Sisters Sandra and Franca Di Diomete were always close, despite a nine-year age gap. During their childhood in Ontario, Canada, Franca taught Sandra how to study for exams. “She was my sister, but also a mom and a friend,” said Sandra, 61.
When Sandra moved to Ottawa 25 years ago to earn her teaching degree, she stayed with Franca and her husband, Mark Holmes, in the city’s Hintonburg neighborhood. Then, in 2003, Sandra, who had become an elementary-school teacher, bought a two-bedroom bungalow nearby.
“Franca had always been a guiding force to help me through everything,” Sandra said. “She was my right-hand man in decorating. She was always there to lend a hand and be my handyman. She would climb up into the attic to investigate a leak. I was more the ‘Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what to do.’ For her, it was a problem to be solved.”
When Sandra mentioned that some students at her school needed support, Franca, a social worker, immediately volunteered to help. But Sandra never took her up on her offer. “I would laugh and shake my head at her because she was so busy with her own job, even working on the weekends to keep up,” Sandra said.
Over the years, their sisterhood, and friendship, deepened. They would shop, bake and go on walks. “We liked hanging out. … We had a similar viewpoint on life,” Sandra recalled. They also discussed living together as they aged.
At first those conversations were in jest. But when Franca and her husband, also a social worker, neared retirement, the three realized that pooling their resources on one property made a lot of sense. They all wanted to stay in Hintonburg and age in place, and Mark and Franca were intent on downsizing, especially since they planned to spend winters in Italy.
By 2018, home values in Hintonburg had risen significantly, so the couple could sell their three-story brick house and invest in a new home. If they demolished Sandra’s bungalow, which was in poor condition, they could build two homes on that lot. To enable aging in place, they planned to equip each one with an elevator and basement-level living quarters for a potential aide.
They just needed to find an architect to help them realize their vision. Mark and Franca, who had admired a modern house in their neighborhood, learned that it had been designed by Paul Kariouk of Kariouk Architects. They hired his firm in fall 2018. Kariouk’s deep knowledge of Hintonburg would prove instrumental in executing what would become a difficult project.
“Hintonburg has historically been working class,” Kariouk said. Most homes, he said, are 700-square-foot, wood-frame structures built by lumber workers more than 100 years ago. “It was a Wild West of construction. Hence, some were well built and some were not.”
Lots tend to be small and oddly shaped, with homes arranged “cheek by jowl,” he added. Sandra’s plot, at a fraction of an acre, was no exception, and Kariouk wasn’t surprised when a survey showed that part of her bungalow encroached on a neighbor’s property.
Kariouk realized that since the lot was so small, the two homes needed to be vertical and interlocking. “There would be no wiggle room,” he said. “We would need to start at the back of the lot and work our way forward to the street side. There was no side yard to get machinery in. It was kind of like an animal burrowing.”
“It was unusual,” said Lindsay Nicol, president and founder of Ottawa-based Crossford Construction, the builder on the project. “It was one of the first front-to-back, semidetached homes in our city. Typically, they’re side by side. It was very challenging as far as executing in the tight quarters.”
Kariouk kept iterating to determine the right configuration, like a game of Tetris, showing his clients model after model. “There was a kind of negotiation about how the two houses … would lock together,” he said. “It was a little bit like horse trading in a very friendly way. … There was pushing and pulling since they had very different criteria for the most important spaces and how they would be used.”
In the end, the sisters, Mark and Kariouk agreed on 2,734 square feet of living space, on three levels, between both homes. Each residence would also have a roof deck.
The team managed to navigate thorny design issues. But there was no easy fix for a more dire situation. Weeks into the planning process, Franca was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She began treatment that would include surgery, three rounds of chemotherapy and clinical trials.
Then the pandemic hit, and construction was delayed until July 2020. It took many more months than expected, but in February 2022, Sandra finally moved into her new home, followed by Mark and Franca in April.
“It was a very communal time for us,” Sandra said. “Sometimes, Franca would pop over in the morning for 10 minutes while I was getting ready for work, or I would often be invited for dinner.” When Mark left to run errands, Sandra would stay with her sister.
But Franca’s condition worsened, and she died in August 2023 at age 67.
“She was living at home up until four days before she died,” said Mark, who thinks their accessible new home made that possible. “Any other place, she would have been in her bedroom the whole day. The fact that she could take the elevator down and do laundry. … It was good for her to feel she could still do things and be part of life.”
Sandra recalled one of her sister’s final days at home. “We were sending ‘love bombs’ to our relatives via photos,” she said. “We sat in the driveway soaking up the sun. … I remember showing her the front garden not knowing those were her last days.”
Over the past few years, Mark and Sandra have found one (small) silver lining amid their grief. Mark has been volunteering at Sandra’s school, which has helped them grow closer. “We’ve been forging our relationship, which I know Franca would be very happy about,” Sandra said.
“I love that Mark is next door,” she added. “It’s comforting that he is there. It’s a reminder of when Franca was there.”
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