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Address: 43 Glenayr Road
Neighbourhood: Forest Hill South
Agent: Marianne Miles, Forest Hill Real Estate Inc., Brokerage
Price: $3,679,900
The Place: A five-bedroom family home with a large backyard pool located near two top private schools and Forest Hill Village.
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Drake was a busy guy last night. While he was attending the Grammy’s—where he picked up the Best Rap Album award for Take Care and pretended he was too cool to dance to the Bob Marley tribute—his label officially released “Started From the Bottom,” the lead single from him upcoming album Nothing Was the Same.
ADDRESS: 319 Lonsdale Road, Unit 1D
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Forest Hill South
AGENT: Janice Williams, Bosley Real Estate
PRICE: $1,369,900
THE PLACE: A three-bedroom, two-level condo in a former apartment building in Forest Hill. The structure was built in the 1920s according to a design by W.C. Charters, the architect behind many of the matching low-rise “apartment houses” that share the street.
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I love to start my Saturday by walking into Forest Hill Village with my 11-year-old daughter, Jacqui. Depending on my mood, I’d pick up a green tea or a dry cappuccino at Starbucks. Then I’d get some fashion mags at Type Books (427 Spadina Rd.)—they have a great international selection—and Jacqui would pick up a graphic novel from the store’s fun kids’ section.
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ADDRESS: 20A Senlac Road
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Lansing-Westgate
AGENT: Russell Pearsall, Forest Hill Real Estate
PRICE: $1,689,000
THE PLACE: Toronto’s first upscale prefabricated home (though the concept has been popular elsewhere for years) sits just north of Sheppard, overlooking a ravine. Famed Californian architect Ray Kappe designed the four-bedroom house, which boasts 2,132 square feet of interior space—plus another 1,000 square feet in the basement.
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February 29. It wasn’t quite musical chairs, but there was a flurry of seat swapping between courses during a dinner at the Forest Hill home of Michael and Diane Budman. The buzz was mostly about a new ESPN documentary by Hollywood producer Frank Marshall that they’d just previewed in the basement theatre. Right to Play centres on Budman’s friend, Johann Olav Koss, the founder of the humanitarian sports organization of the same name. Things started slow as Budman spent a few minutes figuring out the DVD player, leaving the guests in the dark. (Martin Short couldn’t resist: “It’s a triumph, Frank.”) After dinner, Short nudged musician Stephan Moccio, his fellow judge on Canada’s Got Talent, toward the piano and delivered a semi-improvised, mostly nonsensical song that referenced bin Laden, deadbeat dads, dirty beards and Navy SEALS, and left the crowd howling. The moral of the story: when throwing a dinner party, always invite a comedian.
(Image: ashleymadison.com)
Ashleymadison.com, the “infidelity dating site” (and, it would seem, Centreville zoo fan) has revealed that, in Toronto, the Beaches, Forest Hill and High Park have the most people looking for a little extramarital action. (All three are blue chip real estate neighbourhoods: coincidence?) According to data compiled from the adultery-enabling website’s 400,000 GTA users, Rosedale, Etobicoke, Downtown, North York, Midtown, Leaside and Scarborough round out the neighbourhoods with the most cheaters. Other tidbits: Leaside members had the most affair partners, while Etobicoke had the fewest, and Scarborough members had the most overall encounters. We’ll bet that, right now, someone in the Beaches is snooping through their spouse’s computer history.
The former Forest Hill home of alleged G20 plotter Byron Sonne looked like the scene of a cop show yesterday as Toronto’s bomb squad combed his backyard for buried explosives. A few days ago, Sonne’s trial was winding down, but Crown prosecutor Elizabeth Nadeau’s closing arguments renewed police suspicions that Sonne had more explosives squirreled away. (Nadeau referenced a May 2010 Internet chat in which Sonne talked about a “storage magazine” of potassium chlorate.) Sure enough, officers wearing badass Kevlar bomb suits used a robotic device to dig up a suspicious buried container, then sped across the city (in rush hour no less) to dump it in the Leslie Street spit. Thanks to that package, Sonne will likely be back in court soon—police won’t say yet whether the container contained potassium chlorate, but it’s probably safe to assume it wasn’t almond flour. Read the entire story »
ADDRESS: 110 Kilbarry Road
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Forest Hill South
AGENT: Nissan Michael, RE/MAX Unique
PRICE: $4,300,000
THE PLACE: This grand Georgian sits on a sprawling lot in well-established Forest Hill South. Extras like English-country landscaping and a circular driveway ooze prestige.
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For almost a decade, Karen and Richard Pilosof lived the expat high life in London. Richard’s career as a trader was thriving, their three young kids—Jordan, Kit and Eli—were enjoying school, and the family loved their Arts and Crafts house in the tony Hampstead Heath area. When Jordan was recruited to board at an elite tennis academy in Florida, however, Karen and Richard balked at the prospect of transatlantic parenting and opted to return to their native Toronto. They listed their London house (it sold to the captain of Arsenal FC), packed their bags and, after summering in the south of France, landed in Forest Hill.
Once in Toronto, Richard started his own investment firm, and Karen, an accomplished artist, redesigned the new house. The place was built about 10 years ago by the previous owner, who had commissioned Toronto architect Dee Dee Taylor Eustace to design the structure and HGTV host Sarah Richardson to decorate the interior. “It felt like a boutique hotel,” says Karen. “It was absolutely beautiful, but the owners probably had no children. It was too serious. I had to make it more family-oriented and more playful.” She added a mixture of repurposed vintage pieces, hockey memorabilia (Eli has a shrine to Alex Ovechkin in his bedroom) and show-stopping art pieces—many of which came from the Pilosofs’ extensive personal collection. It took a few years, but Toronto is finally starting to feel like home again.
Your company, Green for Life, has multi-million-dollar contracts in Oshawa, Whitby and Hamilton—and now one for 165,000 homes from Yonge Street west to Etobicoke. Not bad for a 32-year-old.
I guess I’ve done well. I just bought a place in Forest Hill.
So you’ll be collecting your own garbage.
Yep. My neighbours are already hounding me to see if they can put out extra bags.
Tell us about your bid. The city currently collects at a yearly cost of $166 per household. You say you can do it for $106. Are people wrong to think your numbers are too good to be true?
They’re 100 per cent wrong. We had 20 people researching this contract for 10 weeks. We followed every city truck that left every yard, noted when they started and counted how many houses they visited, what time they got back in and where they dumped their loads.
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Each truck was collecting from a maximum of 675 houses a day. In Hamilton, my employees collect from up to 930 houses a day in the same amount of time.
ADDRESS: 4 Montclair Avenue
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Casa Loma
AGENT: Andrew Victor Zimet, Chestnut Park Real Estate Limited
PRICE: $5,590,000
THE PLACE: This 6,000-square-foot-plus home is just steps from Forest Hill Village—no need to drive for that Saturday morning coffee run anymore.
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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.
Elbow-patched academics, keg-emptying frat boys and earthy middle-incomers have long ruled the Annex. But lately, a clutch of moneyed, high-powered Forest Hill and Rosedale types have wandered south, looking for cool downtown bustle without having to give up the acreage. And who can blame them? The east Annex is a natural geographical nexus for the intellectual and moneyed elite, what with U of T and all the museums to the south, and the revamped Bloor Street promenade—not to mention Whole Foods—a short stroll away. The choicest address is Admiral Road, a winding, bucolic boulevard with huge heritage homes ripe for renovation. Margaret Atwood is its most famous resident; she’s lived there since ’85. Ex-GG Adrienne Clarkson became her neighbour in ’05. Adrienne’s ex-hubby, eminent egghead Stephen Clarkson, is down the way on Lowther—a strip dotted with luminaries like George Cohon of McDonald’s and real estate king Jimmy Molloy. Above, we chart the most recent arrivals to Toronto’s newest Golden Mile. Read the rest of this entry »
After a year and a half, “The Anarchist of Forest Hill,” Byron Sonne, is going to trial. Sonne is accused of planning an attack on the G20 summit last summer, after police found chemicals used for building bombs in his basement (his Flickr page is littered with pictures of police, whom he calls “bacon”). But Sonne’s lawyers claim that he was simply conducting a review of the summit’s security infrastructure and the chemicals were for unrelated experiments. (Probably not helping his case: the picture on his Flickr page of two hook-like tree steps that he describes as “for climbing G20 fences, or for helping to get a grip to pull them down.”) According to the National Post, Sonne’s defence also argued yesterday that his Charter rights were violated when police detained him without cause (the issue of Charter rights seems to be something of a trend among G20 fallout stories.) Unfortunately, many of the juicier details are blocked by a publication ban (luckily, Denise Balkissoon penned a lengthy piece in the May issue of Toronto Life on Sonne’s back story). Read the entire story [National Post] »
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