Tag: Real Estate

In Vancouver’s sea of steely, boxy skyscrapers, the Alberni leans into the greatness of the outdoors (Photography by Ema Peter/Westbank) Vancouver’s soaring skyline tells the story of Canada’s race to blanket the real estate market with residential units—no fewer than five new high-rises are expected to pop up in Metro Vancouver by 2027. Last June,…

If this castle in small-town Quebec sells, it’ll be a record price for the area (Photography courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada) In L’Assomption, a town of 23,000 people located 50 kilometres north of Montreal, stands a stone castle—known, unsurprisingly, as the Stone Castle. The place was only built about 50 years ago, but looks…

Denis Dumas built his dream vacation home to recall hot days and nights by the beach (Photography courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty Québec) Montreal entrepreneur Denis Dumas doesn’t tackle projects half-heartedly. He spent 18 years transforming a 2,800-square-foot, California-style house with 360-degree views into a mini beach resort. He calls it “Cuba in Quebec”: a…

“I wanted to transform it into something magical, like the villas I saw in Europe” (Photography by Nathan Cyprys) Artist Eve Gordon will never forget the grandiose European designs she saw during her summer in France in the 1970s. Her parents had sent her to do a French course in Montpellier; while on a biking…

Hayley Shaughnessy standing in front of her “very Newfoundland-y” clapboard home St. John’s. (Photography by Johnny C. Y. Lam) The buyer: Hayley Shaughnessy, a 32-year-old communications consultant The budget: $325,000 The backstory: In October of 2019, the Toronto-based public relations agency where Shaughnessy was working decided to hold its next company retreat in St. John’s,…

One apartment is a seven-storey tower unit with timeless artifacts and sweeping views of the city (Photographs courtesy of Open House Media) For years, the neo-Gothic St. Mary the Virgin church stood empty on Toronto’s Westmoreland Avenue. But where most people saw a derelict building, developer and architect Asen Vitko saw a multi-million-dollar opportunity. It…

“I basically wake up and I pinch myself every day.” (Photography courtesy of Homes in Focus) Just off of Ontario’s Highway 11 sits the home of former lumber worker Tom Owens and Subzero Wolf area territory manager Michelle Stevens—a barn restored into a modern house. In one version of the story that Owens and Stevens…

Avram Spatz grew up visiting the Evangeline, a historical inn in the Annapolis Valley (Photography by Matt McMullen) In 2020, Avram Spatz was an associate at a Toronto-based boutique litigation firm when he felt the entrepreneurial itch. Business runs in the family: his older brother, Josh, co-owns Toronto’s North of Brooklyn Pizzeria, and his grandfather,…

“I’m proud of what we’ve built—for a group of amateurs, it’s quite an accomplishment” Cate de Vreede and her family. (Photography by Meghan Tansey Whitton.) For more than a decade, Cate de Vreede dreamed of living in a co-housing community—a village where residents have private homes but share common areas and amenities. De Vreede, an environmental and…

Owned by an antiques dealer, this mansion is part-residence and part-showroom On the outskirts of Montreal, there’s an imposing 6,500-square-foot Georgian mansion in Châteauguay, Quebec. It looks like something out of the Gilded Age, with an ornate hand-carved entrance and turn-of-the-century copper sconces. In fact, the house was built just last year.  Its owner, antique…