For one artistically inclined couple, a late-night foray into on-line dating led to DIY domestic bliss
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Great Spaces: inside the home of Victoria Jackman and Bruce Kuwabara
What happens when a preservation-minded art lover marries a professional minimalist
By 2008, Victoria Jackman and Bruce Kuwabara, Toronto’s artsiest power couple, decided their family of four had outgrown their Admiral Road Victorian. Neither Jackman, executive director of the Hal Jackman Foundation, nor Kuwabara, the architect and co-founder of KPMB, wanted to leave the Annex, but Kuwabara wasn’t wild about renovating another Victorian—the predominant architectural style in the neighbourhood.
Then they saw this Lowther Avenue house built in 1893 by Edmund Burke, the same architect who designed the Bloor Viaduct and The Bay on Queen (back when it was Simpson’s). The 5,500-square-foot house had been converted into a warren of lawyer’s offices, but once Kuwabara got his hands on the 100-year-old blueprints, he was impressed by the building’s great bones. It wasn’t far from the Av and Dav flower stores Jackman loves, and Kuwabara, who refuses to get a driver’s licence, likes that they can still walk to their favourite restaurants (Sotto Sotto and Joso’s) and to such cultural institutions as the ROM and the Gardiner. They decided to buy the place and gut it.
The couple wanted an open, bright and calming space.
Great Spaces: Inside an old Corktown machine shop turned modern bachelor pad
The first time Robin Lewis saw the Corktown garage that would become his home, there was an oven in the middle of the kitchen, a bathtub upstairs in the sleeping loft and rubble everywhere. The derelict building had been a machine shop in the 1940s and then a semi-converted storage unit. Read the rest of this entry »
Art House: inside a monument to modern minimalism
A former architect turned high-flying money manager builds a monument to modern minimalism
(Images: Michael Graydon)
The Bold and the Beautiful: inside a defiantly non-traditional Forest Hill home
A defiantly non-traditional Forest Hill home with generation-spanning art and furniture
(Images: Michael Graydon)
From the outside, Steven and Lynda Latner’s Georgian-style Forest Hill home looks discreet, quietly set back from the street. But open the door and it’s another story: front and centre is a large wave drawing by the Californian contemporary artist Raymond Pettibon, and around the corner there’s a graphic Roy Lichtenstein rug. Vinyl text art decorates the dining room wall, a purple pool table shares the library with a blaring video installation, and, yes, that’s a Kandinsky above the mantel. Read the rest of this entry »
The High Life: four glam condos that redefine urban opulence
They call it downsizing, but who are we kidding? Four glam condos that redefine urban opulence
Great Spaces: two Halifax expats bring some Maritime flair to Rosedale
(All images: Michael Graydon)
The Nova Scotia flag flying out front is the first sign that Jennifer Leitch and Anthony Novac’s Rosedale Edwardian is different from the rest of the houses on the street. The couple, who met as kids in Halifax and moved to Toronto together in 1997, have stayed true to their Maritime roots: they host several raucous parties a year (which explains the disco ball in the study), including a backyard lobster boil, complete with a fiddler, every summer. Read the rest of this entry »
Great Spaces: a skylit two-storey Yorkville penthouse made for partying
In this edition of Great Spaces, we tour the home of Dennis Keefe, a marketing and communications consultant, and John Jordan, a psychologist. Once the office of Garth Drabinsky (before he was convicted of cooking the books), the panoramic condo is now where the couple lives when they’re not wintering in St. Barth’s. Take a look inside the penthouse >>
Great Spaces: an antique lover gives his Annex semi the royal treatment
In this edition of Great Spaces, we tour Andrew Taylor’s stately Victorian home on Tranby Avenue. The experience is like a crash course in 18th- and 19th-century history: period furniture, large-scale oil paintings, walls and tabletops layered with rare artifacts and objets.
Great Spaces: inside an art collector’s gallery-like Rosedale home
In the latest edition of Great Spaces, we visit the home of Elisa Nuyten and her husband, David Dime, an organic chemist. The couple have been serious art collectors for only six years, yet they already have more than 30 contemporary pieces installed on the three floors of their Rosedale home, which they share with their three school-aged kids and two pets.
Click here for photos of the fastidiously spare neo-Georgian >>
Home made: Reinventing a Cabbagetown row house
(Photo by Michael Graydon)
In 2000, Todd Caldwell, a landscape and floral designer, and Shaun Moore, then a furniture design student at Sheridan, started house hunting. They spent a year inspecting more than 100 homes all over the city. In the end, they chose the biggest house on what might be the ugliest street in Cabbagetown. Click here to see how they transformed the crumbling row house.
