At first glance, Amelia Street is a typical stretch of Cabbagetown, lined with houses in late-Victorian styles, lovingly tended by their preservation-conscious owners. But Amelia, just south of Wellesley, has a specialty. It’s unusually rich in a lovable little house known as the worker’s cottage. One or one and a half storeys high, with a central peak over the front door, the style descends from a prize-winning design that was presented at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. Basic and cheap, the idea crossed the Atlantic, and thousands were built in poorer neighbourhoods across Ontario in the last third of the 19th century. For the same reason, relatively few of the houses have survived. In the first block west of Parliament Street, Amelia’s cottages come tricked out in all the winsome details that this style inspires. One house is clad in rustic stones, others in brick and stucco. Shutters, etched-glass transoms and bay windows animate the cottage’s simple shape. The peaks are edged in the undulating wooden gingerbread that spells “Home Sweet Home” to lovers of Victorian architecture.

And then there’s 50 Amelia Street, the home of Rick Hayward, an executive in a multinational corporation, and John O’Connor, an architect. The trademark profile, dominated by the sharp gable, is in place, prefaced by an informal perennial garden. But the house completely lacks gingerbread, finials or any other reassuring accessories, and is covered in something grey and industrial-looking. The plain-spoken façade is not unfinished, as many passersby assume, but covered in cement board punctuated by vertical metal strips—a witty take on traditional board and batten. The cladding, plus a staggered path of cement panels, a swanky stainless steel handrail and a meticulously detailed but utterly contemporary mailbox-cum-lamp, announces a sensibility bent on something more complicated than restoration. This is a new way of acknowledging Cabbagetown’s heritage that is neither slavish nor precious. This is an Ontario cottage that does not do cozy.

John O’Connor never intended to toy with historical accuracy when he bought the house in the late ’90s. A tall, likable man with a ready laugh, O’Connor was at a crossroads in his career. He’d just finished managing the creation of the Don Mills and Downsview subway stations, and wanted nothing more to do with big, frustrating jobs “where the design aspect gets killed.” At the same time, he’d gutted and renovated a house on Brunswick Avenue and sold it a year later for a profit of almost $200,000. He’d found the hands-on experience of designing and building a house the most satisfying work he’d done, so he decided to start a small company of his own.

Hoping to duplicate his financial success in the Annex, O’Connor looked fruitlessly for an empty lot on which to build something new. Then one Saturday afternoon, he saw an ad in the Toronto Star for a Cabbagetown house priced at $225,000. He was there within half an hour and found an 1870s cottage in “really rough shape,” with a La-Z-Boy in the yard. An elderly woman had lived there for almost 50 years. O’Connor had only two questions: does the house have termites, and is there access from the laneway? As soon as he got the right answers (no and yes), he bought it.

Over the next couple of months, he arrived at a few key decisions. “The cottage needed to be torn down,” he says, “but the neighbourhood needed the cottage.” Derelict as it was, the house was a relatively rare survivor of an endangered species, and part of what makes Amelia Street distinctive. Not every modernist designer has such sensitivity to a very modest piece of the past. O’Connor traces his to the three years he spent in Venice as a young architect in the early ’90s, where he learned that a city disrespects its historic fabric at its peril.