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Great Spaces
Gut Feeling
An upmarket renovation tale about people who wanted to live in a glass house
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It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but a few years ago this was a dilapidated Edwardian rooming house containing 16 squalid apartments and 13 minute bathrooms. Its location on the tranquil curves of Poplar Plains Road, however, caught the attention of Andy To and Diane Choi. The couple—owners of the C Squared streetwear stores on Yonge and on Queen—have two (now teenaged) children and had been searching for their perfect family home for six years. They bid $1.2 million, topping multiple offers, then launched the long reno process. “I wanted things as simple as possible, with a traditional Japanese influence,” says To. “An open space stripped of any superfluous details.” The neighbours were aghast: a little Queen Anne or a dash of neo-Georgian would fit within the streetscape, not a modernist box. Choi and To spent more than a year wrangling permits and placating Poplar Plains residents, and the planning department finally ruled in their favour. The reno cost $2 million (double their original budget), but in the fall of 2007, the family finally moved in to their 6,850-square-foot, three-storey glass house. As for the neighbours, they love it. And they love what it’s done to their property values.
Photographs by Michael Graydon
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