Personal Space: At Home with Designer Claire Saksun, Her Beloved Cats and Her Construction-Site Rock

As the third train of the morning blitzes down the track under her window, designer Claire Saksun barely reacts. After two years of living in her compact and charming Railtown townhouse, she doesn’t notice the clanging of the engine anymore. “Sometimes it feels like The Busy World of Richard Scarry over here, between the trains and the sea planes and the cranes out there,” she says with a laugh, gesturing to the views of the North Shore Mountains and the bustling docks. “It’s every form of transportation you can think of.”

Despite all the excitement out the window, the interior of this angular, oddball townhouse has been programmed by Saksun, who has her master’s in architecture, and partner Ryley Zucca (a wine importer who also studied architecture) to be a hub of calm and comfort. The fact that two designers live here is apropos: the block was developed years ago by a group of UBC architecture professors as an academic project—developers had deemed the site too awkward—so each unit is unique, ambitious and the diametric opposite of the cookie-cutter condos found elsewhere downtown. The couple’s own four-storey home, for instance, is technically 1,184 square feet—but 484 of those are staircases. “It’s a really small footprint, but there are so many little nooks around here,” Saksun explains. “We have two window seats and two balconies and it feels like the biggest place I’ve ever lived.”

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As you trek up to the living room from the landing, there are enough stairs to give you a bit of a thigh burn. The hike is worth it: you can scope out how Saksun and Zucca have optimized every one of those nooks, and how they’ve programmed the living space, pictured here, to feel downright ample (with enough room for a surprisingly chic play tower for their two cats, Gia and Hector). The couple renovated the kitchen when they first moved in—sleek charcoal-coloured cabinets pair with a beautiful soapstone counter, complete with a hidden coffee niche that perfectly fits the grinder—and they continue to chip away at other improvements piece by piece. “Renovations are never done. That’s what I’m learning,” says Saksun. “But isn’t that life? To never be done?”

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Think Small: How designer Claire Saksun makes the most of a small footprint.

Design for Your Lifestyle

“Awkward layouts are all about creating priorities that are specific to you because you can’t have it all in a small space,” advises Saksun. Is watching TV important to you, or having a gathering space? When you arrange your space in a way that focuses on the daily activities most central to your life, your home will work better for you.

Use Your Vertical Space

“We keep a light step stool under the sink and it is always coming out,” says Saksun. Keep your “once a week or less” items in your tallest cupboards, but don’t be afraid to use those spaces.

Mix and Match Storage

A combo of open and closed storage helps keep things visually interesting but also practical. “It’s not realistic to imagine that every object will be put away after use, so making sure that the ones you use most often have a deliberate place to sit out that doesn’t bother you is important,” advises Saksun.

Anchor Your Space

Items with more visual weight or noise can anchor the room and draw the eye, says Saksun—but it’s important that those pieces are multi-functional, too. “For us, that’s our big glass coffee table. It’s the heart of the room: we arrange all the chairs around it, it holds books and plants, we work on it during the day, and sometimes even eat at it. Having one piece that can flex between roles keeps things fluid and stops the space from getting cluttered with too many single-use items.”

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Well Loved

The Brazilian modernist armchair is another vintage find, very much in line with Saksun’s warm, casual work. “I don’t love that showroom feeling. And the people I work with don’t love that either. And that’s why we find each other. We love things that are lived in a little bit,” she says.

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Dine Time

A huge mortar and pestle (“A cacio e pepe machine—we mostly just use it to grind peppercorns,” Saksun jokes) sits on a wooden countertop that acts as both an extension of the counterspace and a table come dinnertime. “We really debated when we were programming the space: do we prioritize the dining space, or the living space?” says the designer, who loves to host. Ultimately, they made the kitchen and living area the stars of the show, choosing a table just big enough to accommodate four stools for a “snacky, intimate dinner.” The rooftop patio is now the spot for bigger dinner parties, with room for a long table alongside the couple’s plant pots.

Give Me a Hand

“We like peculiar objects,” says Saksun. “Things with a story.” This hand chair (and a matching foot seat across the room) were discovered at a local shop called Visitor Goods. “The lore is that someone on Vancouver Island carved them with a chainsaw. So that’s what we’re going with.”

 

Sense of Shelf

Saksun reached out to the woodworker who did Main Street’s beautiful Cultivate Tea shop to build a custom shelf for the space. “I sent him really rudimentary drawings; he gave me no feedback, and just showed up to install it and was like, ‘It’s done!’” she says with a laugh.

 

Sparkle and Shine

Windows in the kitchen display a collection of vessels: plates from Vancouver ceramicist Janaki Larsen, bottles from Paris. “They catch the light later in the day and refract patterns all over the kitchen,” says Saksun. Some of the bowls were made by Saksun herself: “I’m extroverted but I hit a breaking point where I just need a solitary craft.”

Rock Solid

This chunk of rock and concrete was snatched from Saksun’s first construction site. “It’s such a stereotypical architect thing to do,” she says. “But the first time you go to a site and there’s a giant hole in the ground and 18 people building that thing you drew… you want to take a rock.”

 

Basket Case

Saksun’s mother is an artist. She normally sticks to painting, but recently she took up basketweaving—an early attempt sits on the floating Util credenza. The rug that hangs on the wall above is a gift from Zucca’s dad, who is an avid rug collector. (The one under the coffee table is also a pick from Dad.)