Upland Cottage 1906-8

Upland Cottage is the second and most substantial of Reid’s Toronto homes, and was only the third house to be constructed in Wychwood Park. Reid lived there from 1907/08 until his death in 1947. His scrapbooks preserve several preparatory drawings for the house, and the design set the visual tone for much of Wychwood’s later architecture. Although Reid was the architect of several residences and other structures at the Onteora Club in New York State, he designed only three significant buildings in Canada: two Toronto houses for himself and his first wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), and the new quarters for the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University).

Upland Cottage is situated on the northern edge of Wychwood Park. “Upland” was an acknowledgment of its location overlooking a ravine. “Cottage” was a name commonly applied to the houses Reid had designed at Onteora, referring to both their bucolic locale and their incorporation of aspects of English cottage–style design. As was the case with Bonnie Brae, the Reids’ home-studio at Onteora, Upland Cottage and its landscaping complement one other, with the house designed to fit snugly into its natural setting instead of looking as if it had been imposed upon it.

Reid’s long-standing commitment to the Arts and Crafts movement’s principles of visual simplicity and clarity, as well as its use of natural materials in ways that emphasize their inherent qualities, links the house to the work of such British Arts and Crafts architect-designers as Baillie Scott (1865–1945) and Charles Voysey (1857–1941). Other Arts and Crafts characteristics on the house’s exterior are the picturesquely asymmetrical facade, the steeply sloping roof, the gables, the casement windows, and the cream-coloured stucco. Upland Cottage’s interior, too, is animated and given unity by its pervasive Arts and Crafts qualities. These include exposed beams, the extensive use of an unexotic wood (pine) for the walls and floorboards, a mural decoration by Mary Hiester Reid, the inglenook in Mary’s studio, and the furnishings and fittings, most of them designed by George. Hiester Reid’s two-storey studio also includes one of her husband’s architectural trademarks: a balcony running the full length of one wall.

After his marriage to Mary Wrinch (1877–1969) in 1922, Reid added a two-storey porch and glassed-in sunroom on the north side of the house. For neighbouring lots on Alcina Avenue, he designed two studio-houses as rental properties, and then filled in the land between Upland Cottage and the Alcina Avenue buildings with three walled gardens, the large central one having a circular pool and fountain. But he ensured that these additions enhanced rather than undermined Upland Cottage’s pre-existing character. The house is still inhabited today, faithfully preserved by its owners.