The award-winning architect with a penchant for modern spaces, where glass blurs the line between outdoor and inside spaces, has been known to take hours mulling over a design problem.
Take the time he paced around the construction zone in his home in the fall of 2006, watching his colleague and contractor, Guy Robinette, perched on scaffolding high above the dining-room floor, holding up several drywall options for the ceiling.
The mission was to box in ductwork linking the fireplace to an exterior wall. It was impossible to send the metal work straight up and out the roof two floors up.
"He spent four hours talking about it, asking for changes," adds Robinette, who has known Simmonds since he graduated from Carleton University's School of Architecture 26 years ago. "The first attempt wasn't interesting enough for Mr. Simmonds," says his friend with a hearty laugh.
Eventually, the two settled on a 12-foot curve that hugs the ceiling, fanning out from a narrow span at the fireplace, gently widening as it passes in front of the large dining-room windows. Simple drywall flows like a gentle river into a delta.
The untutored eye would not realize there is essential ductwork behind the curve.
It is one small piece in a thoroughly modern home that sits on a narrow lot in Old Ottawa South. The silver stone house is entered in this year's Design Awards being organized by the Greater Ottawa Home Builders' Association and set for mid-October at the National Gallery.
Simmonds has a long track record of winning honours at the event, taking home multiple trophies for an Old World-style bungalow sitting beside a cascading waterfall in east Ottawa, a stunning bungalow set on a bluff overlooking the Ottawa River and a courtyard home tucked beside the Rideau River.
Yet all of his designs share common factors: a sense of light, flow, layered textures and intricate detailing.
For the Simmonds house, "there were a lot of changes and 99 per cent were inside," says Robinette, who says all of the conversations and changes added up to a sun-drenched home filled with hints of Australia, the homeland of Simmonds's wife, Inga D'Arcy.
"The changes were all worth it," says Robinette, who interrupted his honeymoon to make sure the house was finished correctly.
"Sun and light are very important to Inga," says Simmonds during a visit to his semi-detached home located between the Rideau Canal and the Rideau River.
A path leads past a garden to the front door while at the rear, three floors of glass drop down a steep hill to D'Arcy's lush garden of vegetables and herbs. Sunlight streams through the banks of south-facing windows, heating up the blond-coloured maple flooring and smartly reducing heating costs.
Simmonds, again the perfectionist, designed large roof overhangs to protect the house from the hot summer sun.
He abandoned a garage in favour of a carport and the option of more windows at the front of the house and another small, sheltered garden where he has been valiantly trying to grow bamboo.
He fully realizes Ottawa is at least two zones too cold for bamboo, yet this spring a few branches emerged from the snow, clearly delighting Simmonds, who took a year off before completing his architectural degree at Carleton University to work in Toronto for Jurgen Partridge, now a leading landscape architect.
"I am a crazy gardener with a Zen soul," says Simmonds, who has earned honours for eco-designs such as the Mountain Equipment Co-op building, a green low-rise apartment building and the eco-friendly headquarters of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority outside Manotick.
It makes sense that his own home is green on the inside, with radiant floor heating, and green on the outside.
The small bamboo garden gives him great pleasure because it adds light to the house and it's the first thing he sees each morning when coming down the stairs.
Inga D'Arcy's studio, with her paintings and cupboards brimming with books on art and meditation, takes up the other half of the lower level. Both rooms are filled with sun and uninterrupted views of the garden.
Both D'Arcy and Simmonds have their own away rooms in the house, quiet, sunny places where they can be alone and meditate.
A different shade of sun pours through Simmonds's bathroom on the third level. Here a high window brings a soft blue light into the room.
Across the hall, there is the women's bathroom, a larger, brighter room with a curvy tub and tinted glass wall tiles re-creating feelings of walking along one of Australia's long, white, sandy beaches. The limestone flooring adds another level of texture and light in a house that has the power to encourage bamboo to grow.
-- Canwest News Service
