Apr
Our Bathurst Manor in the Globe and Mail!
Check out this great article about the Bathurst Manor community and Bathurst Manor real estate in the Globe and Mail. We’re proud to serve the residents of this diverse and family-oriented community! Click the Pic to read the article. But, also visit our listings page for current homes for sale in the Bathurst Manor, and visit our neighbourhood section for more information on the Bathurst Manor community.
Bathurst Manor’s mid-century modern homes have survived on the modesty of their owners
Others, such as Scarborough’s Midland Park (started 1959), where I lived for five years, or Bathurst Manor, which sits between Sheppard and Finch avenues and Bathurst and Dufferin streets, and began construction in the mid-1950s, can soldier on under the radar for decades. Pauline Landriault, an architect/furniture designer who busies herself with store development for Roots Canada, recently brought the latter to my attention.
A home in the 1950s-era Toronto neighbourhood of Bathurst Manor.
DAVE LEBLANC/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
A home in the 1950s-era Toronto neighbourhood of Bathurst Manor.
Ms. Landriault, who bills herself as a “retail marketechture specialist,” has seen the devastation McMansions have caused in Don Mills and, even closer to home, to the areas just to the south of Bathurst Manor, and she and her neighbours are hoping to stem the tide.
“Definitely they’re coming,” she says, her tone grim.
“We need to rejuvenate the neighbourhood the way it was.”
The interior of Pauline Landriault’s home.
DAVE LEBLANC/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Her own split-level home on Acton Ave., near Wilson Heights Blvd., which belonged to her husband before they met, boasts a lovely, large living room with oversized windows (not quite floor-to-ceiling but close), an ample kitchen, original banisters and pickets on the stair, a few original pin-holed light fixtures – “I’m not a vintage expert [but] there was no way I was going to get rid of those lights,” she says – larger-than-period bedrooms and a bright basement for a home office. And while it’s expertly and lovely decorated today, it still exhibits the lack of pretension characteristic of the neighbourhood.
Ms. Landriault’s friend, Judi Cohen, an urban planner who now directs the “experiential” travel company WorldwideQuest, grew up in a slightly smaller home on Acton closer to Bathurst. She says her Hungarian Holocaust-survivor parents, as with many other immigrant families in the neighbourhood, purchased in 1957 and never considered moving elsewhere regardless of financial status.
“People lived very modestly in these houses, but they amassed massive wealth, they went on and they bought real estate everywhere, and they became builders, and the Hungarian Jews became some of the biggest builders and owners of real estate … but they never collected any kind of show-wealth.”