A Doctor in the House: The Architecture of Home-offices for Physicians in Toronto, 1885–1930

Abstract

Dr William Dumble’s house in Toronto (Figure 1) looked like many other middle-class homes constructed in North American urban centres in the early twentieth century. The twostorey, brick house with a hipped roof and dormer window was typical in its blocky massing, pronounced chimney, generous setback from the street, contrasting materials, and careful detailing. Such houses were intended to house a typical family: two parents, perhaps a few children, and maybe a servant or lodger. Even the way the architects Burke, Horwood andWhite drew the building’s facade—in soft pencil and red ink on tracing paper, showing the warm tone of the red brick and the rough texture of the stucco trim and manicured lawn—signalled domesticity. Both the house design and the architect's drawing, that is, were styled to appear friendly, inviting, and traditional. The house corresponds to the general type of domestic architecture built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a picturesque, non-classical, asymmetrical cottage ‘‘with diverse visual and tactile effects on the exterior and an integration between exterior form and inside spaces’’. Burke, Horwood and White’s floor plan of the house, however, reveals little integration between the front elevation and the spaces inside, which were much more commercial and scientific than the homey exterior suggested. Behind the bay window, to the right of the front door, was the physician’s office; across the hall, boasting white pine trim, oak borders, and a gas fireplace, was a waiting-room for patients. Indeed, nearly half of the ground floor area of the Dumble house was given over to his medical practice, with a close and direct connection to rooms presumably used by his family and live-in