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The Goods

Weddings

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Wedding Guide: the best Toronto wedding planners

Wedding Guide 2013: Event Planners

(Image: Let’s Party Consultants)


Bliss
60 Sumach St. (at Queen St. E.), 416-323-3353
Wedding coordinator Tara O’Grady is known for her unflaggingly good taste. Bliss’s staff of four consult from their downtown studio, pulling off six-tent high-society extravaganzas, small out-of-town gatherings in Niagara-on-the-Lake and chic urban restaurant weddings at places like Canoe. Clients’ budgets range from $50,000 to $250,000. Wedding day service from $2,500. Full service from $5,000. By appointment.


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The Informer

Real Estate

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Year in Review: the five best getaways from Cottage of the Week

Whether you’re in the market for a vacation property or not, ogling other people’s places (and judging other people’s decor) is rollicking good fun. That’s why we spend the summer hunting down the most beautiful, most luxurious, most over-the-top cottages for sale and posting full photo tours for anybody stuck in the city. Here, our five favourite cottages from the past 12 months.

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The Dish

Food Events

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Beer geeks steel yourselves: Cask Days 2012 will be bigger than ever

Bar Volo, the Yonge Street den for beer geeks, seems perpetually restless. It was just voted the city’s best spot to grab a craft pint; it operates a “nano-brewery” onsite (micro-brewing not being quite small enough); it hosts an IPA challenge; and every year, it runs Cask Days, the cask-conditioned ale festival that has emerged as one of Toronto’s premiere beer events. This year’s iteration is massive: Hosted for the first time at Evergreen Brick Works, it will feature more than 150 brews from over 75 breweries (up from 80 and 50, respectively). 

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The Dish

Drinks

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Once again, Bar Volo cleans up at the annual Golden Tap craft beer awards

Ontario’s best beer: Muskoka’s Mad Tom IPA (Image: Twitter)

Sometimes it feels like Toronto is drowning in the best possible way: tournament-style beer-offs, new bars (both huge and humble), Toronto Beer Week—it’s a golden age for Toronto craft beer lovers. Keeping track of all this activity is The Bar Towel, a long-running blog and discussion forum, which capped off this year’s Beer Week with the 10th annual Golden Tap Awards at Beerbistro. Great Lakes Brewery and Muskoka Brewery each snagged a pair of awards, while Bar Volo took away three of its own, holding on to its title as Toronto’s go-to taphouse for fans of the new and peculiar (it won the same three categories last year). Oh, and the best beer in Ontario? Muskoka’s Mad Tom IPA.

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The Informer

Real Estate

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Cottage of the Week: $975,000 for a lakefront cabin with two kitchens, two living rooms and one massive loft

ADDRESS: PT LT 3 Lindhill Island

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Kahshe Lake, about 15 kilometres southeast of Gravenhurst, Ontario

AGENTS: Maggie Tomlinson, Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd., Brokerage, Port Carling, and David Reid, Enjoy Muskoka Realty Inc., Brokerage, Gravenhurst

PRICE: $975,000

THE PLACE: A sprawling cottage on the tip of Lindhill Island, in Kahshe Lake, just south of Gravenhurst. The property has been in the same family since the early 1960s; in 2007, they built a two-storey addition with cathedral ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, an upgraded kitchen and a sleeping loft.

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The Informer

Real Estate

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Cottage of the Week: $2.7 million for a Georgian Bay getaway with a pirate ship

ADDRESS: 168 Old Mill Road

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Georgian Bay

AGENT: Bob Emmett and Fred Shaw, Royal LePage Four Seasons Real Estate Centre, Brokerage

PRICE: $2,650,000

THE PLACE: A unique (how many homes greet you with a totem pole at the front door?) and grandiose (check out the chandelier in the bathroom) cottage that still maintains a home-y feel, thanks to wide-plank wood floors, reclaimed wood-beam ceilings and that old cottage staple, a moose head on the wall.

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The Dish

Drinks

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Our top four picks for Toronto Beer Week

The third annual Toronto Beer Week kicks off this Friday, with over 50 bars and restaurants, 25 breweries and two importers participating during the nine-day celebration of the city’s craft beer scene. After the jump, we assemble a four-pack of some of the more buzz-worthy events.

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The Informer

Real Estate

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Cottage of the Week: $1.6 million for a bayfront property that’s classic Muskoka

ADDRESS: 1338 East Bay Road, Torrance

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Lake Muskoka

AGENT: Iris and James Gardiner, Chestnut Park Real Estate Limited, Brokerage

PRICE: $1,575,000

THE PLACE: A six-bedroom, five-bathroom cottage on a sheltered bay in Lake Muskoka.

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The Informer

Features

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Into the (Not So) Wild: our look at the summer camps of Toronto’s rich and famous

Summer camps of Toronto’s rich and famous

A sojourn to Northern Ontario used to mean grabbing a sleeping bag and a can of beans and roughing it in the woods, all in the name of character building. Today, high-end camps offer perks that sound like something out of a brochure for a four-star resort. Here, a glimpse at life as a modern-day camp kid.

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The Informer

Real Estate

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Sold: a 12-acre waterfront retreat north of Parry Sound for just under asking

With all the talk of condo bubbles, over-the-top bidding wars and failed flips, wading into Toronto’s housing market requires equal parts bravery and real estate savvy. To help with the latter, we decided to dish when the properties we profile in our House of the Week, Condomonium and Cottage of the Week features are sold. Here, all the details from the latest sale.

Cottage of the Week: $2.6 million for a 12-acre retreat just north of Parry Sound [May 22, 2012]

The place: A 12-acre property with a main cottage, a separate secondary guest cottage, a private sandy beach, a boathouse, outdoor showers and 360-degree views.

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The Informer

Real Estate

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Cottage of the Week: $12 million for a manicured 1.6-acre island in Muskoka

ADDRESS: St. Helen’s Island

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Muskoka Lakes

AGENT: Richard Scully, Harvey Kalles Real Estate Ltd., Brokerage

PRICE: $12,000,000

THE PLACE: A 1.6-acre island on Muskoka’s Five Mile Bay with a main cottage, a two-bedroom guest cottage and a boathouse with yet more accommodation.

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The Informer

Features

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Gone in 60 Minutes: how to get from the office desk to the cottage dock in about an hour

Gone in 60 Minutes | Billy Bishop Airport

Top down and open road used to be the best way to get to the cottage, but that was before highways became parking lots, crammed with expletive-spewing drivers all thinking the same thing: there’s got to be a better way. Turns out there is. Here, we show just how fast the city’s luckiest cottagers get from Billy Bishop Airport to their northern oases.

ANTHONY LACAVERA
Chairman, Wind Mobile

His plane: 2012 Lancair Evolution Turbo Prop (approx. retail value: $945,000)
His cottage: Lake Muskoka
Estimated air time: 20 minutes
Other destinations: New York; Montreal


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The Dish

Openings

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Introducing: Hidden Kitchen, a dinner series brought to you by a ghost chef, an ex-chef, a guest chef and a craft brewery

Trying to keep up with the many pop-up food events in Toronto is a challenge, what with their unpredictable locations and irregular timing. And even if the location remains a mystery until the day of the event, Hidden Kitchen, a new collaboration between chef Matt Kantor (Secret Pickle, Ghost Chef), Swallow’s Ivy Knight (a former chef) and Muskoka Brewery, is at least blessed with a predictable schedule. The series takes places on the last Thursday of each month at non-traditional (yet TTC accessible) venues, and has space for 40 diners. It always starts at 7 p.m. and, unsurprisingly, is reliably stocked with a bounty of beer.

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The Informer

Real Estate

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Cottage of the Week: $13.9 million for a private island on Lake Muskoka


ADDRESS: Old Woman Island, Lake Muskoka

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Muskoka Lakes

AGENT: Diane McKee, Chestnut Park Real Estate Limited, Brokerage

PRICE: $13,900,000

THE PLACE: Old Woman Island, a nearly 16-acre island in the middle of Lake Muskoka that has six beaches and seven matching buildings.

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The Informer

Business

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A fancy Muskoka resort orders its spa workers to hand over their tips (or get out) 

Marriott resort in cottage country is forcing some of its staff to give nearly half their gratuities to the hotel—if they don’t, they’ll be fired—which we have to say, seems a little heavy-handed. In a three-page letter obtained by the Toronto Star, Rosseau Muskoka general manager Tony Tamburro lays out the new policy: customers will be charged a 20 per cent gratuity, of which 8.75 percentage points will go to the hotel “to efficiently manage our costs and to remain competitive within the industry.” Forced tip-outs aren’t new (though the cut taken by management in this case seems especially high), but they have been in the limelight this month after Dalton McGuinty showed some enthusiasm for a bill to outlaw the practice. Until such legislation prevents Rosseau from taking a cut, we wonder if spa-frequenting folk will be taking their $450 “Rock, Wind & Water for Two” packages elsewhere. [Toronto Star]

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