For the past century, Toronto’s status-conscious upper class has lived in houses that shared a certain look. Red brick, bay windows and gables—you could call it Toronto Vicwardian. The vast majority were built between 1880 and World War I, an era when houses in this city went up at the rate condos are rising now. Until fairly recently, they stayed just as they were—icons of tradition and prestige.
But we are now a society more or less defined by new money, and those old homes no longer have the same hold on our psyche. They’re drafty and expensive to heat and cool; they lack media rooms, walk-in closets and an ensuite for every bedroom. The preferred solution was once a full-scale gut job: rip out the innards but save the skin. But why endure the hell of remodelling if you aren’t wedded to the turn-of-the-century façade?
It started in the city’s north end with the spread of McMansions, and moved down to Forest Hill. Now a drive through even moderately affluent neighbourhoods, from the Humber to the Bluffs, reveals replacement over renovation as a city-wide phenomenon. And though people want modern conveniences, they are still—89 years after the Bauhaus manifesto and almost 45 years after Robert Venturi’s first postmodern house—more interested in styles that predate Victoria.
John Tackaberry, of the high-end project manager Den Bosch & Finchley, usually works on homes worth $1 million and up. “In our new builds, we are often replicating a lot of the old detailing— architectural details like a portico or a Georgian entry.” Of the 18 or so jobs Tackaberry’s firm handles every year, it used to be one new build for every 17 renos. Now they’re regularly doing four or five from scratch. “The biggest factor is the cost of a true renovation versus a new build,” Tackaberry says. People are demanding more extensive renos than ever before. They no longer simply want open spaces—they pretty much want to take the house apart and put it back together. Restoration—often desired in older homes in which elements like masonry and staircases are fundamental to the house’s appeal—can be even more expensive than renovation. Re-plastering a 5,000-square-foot house can cost $80,000, and Tackaberry has worked on projects where restoring the masonry alone has cost $400,000. At those prices, a tear-down—usually $350 per square foot for high-end homes—starts to look pretty good.
New houses generally take up bigger portions of the lots than their predecessors. This summer, former Maple Leaf Darcy Tucker replaced a 2,800-square-foot Moore Park tear-down with a 6,700-square-foot French-influenced limestone home by his friend Taylor Moore, of Sherwood Custom Homes. Such rebuilding creates a domino effect. Once one newer, bigger house goes up, the rest start looking small by comparison—which leads to more tear-downs. Never underestimate the allure of keeping up with the Joneses.
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