HOME February 9, 2012 The Magazine | Digital Edition | Subscribe | Newsletters
Advertisement
The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
ADDRESS: 138 Bedford Road
NEIGHBOURHOOD: The Annex
AGENT: Barry Smith, Chestnut Park Real Estate Limited, Brokerage
PRICE: $4,450,000
THE PLACE: Bringing a little of the 8th Arrondissement to the heart of the Annex, this Parisian-inspired townhome embodies European luxury with inlaid-pattern marble floors, traditional custom millwork, plaster cornice mouldings and fireplaces in nearly every principal room (many of them are even wood-burning).
Read the rest of this entry »
Albert Latner made his fortune in real estate, health care and casinos, and lavished his four children with riches. After his wife died, he gave them their inheritance early. Now they’re feuding over the estate, launching lawsuit after lawsuit and tearing the family apart. A cautionary tale about the burdens of love and money
In February 2010, Joshua Latner was alerted by several friends about a photo posted on the Internet. He sat down at his computer, Googled himself and was disturbed to find his picture with the word “loser” scrawled across his face.
Joshua is not, and has never been, a man with a nine-to-five job. An enthusiastic collector of fine wines and rare antiques, he is 49 years old and lives in Zurich with his wife, Kendal, and their two young children. He also maintains residences in Toronto, Key Biscayne and Tokyo and on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he raises chickens and honeybees as a hobby. He inherited $150 million when his father, Albert Latner, a Toronto property developer and entrepreneur, decided to give each of his four children what’s known in high-net-worth circles as the velvet handshake—shorthand for early inheritance.
Read the rest of this entry »
Bixi bikes in Toronto (Image: Gary J. Wood)
Ever since its inception in Toronto in early May, the Bixi bike-sharing rental program has been a hit, growing from 700 trips in its first week to more than 28,000 trips a week by the end of the same month. The obvious question is what to do now. The Toronto Cyclists Union says the next step is to add more bikes (no surprise there) despite the fact that Bixi is underused by the standards of, say, Paris, where the Velib “freedom bike” program racked up roughly six rides per day in its first month back in 2007.
Read the rest of this entry »
T.O. is the second best (Image: Anonymous)
U.S. firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a list of the world’s best cities, in which “best” is defined by a high score on an index that’s intended to highlight “cities of opportunity.” That New York City took the top spot is no surprise—they did, um, pay for the study—but we’re a little bit tickled that Toronto came in a close second, despite what the report calls its “beta city” status, which, apparently, means that it isn’t “part of the conversation with London, Paris and New York.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Jessica Stam and John Galliano in 2007 (Image: Dave M. Benett/Getty Images)
Natalie Portman may have withdrawn her support for John Galliano after a video surfaced depicting the soon-to-be former Dior designer unleashing an anti-Semitic tirade on patrons at a Paris bar, but Canadian model Jessica Stam remained committed to the label, walking in Galliano’s final Dior show in Paris last Friday. In the drunken rant, Galliano, who joined the fashion house in 1996, drunkenly proclaims “I love Hitler,” an offence punishable as a crime under French law.
Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things we love about Rachel McAdams is her adventurous fashion sense. It’s easy to look good when the risk is minimal, so in the endless sea of LBDs, our girl almost always stands out—even if it’s not always for the right reasons (ahem). Recently, McAdams has been earning frequent flyer miles in service of her movie Morning Glory, gracing red carpets in New York and all over Europe. Here, we rate her efforts, which—phew!—seem to get better as time goes by.
(Image: Andrzej Wrotek)
The Art Gallery of Ontario will host two world-class exhibitions in the coming year, further cementing its status as a player in the international art circuit. The first show, titled Abstract Expressionist New York, will feature 100 pieces from MoMA’s permanent collection, including works by big names like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. It’s the first MoMA show at the AGO in 34 years, and Toronto is the only Canadian stop of the exhibition’s tour, which was a hit in New York.
The second show—Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou—pulls 120 Russian-themed paintings directly from the Centre Pompidou’s vaults. Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky are both well-represented in the exhibition, which brings the Paris gallery’s collection to the AGO for the first time. It is also the only North American stop of the travelling show.
Read the rest of this entry »
Prices are for a five-kilometre trip by taxi in 14 major cities
We all know that taxis are expensive in Toronto, but today’s Globe goes one step further and proves it. According to the paper and a new survey, our city has some of the most expensive taxis in the world. Toronto cabs tied with Montreal’s as the most expensive in North America, pricier than those in both Los Angeles and New York. The most expensive, with few exceptions, are in European cities, where it’s not uncommon to be escorted around in a Benz. Zurich’s cabs, apparently, are the most exorbitant.
Read the rest of this entry »
Read the rest of this entry »
Not since the opening of Sam James have we seen so many re-tweets and wall postings about a new café. But it’s not the coffee that’s generating excitement for Snakes and Lattes, it’s the concept: customers can choose from more than 1,000 board games and play all day for just $5.
Bixi bikes await their renters in Montreal (Image: Shawn Carpenter)
City council has given the thumbs up to a bike-sharing program that should see about 1,000 bikes set up for public use throughout downtown Toronto by May 2011. The initiative will be run by the same company that orchestrated the successful Bixi—“bicycle taxi”—program in Montreal. In theory, the city of Toronto will incur no costs in the endeavour but will act as a guarantor for the $4.8 million loan needed to start things up.
Read the rest of this entry »
Over the next couple of years, this city will get five new luxury hotels. It starts with the Thompson, which opens its high-concept doors this month and promises to be ground zero for the beautiful people
If you build it: the Thompson Toronto, on Wellington West, is the first international arm of the New York–based brand (Illustration: Kagan McLeod)
Lately, King West is an urban cloud nine: designer condos, old brick studio spaces, fantastic carpaccio. Only 15 years ago, no one had much reason to venture down here—not for work, not to live, not for a dining scene, because there wasn’t one. There were no ad agencies, no Susur Lee joints, no Spoke Club and certainly no boutique hotels. But now the dozen or so blocks bounded by Spadina and Bathurst, from Adelaide down to Wellington, are a humming, self-sustaining ecosystem—a model of how to retrofit a vintage downtown neighbourhood.
Real estate agents call this part of town King West Village, a handle the locals find too artificial to pass their lips, especially considering the place isn’t yet fully formed. At every turn, there’s a construction site, or a gaping hole in the ground, or a lot with a target on its back, almost all of them bearing the same signage: an artful graphic in lower case letters saying “freed.” It’s not an existentialist statement; “Freed” stands for Peter Freed, the Forest Hill–bred developer who has nine projects on the go in the area. No one has been a bigger catalyst of the evolution of King West, or capitalized on it more, than Freed. His real estate portfolio, mainly condos, is worth $1 billion, and much of it is geared to a highly specific breed: a 35-ish, design-obsessed demographic that wears Japanese denim, listens to Phoenix, works in advertising or banking or consults in high tech, travels often and widely, and stays at properties designed by Ian Schrager, the Manhattan entrepreneur often credited with founding the boutique hotel genre. In King West, Freed has prepared a landing strip for these hipster high flyers (and those who aspire to become them). They’re not rich, necessarily. Their ambition is to be tastefully in the know.
For them, Freed has invested in a crowning achievement, a gleefully anticipated light box on Wellington: the 102-room Thompson Toronto, which is scheduled to open its high-concept doors this month. Read the rest of this entry »
With bread flown in from Paris, this Yorkville institution creates authentic French tartines that are worth the $15 price tag
(Images: Renée Suen)
Famed meat lover Sarah Palin (Photo by Roger H. Goun)
• Sarah Palin takes aim at vegetarians in her highly anticipated memoir, Going Rogue. The moose-hunting former governor’s justification for being a meat eater: “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” Perhaps Palin should present her infallible logic to Hillary Clinton over carnivorous scones when the two meet for coffee. [Examiner]
• Paris no longer reigns supreme as the Michelin star capital of the world. With 11 three-star restaurants, Tokyo has inched ahead of the City of Light, which houses a meagre 10. Some observers say that comparing the two cities isn’t fair, as Tokyo is home to about 160,000 restaurants—about four times as many as Paris. [Bloomberg]
Footwear from Alexander McQueen's spring/summer 2010 show
• While some are praising Toronto fashion week as a bona-fide fashion event, we hear the work’s not over yet. David Graham applauds the designers snagged by the Fashion Design Council of Canada but thinks next year, the FDCC needs more A-list talent. (Well, duh.) Graham wants to see Toronto phenoms Jeremy Laing, Lida Baday and Michael Kale in the tents, too. [Toronto Star]
• Does Lululemon cater only to skinny yogis? One shopper complains that a Lulu employee told her the shop would be discontinuing size 12 outfits because bigger sizes are not within the company’s target demographic of young, high-income, childless women. [National Post]
Read the rest of this entry »
Great white hope: Nadège brings Paris's cool minimalism to Queen West
Back in 2008, a for lease sign went up in the window of Trinity Bellwoods’ Art Photo Studio, making some West Queen Westers a little nervous. Would the prime location price out all the little guys? Apparently not. This spring, the studio’s decidedly dated green tiles were replaced by a white exterior and bright sign announcing the arrival of Nadège Patisserie—a high-end bakery and café that opened in early July.
Read the rest of this entry »
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
© 2012. All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part strictly prohibited. Toronto Life is a registered trademark of Toronto Life Publishing Company Limited
Follow Toronto Life on Twitter, Facebook and via RSS