#This Nova Scotia co-housing community is creating connections—and more affordable homes

#This Nova Scotia co-housing community is creating connections—and more affordable homes

“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…

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#Inside Manoir Blackswan, an extravagant modern-day palace in Montreal’s suburbs 

#Inside Manoir Blackswan, an extravagant modern-day palace in Montreal’s suburbs 

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…

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#Home borrowing costs hit 23-year high 

#Home borrowing costs hit 23-year high 

Home mortgage rates have reached the highest figure since 2000, as the average borrowing rate for 30-year home loans topped 7.31 percent this week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. The new figure is a slight increase from last week’s 7.19 percent. A year ago it was 6.70 percent. The rate continues to climb, in…

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#A Manitoba five-bedroom fit for a (former) prime minister

#A Manitoba five-bedroom fit for a (former) prime minister

Two-time Canadian PM Arthur Meighen owned this sprawling Edwardian just outside of Winnipeg. Now, you could, too. (Photography by Graham McCallum) Manitoba realtor Meagan McKillop is sitting on what she considers to be the most precious listing of her career: a 2,400-square-foot, three-storey, mint-tinged Edwardian home in Portage La Prairie, located an hour’s drive from…

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#This tiny B.C. hut is a birdhouse for humans

#This tiny B.C. hut is a birdhouse for humans

How one Calgary architect fulfilled his longtime dream to live among the birds  (Photography by Hayden Pattullo, Studio North) Every summer when Mark Erickson was growing up, his family would drive three hours west of their home in Calgary through the mountainous wilderness of Banff to visit their spartan two-bedroom cottage in Windermere, B.C. The…

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