Gray Road Residence
The name is an inheritance from the street. Gray Road is where this house has stood for decades: an older property, compact, its rooms sealed off from one another in the manner of its era. That the interior would eventually settle into a register of soft grays is a coincidence its designer, Zoe Lee of Dexign Matter Studio, was happy to accept.
The owners are a young family, and their brief was disarmingly simple: a Scandinavian home, minimal but with character. They had seen Lee's Cachet Parkway residence and recognized in its stillness precisely what they were after. The commission that followed was an exercise in delivering that stillness, and in deciding, inch by inch, where the character would hide.
Pale oak sets the tone of the house, rising from herringbone floors into cabinetry, archways, and paneled walls. Around it gathers a quiet family of grays. Stone tile, terrazzo, softly shadowed paint bound together by matte black at every door and baseboard. A single wine-dark red, reserved for the dining room, is the palette's one act of drama, and its point.
Interior Design Awards
Our Success
An Enfilade of Curves
Zoe Lee opened the plan without abandoning its rooms. Where walls once stood, she placed three oak-lined openings: two broad portals with generously rounded corners, and a true arch at the kitchen doorway. Set at different angles, they layer in view from the foyer, one opening appearing behind another, each space framed by the next.
“It’s like reading a novel,” Zoe says. “You take one step and see another step, another layer.” The floor performs the quiet work of a floor plan: the same pale oak throughout, shifting into herringbone across the common rooms so that, in Lee’s words, it reads “like a carpet” telling you, without a single wall, where dinner happens and where you rest.
A Continuous Line of Black
Convention paints baseboards white. Here they are matte black, as are the interior doors and their jambs, so that trim, frame, and door read as one dark line drawn without lifting the pen, a Dexign Matter signature that gathers every room into the same sentence. The gesture extends to the hand itself: black lever handles fitted with terrazzo-stone grips, a small luxury repeated at every threshold.
The Red Room
The dining room’s color arrived by chance. Leafing through a magazine, Lee stopped at a deep red and brought it to her clients’ next presentation, setting the page against the assembled samples of oak, gray stone, and black hardware. The response was unanimous and immediate: that was the color.
It now presides over an oval table of dramatically banded black-and-white marble set on cylindrical marble legs, ringed by black armchairs with leather-wrapped arms. From the pale living room, the red reads as a jolt; from the kitchen, where black cane-backed stools line the island, it reads as a continuation. The contrast is deliberate. So is the thread.
Grain and Shadow
In the kitchen, flat-panel oak cabinetry keeps its counsel so that one element may speak: a range hood wrapped in fluted oak, its vertical ribs catching the light, drawing the eye upward, and giving the room a focal point without a hint of busyness. The curves recur softly throughout, the island’s pale stone top rounds its corners, the run of upper cabinetry eases around its end in a gentle radius, echoing the archways a room away.
Stone, Framed
The living room holds the house’s most architectural gesture: a panel of gray terrazzo, rounded at its corners and framed in white millwork, carrying the television the way a mat carries a print. Cabinetry runs beneath it and open display niches flank it, because here storage was conceived as part of the composition rather than concealed in spite of it.
The Soft Rooms
The main bedroom carries the curve to its gentlest conclusion. A custom rounded headboard in cream boucle sits within pale oak, beneath a pair of carved marble sconces; bedding in soft blues supplies the room’s only color. Opposite, a wall of oak veneer conceals its own quiet trick, shelving and drawers to the left, a floating shelf at center, and to the right a door that swings into the ensuite and, once closed, vanishes. “The entire wall looks like one piece of wood,” Lee says. That was the intention.
Water, Quieted
The family bath answers to a rule Lee repeats often: less is more. A single gray stone tile covers wall and floor alike, leaving the fixtures to perform, an egg-shaped freestanding tub beneath a skylight, a domed shower head, a fluted oak vanity that repeats the kitchen hood a floor below. Presiding over the sink is the room’s one flourish: a white gooseneck faucet on a rose-gold base, an award-winning piece Lee recognized the instant she saw it in the showroom. The room was designed for the family’s baby, the round mirror, the soft shapes, and the playfulness are his, yet designed carefully enough to still fit him at fifteen.
In the principal ensuite, the terrazzo returns as a bench in the shower, closing the loop that began at the living room wall.
Quiet on Purpose
Everyone wants a minimal home; everyone fears the cold one. The distinction, this house argues, has little to do with how much you own and everything to do with how much of it means something. Nothing here was chosen in isolation. Countertop, stone, wood, and hardware were judged together, as Lee puts it, “as one piece, not individual pieces”, and the art and ceramics were selected last of all, once the rooms could say what they still needed.
The result is a home that is calm without being silent and simple without being empty. Its owners will never notice most of what was decided on their behalf. They will simply live inside it; which was, from the beginning, the entire point.
A Scandinavian-inspired, minimal-modern style tailored for a young family: light wood tones, gray tile, a gray color palette, and carefully placed accent colors. The clients chose this direction after seeing Dexign Matter Studio's previous Cachet Parkway Residence and asking for the same minimal, modern character.
- Layered archways and curved openings: Two large openings with rounded top corners plus an arched kitchen doorway, positioned at different angles. Viewed from the foyer and staircase, they create a layered, structural sequence of frames between dining, kitchen, and living areas. Open-plan living with clear zoning.
- Black baseboards, black doors, and black door jambs: A Dexign Matter Studio signature. The continuous black line ties the wall base, doors, and jambs into one visual family throughout the home.
- Terrazzo-finish feature walls: A rounded-corner terrazzo TV wall in the living room with surrounding display shelving and integrated storage cabinetry, plus a matching terrazzo finish in the master ensuite.
- Fluted wood detailing: On the kitchen range hood and the bathroom vanity. The fluted hood acts as a structured focal point. Vertical texture that adds depth and draws the eye upward without making the kitchen feel busy.
- Curved elements throughout: From the kitchen island countertop and cabinetry to the arched entrances and a custom curved headboard in the master bedroom, soft lines balance the home's clean geometry and ease transitions between rooms.
- Herringbone wood flooring: The same light wood tone as the rest of the home, laid in a herringbone pattern that reads like a carpet and subtly defines the living zones.
Zoe Lee discovered the red while flipping through a magazine and proposed it during a mood-board presentation. Tested against the full material and sample board, the team and clients agreed on it instantly. The red brings character and a rich tone to the dining area, while black woven bar stools at the kitchen island carry the dark accent language between rooms so the spaces read as one continuous whole.
- The main bathroom features a freestanding white tub and a single gray tile used on both walls and floor. This was a deliberate "less is more" decision that lets the fixtures stand out and creates a calm, spa-like retreat. The fluted vanity ties back to the kitchen hood downstairs.
- The children's bathroom features award-winning designer fixtures, including a white faucet with a rose-gold base and round, soft forms, paired with a round mirror. It was designed to feel fun for a baby now, yet remain usable and elegant as the child grows.
- Door hardware includes black handles with stone/terrazzo grips, sourced as designer pieces from a showroom.
The master bedroom pairs a custom curved headboard with soft textures and a pair of marble sconces above the nightstands — bold, but softened. In the ensuite, a concealed door swings into the bathroom: when closed, the entire wood-paneled wall — with its shelving, drawers, and TV niche — reads as one seamless piece.
For this project, the abstract paintings, ceramics, and accessories were curated at the very end, once the furniture and full concept were finalized, so every decorative piece is "married" to the whole.
This project had a limited budget, so we focused on maximizing its value, making every dollar of the client’s budget count.
Dexign Matter Studio follows a standardized 5-phase process:
- Initial Brief
- Schematic Design
- Design Development with 3D renderings and material reviews
- Construction Documentation
- Construction Administration & Coordination - including on-site management, contractor coordination, and final punch-list completion, all designed to minimize the client's time commitment and stress.
Contact Dexign Matter Studio to schedule an initial consultation. The team will explore your vision, understand your space, discuss preferences and budget, review inspiration, and outline the design process from first idea to functional completion.
Live beautifully.
Work brilliantly.
Dexign Matter is an independent creative interior design studio based in Toronto.