Gabe Gonda, Jodi Kantor and Victoria Webster have a party for The Obamas (Image: Tom Sandler)

Fabulous Rosedale homes are meant for more than just real estate porn and housing Toronto’s aristocracy—they also provide a great backdrop for parties. Toronto Life contributor Victoria Webster and her husband, Gabe Gonda, weekend editor at the Globe and Mail, opened their home Friday evening to New York Times correspondent and The Obamas author Jodi Kantor. Complete with a question-and-answer period, libations and a book signing, this party was a proper toast among friends. Find out what Kantor had to say about Michelle Obama and who took his shoes off (when no one else did) after the jump.

Friends attending the fete included our own editor-in-chief, Sarah Fulford (who had interviewed Kantor at the Toronto Reference Library the night prior), Steve Paikin, host of TVO’s The Agenda (who removed his shoes), Zoomer’s Suzanne Boyd, Suzanne Cohon and her CFL-commissioner husband, Mark (the couple live across the street), author John Ralston Saul (he’s also Adrienne Clarkson’s husband), Victoria Jackman, Ben Mulroney, Nancy Lockhart, Murray Frum and more.

Naturally, they were all there for Kantor, and the intrepid reporter didn’t disappoint. Her book, you see, is not without controversy. Michelle Obama herself cast aspersions on the biography on CBS, though other outlets, including the Washington Post, call the complaints unjustified. For her part, Kantor kept mum on the brouhaha, simply noting that Michelle was more likely reacting to the media’s reaction to the book than to the book itself (her message to Mrs. President: “If she doesn’t want to read the book, she shouldn’t read the book”). Kantor was graceful throughout the Q and A, and she even appeared attentive as we listened to Saul boast that he knew Barack Obama would be president one day after sitting on a panel with him prior to his election. We also overheard Kantor say the best experiences of her tour were Friday night’s party and having her honour defended by Jon Stewart (bless—we love The Daily Show). Of course, party conversation shouldn’t be limited to politics, so we enjoyed listening in as Mulroney commented on gossip columnist Shinan Govani’s greying five o’clock shadow. Sadly, there were no fist bumps to report.

(Image: Khairil Zhafri)

Dear Urban Diplomat,
I moved to Toronto from Tokyo about a year ago. Maybe it’s just a difference in cultures, but no one shows up for my parties on time. Where I’m from, if an invitation says 8 p.m., you show up at 8 p.m. Here, some guests arrive an hour late and don’t even apologize. Often, I am too annoyed to enjoy myself. Any tips for hand­ling this situation next time?
—Times Have Changed, CABBAGETOWN

Send your questions to the Urban Diplomat at urbandiplomat@torontolife.com

By Victoria Webster | Interior photographs by Michael Graydon

Max Gotlieb, a partner at Cassels Brock, and his wife, Heather, have lived together in Forest Hill since 1984. Though they spent much of the past two decades renovating their family home in the area (the couple jokes that they had a construction crew in their employ full-time), there was always another house on Heather’s mind. For years, she passed one of the neighbourhood’s most stately Georgian revivals while shuttling her three kids to school, and she dreamed of one day living there. It went on the market only once, briefly, in all those years, long before the Gotliebs were ready to move. Heather feared she had missed her chance. But in 2006, she and Max started talking about finding a larger space, and, miraculously, her dream house was up for sale. The place was massive—9,500 square feet—and perfect for entertaining, but outdated: the third floor had never been upgraded and was still laid out as servants’ quarters. They hired the developer Joe Brennan to update the house, completely gutting the upper floors. He also punched out the back to facilitate flow and add an additional 1,000 square feet (Max says the cost of buying and renovating was “many, many millions”). The Gotliebs don’t consider themselves philanthropists (“I’m not Peter Munk,” says Max), but they attend several fundraisers a week—and host many themselves, including large receptions and grand, expansive dinner parties. After all, they now have a home where they can entertain 200-plus people at a time—which is exactly why they bought it.

I’m among the first generation to come of age on the Internet. By 13, I was an expert at chat room sex, spotting cyber-pervs and hiding my secret life from my parents
By Alexandra Molotkow | Illustrations by Dave Lapp

In 1997, when I was in Grade 6, my friends and I sat at the back of the classroom and talked about sex. We would speculate on what it felt like and place bets on how old we’d be when we finally lost our virginity. We would make fun of the way orgasms sounded in movies and imagine what celebrities’ sex lives involved. Later, at home, we’d reconvene on ICQ, one of the Internet’s first major instant messaging systems, which allowed us to have conversations we wouldn’t want our parents overhearing. That was what the Internet was to us: pretty much what a tree house would have been a few years earlier.

My parents are public sector employees, and they love me as much as parents of only children tend to love their only child. The Beach, which can resemble a small town, is a nice place to grow up. There was a swimming pool nearby, a candy store and a Canadian–Chinese food restaurant called the Garden Gate, which everyone called “The Goof” due to a time when a “Good Food” sign had a few burned-out lights. Of course, the streetcars would ferry us downtown if we ever had the guts to board them. Most of us didn’t. We were good kids.

My family got its first computer when I was in Grade 3. My mom thought it would be a good learning resource for me, but I mostly used it to play side-scrolling MS-DOS games, along with a CD-ROM program called 3-D Movie Maker. When we got the Internet a year later, I used it to make friends with other 3-D movie makers across the globe. People I’d never met in person befriended me over interests that, at the time, felt esoteric. It was a revelation.

I am part of the first generation to come of age online, and my adolescent development dovetails with that of the social web. I’ve lived over half my life through the Internet. My memory often fails to distinguish which of my experiences were real and which were digital. I’ve had many friends I never physically met, and there have been times when real life felt like the limbo between moments lived online.

The “Net Generation”—what the pundit Don Tapscott named us—now stands at 43 per cent of the population, or 15 million Canadians. We grew up in ways that were radically different from any generation before us. In theory, the Internet unshackled us from our milieus.

If we didn’t fit in at school, we could find a social group online. We congregated on mailing lists, online message boards and social networking sites—bolt.com when I was a kid, Facebook today. We could express ourselves in more ways than our parents could ever have dreamed of: online journals (like LiveJournal and DiaryLand) allowed us to share the minutiae of our lives; webspace providers (GeoCities and Angelfire, as well as niche servers like Envy.nu), and then blogs, allowed us to build monuments to ourselves, or at least the people we wanted to be.

It’s no wonder our narcissism has skyrocketed. Today, we are empowered to say anything to a potential audience of millions. And unfortunately, I was empowered to do so during the most shallow period of my life. When I was in elementary school, the spectre of one’s “permanent record” was a deterrent from bad behaviour, a kind of bureaucratic Grimm villain who would strike years in the future, when we least expected it. Now kids write their own permanent records, in graphic detail. We compromise our own privacy in return for validation.

We grew up publicly, and we grew up fast. Kids have always been obsessed with sex, but they’ve never had access to as much explicit content as they can download—according to one study, 42 per cent of 10- to 17-year-olds surveyed had seen porn online in the past year—and the option to erase their trespasses with the “Clear History” button. But porn is old school: there have never been so many opportunities to hook up, virtually or in reality. A 2005 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire found that one in seven kids had received sexual advances online.

I was one such kid—often, I solicited those advances. Although few admitted it at the time, my friends did, too: after school, before their parents got home; at night, after their parents went to bed. We had cybersex long before the real thing

Writers’ Trust executive director Don Oravec and author Margaret Atwood (Image: Tom Sandler)

Forty-three of Canada’s most distinguished authors were invited to share an evening with over 400 guests last night, raising $190,000 for the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Members of the literary elite like Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, Karen Connelly, Michael Lista and Jane Urquhart were presented with white medals alongside more unexpected authors, such as Fashion Television host Jeanne Beker, politician Michael Ignatieff, celebrity chef Mark McEwan, Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean and Dragons’ Den’s Kevin O’Leary. Authors were scattered throughout the space, each seated at a roundtable of paying guests—every attendee received an autographed book from their table’s author. “We’re trying to expose writers to an audience. If people meet the author, they’re more likely to not only buy the book, but also to become fans of the author,” explained executive director Don Oravec. Proceeds from the night went towards Berton House, a writers’ retreat residence, and the Woodcock Fund, an emergency fund for writers. Check out the scene in a gallery after the jump.

Hill was overheard laughing about his Movember ’stache, while CBC’s Shelagh Rogers gushed over MacLean’s wife Cari, saying “I feel like I know you, especially after reading the book,” referring to MacLean’s October release, Cornered. Beker mingled with Canadian musician and new novelist Sylvia Tyson and was overheard complimenting Atwood on her printed silk jacket (esteemed author, Twitter celebrity and fashion plate). As the guests sat down to dinner, a video featuring Jane Urquhart, Yann Martel, Russell Smith, Graeme Gibson, Lawrence Hill and Anna Porter was played to illustrate why the Writers’ Trust is so important to Canadian writers, and the night ended with a literary treasure hunt with prizes from Tiffany’s, Elmwood Spa and Whole Foods. Nothing like a good treasure hunt (with gifts from Tiffany’s, no less) to quash the myth that the literary community is stuffy.

The many faces of Stacey Kimmel (Images: Jenna Marie Wakani)

The Bay continued their party-hosting streak last night (they’ve previously entertained Madonna, the Proenza Schouler boys, Jason Wu and Kelly Osbourne) with a visit from the Thierry Mugler boys Nicola Formichetti and Sébastien Peigné. The Room, the Bay’s repository for expensive designer shoes and dresses (and jumpsuits—we wonder which socialite is wearing that peekaboo lace-panelled Stella McCartney catsuit this week), had Formichetti and Peigné holding court with socialites, fashion media (shocking, we know) and fellow designers like Jeremy Laing and Kirk Pickersgill. Formichetti is famed for styling Lady Gaga but, sadly, we spotted nary a meat dress or McQueen armadillo in the place. We did see socialite Stacey Kimmel sporting a Mikhael Kale dress-cum-white-leather-harness-cum-monkey-vest, Suzanne Rogers in a floral Givenchy number and a statuesque Suzanne Boyd; the rest of the crowd stayed remarkably staid. Check out the scene in our gallery after the jump.

Christopher Sherman, social media manager at The Bay, was spotted gifting the boys the store’s new Assouline book about the Hudson’s Bay Company. Our favourite line came from the Globe’s Laura Serra, who quipped “there are so many trannies in here” (the crowd did seem to skew towards the decidedly fake breasted), but the juiciest gossip of the evening came from a local editor, who told us Formichetti is a semi-regular at the seminal (so to speak) Toronto male strip club Remington’s, having visited twice (allegedly with Lady Gaga in tow). The Mugler boys decamped for a dinner at Campagnolo, where Flare editrix Lisa Tant joked the night “would cap it all off if Lady Gaga sauntered in.” Gaga did not stumble in wearing 17-inch heels, but the night was far from over, since the National Post’s Nathalie Atkinson tweeted that the crew ended the night dancing at The Barn on Church Street. Who knew College Night had such a wide following (we assume everyone was talking about it at Paris Fashion Week)?

Click on to check out THE SCENE at The Room last night »

Captain Fantastic: Peter Munk on his 40-metre yacht, the Golden Eagle, which has a full-time staff of five. (Image: Jim Ross)

There are birthday parties, and then there was Nathaniel Rothschild’s party this past July. The financier, scion of the prominent banking family and future baron was turning 40 and spent £1 million on the weekend-long extravaganza. The venue: Porto Montenegro, a newly developed luxury resort and marina in the Montenegrin coastal town of Tivat, on the southeast side of the Adriatic Sea. It was the sort of gathering that marks the end of an era or the birth of an empire—and in a way, for Europe’s youngest and smallest democracy, it was both.

Four hundred guests arrived at the village airport on private jets or stepped off the fleet of super-yachts that washed ashore from the world’s most glamorous tax havens—the Grenadines, Gibraltar, Grand Cayman. The attendees were described in the Guardian society pages as “200 ugly rich people and their poorer but more attractive partners,” or, as one guest more generously put it, “plutocrats and the women who love them.” A number of the partiers were so fantastically rich they could bankroll whole armies (which the birthday boy’s family, in its heyday, once did): Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (who arrived on his £70-million yacht, the Queen K); the wealthy Egyptian Sawiris family (who have embarked on their own Montenegrin development nearby); King Leruo Molotlegi, ruler of a tiny, platinum-rich part of South Africa, who hit the dance floor in a fabulous dashiki; British politician Lord Peter Mandelson; Jimmy Choo honcho Tamara Mellon; the historian Niall Ferguson and his Dutch-Somali partner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist critic of Islam. There was a healthy smattering of European royalty, as well as members of the Guinness and Goldsmith clans.

Munk bought the Port of Tivat for €155 million. His co-investors include two Rothschilds and the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska

While the guests swallowed gallons of Taittinger around Porto Montenegro’s 215-foot-long infinity pool (decorated with floating disco balls imported specially from London), the actress-turned-DJ Michelle Rodriguez presided over the turntables. The dancing continued until the early morning hours.

Surveying the scene with a paternal pride was Peter Munk, the billionaire octogenarian, Holocaust escapee, philanthropist and chairman of the world’s largest gold mining company. Munk is the leader of a small but significant exodus of Torontonians to the rapidly expanding Porto Montenegro. This tribe, who have affectionately dubbed themselves Munkistanis, either went there to work for Porto Montenegro or have started side businesses (restaurants, interior design, wine distribution, banks) to cater to the growing numbers of yacht tourists that Porto Montenegro is drawing. The resort is Munk’s vision, and he’s the main investor. A slice of Yorkville on the Adriatic.

(Images: Christopher Drost)

Well, it’s a wrap. Some might suggest that there are no winners and losers at TIFF, and that the festival is a harmonious celebration of filmmaking and the artistic spirit. For our part, we say these people are wrong. Life is a competition, and we’ve got the goods on the stars, the parties, the neighbourhoods, the red carpet galas and the films that came out on top—and on the bottom—this year, after the jump.

1. Celebrity stars
WINNER: Ryan Gosling
Good looks, red carpet charm, quality performances in Drive and The Ides of March and more good looks have made the Gos the new man about town. We’d like to say the torch has been passed from George Clooney to Gosling, but we’re scared Clooney might beat us to death with it.

LOSER: Madonna
After spitting venom at some poor hydrangeas at the Venice Film Festival, Madge failed to redeem herself here, allegedly having eight TIFF volunteers turn and face a wall to avoid gazing upon her countenance. Plus, we hear her movie sucks.

2. Splashy A-list party
WINNER: David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method after-party
Let’s not kid ourselves—what makes or breaks a TIFF party are the stars, and the party for A Dangerous Method had them by the Cadillac-load: George Clooney, Kiera Knightley, Jon Hamm, Jonah Hill, Jimmy Kimmel, Ewan McGregor, and the list goes on.

LOSER: The CAA Burroughes party
What else makes or breaks a party? Being able to get inside. Sadly, the elevator in the Burroughes building moves slower than Francis Ford Coppola, and the six flights of stairs were packed solid for the Creative Artists Agency’s shindig—stars first, plebeians in the rear.

3. Red carpet gala
WINNER: The Ides of March
Really, Ryan Gosling is the only star we need—but at this red carpet gala presentation we certainly weren’t starved for choice: George Clooney, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood and, of course, the ever-present Dave Matthews were there, among others.

LOSER: Twixt
The Twixt red carpet presentation had possibly the least glitz, glam and gushing of them all, with only Francis Ford Coppola (a legendary director but not much of a looker) and Val Kilmer (long past his Top Gun glory days) gracing the gala with their presence.

4. Neighbourhood
WINNER: Theatre District
The TIFF Bell Lightbox has officially become a black hole, crushing anything of relevance at TIFF into an extremely fashionable singularity. Oh, and the Ritz-Carlton didn’t hurt matters on that account either (apparently, stars like to stay there).

LOSER: Yorkville
Yorkville has long been the go-to destination for celebrity sightings, but this year saw it tumble into irrelevance (excluding a very dashing Jon Hamm going for a stroll). At least it’ll always have that big rock thing.

5. Film Title
WINNER: This is not a Film
The title succinctly evokes the story of a filmmaker banned from his craft, working in captivity on a project that may never be. No, it’s not a film—it’s a work of art. Honorable mentions: Machine Gun Preacher, Whore’s Glory, We Ate the Children Last and Sorry, Rabbi.

LOSER: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
This title somehow makes the biggest buy of the festival ($5 million) sound like a dry VHS documentary forgotten in some dusty bin in the back of a dilapidated library in Timmins. But maybe that’s what they were going for. Dishonorable mentions: Slow Action, Azhagarsamy’s Horse, Doubles With Slight Pepper and A Film Portrait on Reconstructing 12 Possibilities that Preceded the Disappearance of Zoe Dean Drum.

• 9 a.m. RealTV Films social lodge and gifting suite at Spin Toronto

• 12 p.m. Canfar and the TDot TV gifting lounge at the Bata Shoe Museum

• 3:30 p.m. The Right Hand Gal gifting suite at the InterContinental Hotel

• 6 p.m. Friends with Kids special presentation at Ryerson Theatre

• 6:30 p.m. Moneyball gala at Roy Thomson Hall

• 7 p.m. The Ides of March cocktail party at Grey Goose Soho House

• 8 p.m. Kate Spade and Bryce Dallas Howard party at Harbord Room

• 8 p.m. The Artist dinner with Harvey Weinstein at the Roosevelt Room

• 8 p.m. We Need to Talk About Kevin special presentation at the Winter Garden Theatre

• 9 p.m. 360 special presentation at Elgin Theatre

• 9:30 p.m. The Ides of March gala presentation at Roy Thomson Hall

• 9:30 p.m. 360 party at Brassaii

• 10 p.m. Trishna special presentation at Princess of Wales Theatre

• 10 p.m. We Need to Talk About Kevin dinner at Grey Goose Soho House

• 10:30 p.m. Toro After Dark and Artists for Peace and Justice party at Ame restaurant

• 11 p.m. Kreayshawn concert at the Roosevelt Room

• 11 p.m. Goodnight Gansevoort at Goodnight

• 11:05 p.m. George Stroumboulopoulos’s Hazelton Takeover party at the Hazelton Hotel

VIP treatment to come at Goodnight Gansevoort (Image: Vladimer Shioshvili)

Every year at TIFF, bars, clubs and other venues compete to throw the splashiest party, and this time around, pop-up party destination “Goodnight Gansevoort” seems to be a frontrunner. Goodnight, the text-for-an-invite speakeasy, was named one of the coolest bars in Toronto by the New York Times, and evidently that created enough buzz to make Gansevoort Group’s Michael Achenbaum—rated among New York Magazine’s “Top Five Hosts of the All-Night Party”—want to throw a shindig there during TIFF 2011. Goodnight and Achenbaum will be hosting what they’re calling a “party of select A-listers” on Friday, Sept. 9 and Saturday, Sept. 10 from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. We just hope “A-listers” doesn’t translate to a box of Triscuits and a mattress on the floor, because we’ve been to that party, and it wasn’t very fun.

(Image: Liam Mogan)

Ten-pin Queue Spot for a bachelor party Spot for a bridal party Yacht rental Saltwater dip Exercise craze

BEST HOME GOODS BEST FASHION BEST FUN BEST DINING BEST TASTY TREATS BEST FOOD BEST DRINKS BEST HELP CITY MAP

(Image: detsang)

The latest example of the increasingly partisan nature of city hall—literally, the division of city council into separate organized factions we could shorthand as “parties”—comes from the Toronto Star. Apparently Mayor Rob Ford has been using his power to hold items on the council’s agenda (a power any councillor can wield) to discipline some of the councillors caught between left and right.

From the Star:

Traffic light projects usually sail through council without a discussion or a vote. The mayor almost never tries to stop them. But at council’s July meeting, Ford placed an unusual “hold” on a proposed new Dufferin St. light near an elementary school in the Davenport ward of centrist Councillor Ana Bailão.

Then, according to another centrist, Councillor Josh Colle, his allies lobbied other councillors to vote to kill the project.

“I think a lot of councillors were surprised that a local issue was being so heavily lobbied on,” Colle said.

In this case, the hold accomplished precisely nothing—after debating the issue, council voted overwhelmingly in favour of putting the streetlight in. So it’s possible that the Star has it wrong on this case—that Ford is holding these votes not to kill them, but to demonstrate that he’s voting against what he considers wasteful spending (something the mayor has done with community grants). And we’d be remiss not to mention that city staff recommended against the streetlight, so it’s not like Ford and company have no case. Except that as Josh Colle notes, the mayor’s hold on a streetlight in Colle’s ward disappeared right after the rookie councillor voted for the bike plan that killed the Jarvis bike lanes.

Now if Ford is using the procedures of council to whip votes and get his platform through, there’s actually nothing wrong with that—in a parliamentary tradition. The tradition of municipal government in Ontario is a little different though, and it’s not hard to see that certain councillors are bristling at taking marching orders from Ford. The mayor really ought to be careful holding the metaphorical whip here—opposition councillors are clearly trying to lure people like Colle and Bailão over to their side, and playing the bad cop is something that can backfire quite unexpectedly.

• Ford’s hardball on traffic light has centrist seeing red [Toronto Star]

By Anupa Mistry

(Image: Gluekit; D-Sisive by Melanie Moore; Shad by Christine Lim; Drake by Christian Lapid/CP Images; Airplane Boys by Justin Create)

At 3:46 a.m. on December 12, 2010, a post titled “Introducing The Weeknd” appeared on the blog of Toronto’s most famous rapper, Drake. Two songs—“What You Need” and “The Morning”—revealed a new R&B singer to the world and kick-started a rabid following. The Weeknd’s free nine-song release House of Balloons garnered 200,000 downloads in its first three weeks, and his videos have been watched on YouTube hundreds of thousands of times. It’s been a rapid rise, like that of his mentor, Drake, whose 2010 full-length debut Thank Me Later went platinum in the U.S. just over a month after its release. This is Toronto’s hip-hop moment, and the city’s steadfast identity as safe, stable and middle-class—once the basis of its lack of rap credibility­—is the reason.

In hip-hop parlance, Toronto is “soft,” lacking the crack epidemics, gang violence and grizzled, weary profile of traditional centres such as south central Los Angeles or the boroughs of New York City. Yes, we have intermittent gunplay, as well as geographically isolated neighbourhoods where largely non-white populations deal with urban ills and low incomes. But the experience of urban poverty here doesn’t compare to that in the United States, which has been rigidly tied to hip hop’s ascent and cultural legacy for three decades. When the children of Toronto’s working-class West Indian immigrants first tried their hands at hip hop, U.S. audiences couldn’t relate to their identity woes and patois cadence. There were hard-won Junos and a brief stretch of identifiable party-rap hits in the early to mid-’00s (Kardinal Offishall’s “Bakardi Slang” comes to mind), but local hip hop never achieved more than token success. Toronto was long ago christened rap’s “Screwface Capital,” a hard-sell place where critical audiences greeted musicians with crossed arms and raised brows. Until Drake, hip hop in Toronto was in an eternally nascent state.

Then there he was, on the hip-hop canon Vibe: a handsome, mixed-race Degrassi actor–turned-pretty-boy rapper with a Jewish mom and a Forest Hill postal code. Drake’s 2009 cover both heralded his arrival and epitomized the Toronto rapper in the popular imagination: unadorned save two thumb-sized pendants (one a diamond-studded Hebrew chai) and a fitted, all-black baseball cap with the throwback Blue Jays logo, tilting his head with just enough bravado. Drake, unashamed of his mild origins, doesn’t co-opt clichéd thug tropes like gunslinging and drug dealing. The message in “Fancy,” from Thank Me Later, was new: “Shout-out to the homeowners, the girls that got diplomas,” he rapped, earning lusty squeals from the multiracial women squeezed into the front rows of his shows. Drake’s empowerment message is familiar to the average Toronto listener: real estate, higher education, financial independence.

The timing is right for hip hop’s middle-class ascension. The genre’s late-’70s and early-’80s roots focused on persevering (and partying) through racially based strife. Later, Top 40 successes translated into a celebration by the nouveau riche, when cash ruled everything around hip hop. Bling travelled the arc from joyful to obnoxious to ludicrous. In mid-2009, as the U.S. economy was swaying, Florida singer/rapper T-Pain posted a photo of his latest acquisition on Twitter: a gaudy, seven-and-a-half-pound, 197-karat-gold necklace reading, in cartoonish font, “BIG ASS CHAIN.” He battled a huge wave of criticism over the necklace’s frivolity (his retort included calling himself “Señor Recession-Proof”). Meanwhile, Kanye West, the son of a photojournalist and a college professor, had become rap’s reigning star. The higher-education theme of his first three albums—College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation—was groundbreaking territory for hip hop, and Kanye vaulted over the genre’s dogged insistence on hardscrabble origins to bridge rap’s wordy, cerebral underground with its flashy, commercial face. Middle-class kids like Drake could now be taken seriously (assuming they had skills). His success, in turn, gave Toronto musicians the confidence to move from imitating U.S. rappers to self-actualized realizations of more genuine artistry.

ADDRESS: West Shore Road, Kennisis Lake

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Kennisis Lake

AGENT: Gary F. Vasey, Lynne Tate and Ross Jarvis, Gary F. Vasey Ltd., Brokerage.

PRICE: $1,895,000

THE PLACE: Situated on Kennisis Lake midway between Huntsville and Bancroft, this cottage is large, spacious, sun filled and fully equipped with modern features in every room.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: The six-acre property includes not one but two private islands with 2,100 feet of lakefront views. One island already has a deck and docking area, ideal for a sipping a cocktail and taking in the sunset.

BIG SELLING POINT: The open-concept dining room, kitchen and living room are perfect for dinner parties. The gourmet kitchen features a six-burner Wolf stove, an oversized fridge, granite counters, a wine fridge and even a Miele dishwasher to clean up the mess. The living room’s cathedral ceiling and stacked-stone fireplace, meanwhile, are sure to impress.

POSSIBLE DEAL BREAKER: There’s an office at the cottage—perfect for enabling any workaholic.

BY THE NUMBERS:
• $1,895,000
• 2,100 feet of lake views
• 6 acres
• 4 bedrooms
• 3 bathrooms
• 2 private islands
• 1 powder room