THE LISTING: 193R Brunswick Ave., Toronto
LISTING PRICE $2,395,000
TAXES $9,830.14 (2016)
LOT SIZE (irregular shape) 53.83 ft. by 10.82 ft. by 134.08 ft.
AGENT David P. Fenster, Sales Representative, Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd., Brokerage
There are very few truly discreet homes in Toronto. Whether it’s a grand old Victorian or a flashy new build, designers of all eras always have an eye for curb appeal.
Which is why 193R Brunswick Ave. is such an anomaly. Found at the end of a long driveway tucked between two houses in a row of tall Annex houses, there’s a greyish building with two roll-up garage doors. There is a front door, but it’s behind a wall, completely out of view from the street.
“Anybody driving by thinks that the garage is attached to the house in the front,” said owner Zoe Margolis. “We’ve never had anybody knock on our door for Halloween, we never get any canvassers, and the moment that the postman changes we don’t get mail anymore.”
THE BACK STORY
Despite being behind 193 Brunswick, Ms. Margolis’s property is not a laneway house (there’s no lane behind it) and it’s not an old coach house. It was originally part of Moore’s Hearse Livery and used as a vehicle depot. It was sold by the Moore family in 1983 and converted for residential use by architects George Boake and James Crang.
“The only thing that is left from the livery are the brick walls in the courtyard,” said Ms. Margolis.
Mr. Crang and Mr. Boake are best known for large commercial designs, such as the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and the Canada Trust Building. But the pair did dabble in residential architecture and 193R Brunswick bears their mid-century modern touches. In terms of flow, the home has much in common with Don Mills 1950s bungalows, but its exterior is modern minimalist.
When Ms. Margolis was house hunting in September 2005, she had convinced herself she didn’t want a detached home; she was only going to look at condominiums. But a friend twisted her arm to stop by on her birthday on the way to lunch. At that point, she hadn’t even seen a photo of the house.
“I got out of the car, walked up the driveway, opened up the front [door] and I knew: I want this house,” she said. “Any practicality went out of my head.” By November, she and her husband, Julian Piper, moved in.
The singularity of the home is in large part thanks to its dimensions. While most homes are long and skinny, 193R Brunswick is the opposite. At 50 feet across, the interior spaces are wide, but not every deep.
The home has two bedrooms, five bathrooms and nine skylights. On the main floor, there’s a kitchen tucked away in the northwest corner, but it has an entranceway to the large dining and living room space, which is also open to the family room and two enclosed courtyards. What the courtyards lack in size, they make up for in privacy with their tall brick walls.
Thanks to those walls and the fact that the house is surrounded by their neighbours’ backyards, it’s incredibly quiet in the home and hard to imagine that busy Harbord Street is 50 steps away.
“You never hear a sound in this house,” said Ms. Margolis.
Over the years, she and Mr. Piper have made a number of changes to the home, including staining the hardwood floors, tweaking the massive bathroom, turning a small third bedroom into a dressing room, redoing the flat roof, installing new heating and cooling systems and converting one of the two wood-burning fireplaces to gas.
But their biggest undertaking was a complete renovation of the kitchen.
“Today’s kitchens do a lot of things that our old one didn’t,” said Ms. Margolis. “We started by [thinking about] putting in a new countertop, then we added new appliances but then we just decided to do it all.”
So they replaced the original Downsview kitchen with a German-designed Leicht Kuchen one and upgraded all of the appliances. In doing so, Ms. Margolis believes they’ve added to the distinctive character of the home.
“Even if you go into all of the houses of all the fanciest neighbourhoods, they’re not unique. And if you tear down a house and build a new one, chances are the builders are building another just like it somewhere else,” she said. “But there isn’t another one like this.”
FAVOURITE FEATURES
One of the most sought-after features of 193R Brunswick Ave. is the one you can see from the street: Its attached two-car garage.
“Parking is very tight, none of these homes have garages, whereas here we have a two-car garage,” said real estate agent David P. Fenster.
But Mr. Fenster thinks that it’s truly the sum of the parts that make this house such a special package in the Toronto market.
“This main floor is the size of most condominiums today [at just over 2,000 sq. ft.],” he said, adding that most condos cram two bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, a living and dining room into that kind of a space. “But instead you’ve got these grand rooms.”
He also thinks that loft buyers may appreciate many of the house’s features, like its skylights, high ceilings and open concept.
“If you had all of these features in a loft, it’d be in a busy location and you’d hear everything,” he added.
For Ms. Margolis, she loves spending time on the main floor. And one of the most striking features is the cement mantle of the food-burning fireplace with its oversized, framing ornaments.
“[Crang and Boake] were demolishing a building and they had four of these pairs,” she said. “Three of them went to New York City and one came to this house.”
It’s one of many features that makes the home very special to her.
“There’s no house that I’ve ever lived in that I’ve ever loved more than this one.”