The backyard was doing nothing but growing trees, several of them protected enough that the city wouldn’t let anyone touch them. In this North York neighborhood, the owners wanted to build a home for their daughter without cutting into that canopy or waiting a year for a conventional build.

Modular prefabricated construction solved both problems at once. The two-bedroom, one-bathroom garden suite was built off-site in a factory while the urban forestry approvals worked through the city, then craned into place in a fraction of the time a stick-built home would have taken on site. Build X managed the permit process and reviewed the drawings through fabrication to make sure what came off the assembly line actually fit the lot. The family skipped buying their daughter a condo and put that money into the house instead. She lives in a separate detached home in the backyard, not across the city.