The house at 235 Durham is a Victorian-era cottage, one of the earliest built on its block, and one of the last examples left of the working-class architecture that used to define the street. The zoning on the lot allowed for a single-family home large enough to dwarf every other house around it.

Build X went a different way. The firm built a case for the cottage’s heritage status and used it to negotiate a Heritage Revitalization Agreement with the city, the legal mechanism that let the property split into two homes instead of becoming one oversized one. That meant sitting through community meetings and city council hearings, revising the design each time based on what the heritage committee and the neighbors pushed back on. The front facade stayed. The architectural details that made the house worth saving stayed. What changed was everything behind it: the lot split to make room for a second home built at a matching scale, with parking moved to a shared driveway at the rear so the street in front kept its original character.