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Robert Hill is passionate about his house. For Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, whom he hired to design it, Hill was no ordinary client. An architect himself, he really knew buildings and he knew what he wanted. He holds a day job as an archivist-researcher for a Toronto architectural firm, but his life's work has been the compilation of a massive biographical index on late Canadian architects and their work. ``When it is complete,'' says Brigitte Shim, noting that Hill is currently working on architects whose last names begin with T, ``it will be a national treasure.''
Hill's diminutive jewel of a house sits on Craven Road in a densely built middle-class neighborhood in northeast Toronto. Though the building appears elegantly simple, it satisfies complicated and often conflicting requirements. The U.S.$65,000 construction budget for this 1,100-square-foot house was as minuscule as its 25-by-90-foot lot. ``That did not include `soft' costs,'' says Hill, ``such as design fees, property costs, household appliances, and utility hookups.'' To stay within the budget, Hill, Shim, and her partner, Howard Sutcliffe, along with the general contractor and various fabricators, regularly dissected and analyzed the design in minute detail. In the process, they developed a strict hierarchical ordering within the house. They ranked the relative importance of the spaces, determined how to organize them and how much volume to apportion to each, and at the same time examined how the building would be constructed. Compromises were made so that the money was spent wisely and according to Hill's wishes.
The first thing to go was the garage, which Hill considered a wasteful...