Studio Junction Inc.'s Courtyard House

Though some architects choose to go ahead and prove the skeptics wrong, others resolve this dilemma by limiting their far-out ideas to the interior or rear elevation. Still others—like Christine Ho Ping Kong and Peter Tan—bypass the neighbor issue by seeking out building sites that are concealed from the public eye. Ho Ping Kong and Tan designed their first home on a back alley in Toronto, where they could pursue their ideas without compromising their vision of a perfect place for their young family.
When Ho Ping Kong and Tan found their site 
back in 2001, it held a building you could literally back a truck into: a contractor’s warehouse with 
a storage yard. Yet the two-story concrete-block structure seemed like the perfect place to begin. “Here, you don’t have to conform with the facades of the street,” Ho Ping Kong says. And the building itself “was so elemental—a block and an empty space,” Tan says. “It was perfect. We weren’t paying for things we didn’t want to use and we could experiment with all our crazy ideas.”
The two were following in a local tradition of “laneway housing.” Since the late 1980s, some of Toronto’s most creative architects have been finding sites on laneways—back alleys—on which to build houses, coming up with inventive ways to achieve privacy and space in these cramped quarters. Ho Ping Kong and Tan wanted to push that effort to an extreme with a house totally sealed off from the street, where all the windows looked inward.