A housing design catalogue for the 21st century
The housing catalogue includes 50 low-rise home designs, including for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes. Each design was developed by local architecture and engineering teams with the intent of aligning with regional building codes, planning rules, climate zones, construction methods and materials.
TEXT John Lorinc
RENDERINGS Office In Search Of
During the spring election, the Liberals leaned into messaging that evoked a historic moment from the late 1940s, when Ottawa succeeded in confronting a severe housing crisis.
“We used to build things in this country,” begins Prime Minister Mark Carney in a nostalgic ad filled with archival images of streets lined with brand new post-World War II “strawberry box” bungalows, built for returning Canadian soldiers and their young families.
The video also includes montages from the now-iconic design “catalogues,” published by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. These supplied floor plans and unlocked cheap mortgages for tens of thousands of simple suburban houses found in communities across the country. “The government built prefabricated homes that were easy to assemble and inexpensive,” Carney said in the voice-over. “And those homes are still here.”
Over the past year, CMHC has initiated a 21st century re-do of that design catalogue, and the first tranche of 50 plans—for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes—went live in early March. A second tranche, with plans for small apartments, is under development.
Unlike the postwar versions, these focus on infill sites, not green fields. One of CMHC’s goals is to promote so-called gentle density to residential properties with easily constructed plans that reflect regional variations, local zoning and building-code regulations, accessibility features and low-carbon design. As with those postwar catalogues, CMHC’s other goal was to tamp down on soft costs for homeowners or small builders looking to develop these kinds of housing by providing no-cost designs that were effectively permit sets.
The early reviews are generally positive. “I find the design really very compelling in a kind of understated way,” says SvN principal Sam Dufaux. By making available vetted plans that can be either pre-approved or approved as of right, CMHC will remove some of the friction that impedes this scale of housing. “One of the elements of the housing crisis has to do with how do we approve these kinds of projects,” Dufaux adds. “I’m hoping it is a bit of a new beginning.”
Yet other observers offer cautions about the extent to which the CMHC program can blunt the housing crisis. “It’s a small piece and a positive one,” says missing middle advocate and economist Mike Moffatt, who is executive in residence at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor at Western’s Ivey Business School. “Butone that probably captures a disproportionate amount of attention because it’s something people can visualize in a way that they can’t with an apartment tax credit.”
This kind of new-build infill is unlikely to provide much in the way of affordable or deeply affordable housing, adds Carolyn Whitzman, housing and social policy researcher, and author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. She estimates Canada needs about three million new dwellings that can be rented for per month or less. The policies that will enable new housing at that scale, she says, involve financing subsidies, publicly owned land, and construction innovation, e.g., prefabricated or factory-built components, as well as “consistent and permissive zoning and consistent and permissive building codes.”
Indeed, the make-or-break question hovering over CMHC’s design catalogue is whether municipalities will green-light these plans or simply find new ways to hold up approvals.
An axonometric of a rowhouse development from the Housing Catalogue, designed for Alberta.
A team effort
Janna Levitt, partner at LGA Architectural Partners, says that when CMHC issued an RFP for the design catalogue, her firm decided to pitch a team of architects and peer reviewers from across Canada, with LGA serving as project manager. After they were selected, Levitt says they had to quickly clarify a key detail, which was the assumption that the program could deliver pre-approved, permit-ready plans absent a piece of property to build on. “Even in 1947,” she says, “it wasn’t a permit set until you had a site.”
LGA’s team and CMHC agreed to expand the scope of the assignment so that the finished product wasn’t just a catalogue of plans but also included details about local regulations and typical lot sizes. Re-Housing co-founder Michael Piper, an associate professor at U of T’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, came on board to carry out research on similar programs, and found initiatives in places like Georgia, Indiana and Texas. “I have not found any that moved forward,” he says. “Canada’s national design catalogue is pretty novel in that regard, which is exciting.” The noteworthy exceptions are California, which has made significant advances in recent years in pre-approving ADUs across the state, and British Columbia, which last fall released its own standardized design catalogue.
He also carried out a scan of land use and zoning rules in Ontario for 15 to 20 municipalities. “We looked to seetheir zoning permitted and what the rules were, and as you might expect, they’re all over the place,” he says. “Hence the challenge with the standardized design.”
At present, high-level overviews for the 50 designs are available, including basic floor plans, 3D axonometrics, and building dimensions. Full architectural design packages are expected to be released later this year.
Levitt says the architects on the team set out to come up with designs that used wood frame construction, had no basements, and drew on vernacular architectural styles. They researched representative lot sizes in the various regions, and configured designs to suit small, medium and large properties. Some versions have accessibility features—CMHC’s remit included both accessible units and aging-in-place as objectives—or can be adapted later on.
As for climate and energy efficiency considerations, the recommended materials include low-carbon components and cladding. The designs do reflect geographical variations, but Levitt says there’s only so much her team could do in terms of energy modelling. “How do you do heat energy calculations when you don’t have a site? You don’t have north, south, east, westand you don’t have what zone are you in. In B.C. and Ontario, there are seven climatic regions. There was a lot of working through those kinds of very practical requirements, which were very complicated and actually fed into the design work quite significantly.” As Levitt adds, “in 1947, there were no heat loss models because the world wasn’t like that.”
LGA provided the architects on the team with templates for interior elements, such as bathrooms, as well as standards for features such as bedroom sizes, dining areas, storage sufficient to hold strollers, and access to outdoor space, either at grade or via a balcony. “We gathered together these ideas about the quality of life that we wanted baked into each of the designs, so thatexpressed a really good quality of life—modest but good quality,” she says. “It’s not about the finishes. People had to be able to live there and live there well.”
“This isn’t a boutique home solution,” Whitzman says. “This is a cheap and mass-produced solution. And compared to other cheap and mass-produced solutions, whether they be condos or suburban subdivisions,look fine to my untrained eye.”
A selection of Housing Catalogue designs for the Atlantic region.
Will it succeed?
With the plans now public, the other important variables, besides their conformity with local bylaws, have to do with cost and visibility to potential users, including homeowners, contractors and developers specializing in smaller-scale projects.
On the costing side, N. Barry Lyons Consultantshas been retained by CMHC to develop models to accompany the design catalogue, but those figures have yet to be released. While pricing is inevitably dynamic, the calculus behind the entire exercise turns on whether the savings on design outlays and the use of prefabricated components will make such small-scale projects pencil, particularly at a time when there are live concerns about tariffs, skilled labour shortages, and supply chain interruptions on building materials.
Finally, there’s the horse-to-water problem. While the design catalogue has received a reasonable amount of media attention since it launched, does CMHC need to find ways to market it more aggressively? “From my experience,” says Levitt, “they are extremely proactive, and have assembled a kind of dream team with a huge range of experience and expertise. They are doing very concerted and deep work with municipalities across the country.”
Proper promotion, observes Moffatt, “is going to be important in particular, just for political reasons. The prime minister has made a lot of bold promises about500,000 homes.” Carney’s pledge to get Canada back into building will take time to ramp up, he adds. “I do think the federal government needs to visibly show progress, and if they can’t point to abuilding across the road, they could at least, `We’ve got this design catalogue. Here’s how it works. We’ve already got so many builders and developers looking at this.’”
While it’s far too soon to draw conclusions about the success of this ambitious program, Levitt is well aware of the long and rich legacy of the predecessor CMHC catalogues from the late 40s and the 1950s, all of which gave many young Canadian architects their earliest commissions and then left an enduring aesthetic on countless communities across Canada.
She hopes the updated 21st-century catalogue—fitted out as it is for 21st-century concerns about carbon, resilience and urban density—will acquire a similar cachet.
“These are architecturally designed houses for a group of people across the country who will have never lived in an architecturally designed house,” she muses. “I would love it if, 80 years from now, the consistent feedbackwas that they were able to live generously and well in those houses, and that everything was where it should be.”
ARCHITECTURE FIRM COLLABORATORS Michael Green Architecture, Dub Architects, 5468796 Architecture Inc, Oxbow Architecture, LGA Architectural Partners, KANVA Architecture, Abbott Brown Architects, Taylor Architecture Group
As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine
The post A housing design catalogue for the 21st century appeared first on Canadian Architect.
#housing #design #catalogue #21st #centuryA housing design catalogue for the 21st century
The housing catalogue includes 50 low-rise home designs, including for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes. Each design was developed by local architecture and engineering teams with the intent of aligning with regional building codes, planning rules, climate zones, construction methods and materials.
TEXT John Lorinc
RENDERINGS Office In Search Of
During the spring election, the Liberals leaned into messaging that evoked a historic moment from the late 1940s, when Ottawa succeeded in confronting a severe housing crisis.
“We used to build things in this country,” begins Prime Minister Mark Carney in a nostalgic ad filled with archival images of streets lined with brand new post-World War II “strawberry box” bungalows, built for returning Canadian soldiers and their young families.
The video also includes montages from the now-iconic design “catalogues,” published by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. These supplied floor plans and unlocked cheap mortgages for tens of thousands of simple suburban houses found in communities across the country. “The government built prefabricated homes that were easy to assemble and inexpensive,” Carney said in the voice-over. “And those homes are still here.”
Over the past year, CMHC has initiated a 21st century re-do of that design catalogue, and the first tranche of 50 plans—for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes—went live in early March. A second tranche, with plans for small apartments, is under development.
Unlike the postwar versions, these focus on infill sites, not green fields. One of CMHC’s goals is to promote so-called gentle density to residential properties with easily constructed plans that reflect regional variations, local zoning and building-code regulations, accessibility features and low-carbon design. As with those postwar catalogues, CMHC’s other goal was to tamp down on soft costs for homeowners or small builders looking to develop these kinds of housing by providing no-cost designs that were effectively permit sets.
The early reviews are generally positive. “I find the design really very compelling in a kind of understated way,” says SvN principal Sam Dufaux. By making available vetted plans that can be either pre-approved or approved as of right, CMHC will remove some of the friction that impedes this scale of housing. “One of the elements of the housing crisis has to do with how do we approve these kinds of projects,” Dufaux adds. “I’m hoping it is a bit of a new beginning.”
Yet other observers offer cautions about the extent to which the CMHC program can blunt the housing crisis. “It’s a small piece and a positive one,” says missing middle advocate and economist Mike Moffatt, who is executive in residence at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor at Western’s Ivey Business School. “Butone that probably captures a disproportionate amount of attention because it’s something people can visualize in a way that they can’t with an apartment tax credit.”
This kind of new-build infill is unlikely to provide much in the way of affordable or deeply affordable housing, adds Carolyn Whitzman, housing and social policy researcher, and author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. She estimates Canada needs about three million new dwellings that can be rented for per month or less. The policies that will enable new housing at that scale, she says, involve financing subsidies, publicly owned land, and construction innovation, e.g., prefabricated or factory-built components, as well as “consistent and permissive zoning and consistent and permissive building codes.”
Indeed, the make-or-break question hovering over CMHC’s design catalogue is whether municipalities will green-light these plans or simply find new ways to hold up approvals.
An axonometric of a rowhouse development from the Housing Catalogue, designed for Alberta.
A team effort
Janna Levitt, partner at LGA Architectural Partners, says that when CMHC issued an RFP for the design catalogue, her firm decided to pitch a team of architects and peer reviewers from across Canada, with LGA serving as project manager. After they were selected, Levitt says they had to quickly clarify a key detail, which was the assumption that the program could deliver pre-approved, permit-ready plans absent a piece of property to build on. “Even in 1947,” she says, “it wasn’t a permit set until you had a site.”
LGA’s team and CMHC agreed to expand the scope of the assignment so that the finished product wasn’t just a catalogue of plans but also included details about local regulations and typical lot sizes. Re-Housing co-founder Michael Piper, an associate professor at U of T’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, came on board to carry out research on similar programs, and found initiatives in places like Georgia, Indiana and Texas. “I have not found any that moved forward,” he says. “Canada’s national design catalogue is pretty novel in that regard, which is exciting.” The noteworthy exceptions are California, which has made significant advances in recent years in pre-approving ADUs across the state, and British Columbia, which last fall released its own standardized design catalogue.
He also carried out a scan of land use and zoning rules in Ontario for 15 to 20 municipalities. “We looked to seetheir zoning permitted and what the rules were, and as you might expect, they’re all over the place,” he says. “Hence the challenge with the standardized design.”
At present, high-level overviews for the 50 designs are available, including basic floor plans, 3D axonometrics, and building dimensions. Full architectural design packages are expected to be released later this year.
Levitt says the architects on the team set out to come up with designs that used wood frame construction, had no basements, and drew on vernacular architectural styles. They researched representative lot sizes in the various regions, and configured designs to suit small, medium and large properties. Some versions have accessibility features—CMHC’s remit included both accessible units and aging-in-place as objectives—or can be adapted later on.
As for climate and energy efficiency considerations, the recommended materials include low-carbon components and cladding. The designs do reflect geographical variations, but Levitt says there’s only so much her team could do in terms of energy modelling. “How do you do heat energy calculations when you don’t have a site? You don’t have north, south, east, westand you don’t have what zone are you in. In B.C. and Ontario, there are seven climatic regions. There was a lot of working through those kinds of very practical requirements, which were very complicated and actually fed into the design work quite significantly.” As Levitt adds, “in 1947, there were no heat loss models because the world wasn’t like that.”
LGA provided the architects on the team with templates for interior elements, such as bathrooms, as well as standards for features such as bedroom sizes, dining areas, storage sufficient to hold strollers, and access to outdoor space, either at grade or via a balcony. “We gathered together these ideas about the quality of life that we wanted baked into each of the designs, so thatexpressed a really good quality of life—modest but good quality,” she says. “It’s not about the finishes. People had to be able to live there and live there well.”
“This isn’t a boutique home solution,” Whitzman says. “This is a cheap and mass-produced solution. And compared to other cheap and mass-produced solutions, whether they be condos or suburban subdivisions,look fine to my untrained eye.”
A selection of Housing Catalogue designs for the Atlantic region.
Will it succeed?
With the plans now public, the other important variables, besides their conformity with local bylaws, have to do with cost and visibility to potential users, including homeowners, contractors and developers specializing in smaller-scale projects.
On the costing side, N. Barry Lyons Consultantshas been retained by CMHC to develop models to accompany the design catalogue, but those figures have yet to be released. While pricing is inevitably dynamic, the calculus behind the entire exercise turns on whether the savings on design outlays and the use of prefabricated components will make such small-scale projects pencil, particularly at a time when there are live concerns about tariffs, skilled labour shortages, and supply chain interruptions on building materials.
Finally, there’s the horse-to-water problem. While the design catalogue has received a reasonable amount of media attention since it launched, does CMHC need to find ways to market it more aggressively? “From my experience,” says Levitt, “they are extremely proactive, and have assembled a kind of dream team with a huge range of experience and expertise. They are doing very concerted and deep work with municipalities across the country.”
Proper promotion, observes Moffatt, “is going to be important in particular, just for political reasons. The prime minister has made a lot of bold promises about500,000 homes.” Carney’s pledge to get Canada back into building will take time to ramp up, he adds. “I do think the federal government needs to visibly show progress, and if they can’t point to abuilding across the road, they could at least, `We’ve got this design catalogue. Here’s how it works. We’ve already got so many builders and developers looking at this.’”
While it’s far too soon to draw conclusions about the success of this ambitious program, Levitt is well aware of the long and rich legacy of the predecessor CMHC catalogues from the late 40s and the 1950s, all of which gave many young Canadian architects their earliest commissions and then left an enduring aesthetic on countless communities across Canada.
She hopes the updated 21st-century catalogue—fitted out as it is for 21st-century concerns about carbon, resilience and urban density—will acquire a similar cachet.
“These are architecturally designed houses for a group of people across the country who will have never lived in an architecturally designed house,” she muses. “I would love it if, 80 years from now, the consistent feedbackwas that they were able to live generously and well in those houses, and that everything was where it should be.”
ARCHITECTURE FIRM COLLABORATORS Michael Green Architecture, Dub Architects, 5468796 Architecture Inc, Oxbow Architecture, LGA Architectural Partners, KANVA Architecture, Abbott Brown Architects, Taylor Architecture Group
As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine
The post A housing design catalogue for the 21st century appeared first on Canadian Architect.
#housing #design #catalogue #21st #century
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