roofline, visible together in the same frame, shows how carefully the massing was considered as a set rather than as two separate buildings.
SaveThe Open-Plan Kitchen and Main Living Floor
Inside one of the street-facing units, the main living floor is organised as a single open room running from front to back. The kitchen occupies the spine of the space: flat-front oak cabinetry runs floor to ceiling along one wall, a freestanding oak island with a stone top sits in the centre, and a sliding glass door at the far end frames the rear terrace and the laneway houses beyond. The material temperature is consistently warm — pale oak on the floors, honey-toned oak on all the joinery, white walls and ceiling — with no dark accent surfaces or statement hardware to compete. A glass-and-oak stair rises on the right side of the room, its transparency keeping the volume from feeling divided.
SaveThe Bedroom Terrace Door
In at least one of the units, a bedroom or sitting room at the rear opens directly onto a private terrace through a large black-framed sliding glass door. The cedar-slatted terrace railing is visible just beyond the threshold, and through it the laneway houses and mature garden trees frame the view. A single wishbone chair sits close to the door with an open book on the floor beside it — the scene is almost insistently quiet. The pale oak floor runs continuously from inside to the door edge, so the boundary between room and terrace is felt rather than seen.
SaveThe Living Room with Fireplace
The living room in one of the units pairs an ochre-yellow built-in wardrobe or storage cabinet against a wall with a marble-surround fireplace on the adjacent face. The fireplace surround appears to be a veined grey-and-white marble, its classical profile sitting deliberately against the otherwise flat, contemporary joinery. The same black-framed sliding door leads to the cedar terrace, and a dome pendant lamp — white, small — sits on the fireplace shelf. The contrast between the warm yellow cabinet and the cool marble is the room’s only material drama; everything else steps back.
SaveThe Entry Vestibule and Stair Hall
The entry sequence is handled with the same economy as the rest of the unit. A black-framed casement window faces the street, set above a low built-in oak bench with storage below — the kind of detail that does real work every day. Opposite, a longer oak-fronted storage bench runs along the wall. A turned wooden stool in dark timber sits between the two pieces. The glass-panelled stair is already visible from here, and the white walls bounce the autumn light from the street-facing window through the full depth of the entry. There is nothing decorative in the conventional sense, but the proportion of the window opening and the grain of the oak cabinetry give the vestibule its character.
SaveThe Built-In Study Wall
One of the most resolved details in the project is a full-height built-in study wall, executed entirely in pale oak with a matte finish. Open shelves run from desk height to the ceiling, filled with books and a few white ceramic objects. A flat desk surface is integrated at sitting height, and a wishbone chair is tucked beneath it. A black steel rolling library ladder on a rail gives access to the upper shelves — it is the one industrial element in an otherwise all-wood room, and it earns its place. Seen from across the room with a black-framed window at right, the composition is genuinely calm.
SaveThe Study Wall from the Stair Side
Seen from a slightly wider angle that includes the stair opening, the same built-in study reads as a room-within-a-room. The white-painted stair with oak treads is visible through the door opening to the left, and the library ladder’s black steel hardware contrasts with the pale wood in a way that feels intentional rather than decorative. The continuous oak grain across shelves, desk surface, and cabinet panels makes the whole wall feel like a single piece of furniture rather than a collection of components.
SaveWhat you might carry home
The clearest thing this project demonstrates is that a material decision made at the scale of a building — pale, horizontally-coursed brick — works because it is committed to completely. Every facade, front and rear, uses the same brick. If you are renovating or adding a garden structure, carrying one exterior material around all four sides rather than switching to a cheaper cladding at the back is the move that makes a building feel resolved rather than budget-managed.
The interior palette is worth sitting with. Every surface is pale oak, white, or a single accent colour (the ochre cabinet in the living room). There is a marble fireplace surround that reads as a considered contrast rather than a competing statement because nothing else in the room is competing. If your own home currently has three or four materials doing similar emotional work in the same room, taking one of them out is likely to make the room feel larger and more deliberate.
The built-in study wall is a practical argument for treating a whole wall as a single piece of furniture. The rolling ladder is not an aesthetic choice so much as a functional one — the shelves genuinely go to ceiling height and the ladder makes them usable. If you are speccing joinery for a home office or a living room wall, designing it to full ceiling height and budgeting for a ladder changes what the wall can do, both visually and in terms of actual storage capacity.
Finally, the way this building handles the transition between inside and outside in each unit — a large black-framed sliding door, a cedar-slatted private terrace, continuous flooring material to the threshold — is replicable at a smaller scale. A sliding glass door that aligns with your existing floor level, with a timber screen rail for privacy, creates a version of that permeability without requiring an architectural overhaul.
SaveWhat Gabriel Fain Architects have produced on Montrose is a building that argues, without any rhetoric, that rental housing and careful design are not in tension. Six households live behind that pale brick facade with private terraces, considered joinery, and rooms that feel genuinely quiet. That argument is more useful than any policy paper, and it is sitting on a residential street in Toronto for anyone to walk past and look at.
