Poll: How much do you think this home is or will be worth? Respond in the comment section below. I’ll be giving away one free ATC t-shirt. (Comments)

A few weeks ago a good friend of mine – who is a builder – called me up and told me that I had to come and see a house under construction in Etobicoke (west end of Toronto). He told me that the owner was doing everything from geothermal to a car elevator, and that he was doing it all, not with the intent of ever being able to sell it, but because he just wanted to build something really cool.

I thought: Amazing. I need to see this.

So this past Saturday afternoon, I drove out to 37 Canerouth Drive in Etobicoke to take a look. Situated near Centennial Park, the house is at the end of an unassuming cul-de-sac filled with post-war bungalows that you could probably pickup for anywhere between $800,000 to $1M, fully renovated. This house, on the other hand, has had many multiples of that sunk into it.

But before I get into the house, let me start from the beginning.

The owner actually used to live next door on Canerouth Drive. He lived in a nice, newly renovated bungalow, but he wanted something else. Something cooler. Something he could create from scratch. Being a car collector, one of the driving forces behind a new build was to create a place for all his cars. At one point he had around 7 or 8 of them. So he had decided that it was time to do a knock-down and start again.

But before he could demolish his house, his neighbors – whose bungalow hadn’t been renovated, but which had a slightly bigger and better lot – said to him: “You’ve got to be crazy. Your place is fully renovated.”

Somehow that comment led to the two neighbors actually switching houses. (I think this is fascinating, because I wonder how many of these types of transactions would be possible under the right circumstances.) The neighbors got a newly renovated house, and he got a better lot to build his dream home. It was a huge win for the neighbors, but it also meant one less neighbor to oppose him at the Committee of Adjustment when he went in for his variances.

The biggest variance was apparently density. The house is almost 6,000 square feet. It has somewhere around 4 bedrooms, but also includes a few studio and study areas, a spa area, 2 walk-in closets the size of the bedroom in my condo, and even a “meditation hallway”. The master bedroom and main living areas are all on one floor so that as the couple ages the home remains functional. (There’s also an elevator just in case.)

Being at the end of a cul-de-sac, the lot is pie shaped and the architecture of the house mimics it. The front is concave and the rear is convex – opening up the main living areas and master bedroom to the ravine at the back (see above photo). The owner was absolutely firm in his belief that these curves were central to the architecture. Without them, the house simply wasn’t worth doing, he said.

The initial intent was to build a completely passive solar house, but he found that it was extremely difficult to do so within the confines of our building code. Still, the house contains a significant amount of thermal mass, which is one of the principles of passive solar design. The home uses precast hollow core slabs with 3" of poured concrete on top and in-floor radiant heating and cooling. All of the floors will be polished concrete – love it.

Here’s the main stairwell (check out the support stringers):

Here’s the view from the kitchen looking towards the living room and out to the backyard (the far wall will be outfitted with custom millwork for his pottery collection):

Here’s a shot of the through-fireplace that will connect the living room area to the main stairwell area shown above:

And here’s the meditation hallway:

The most over the top part of the house though, is probably the underground parking garage. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you given that he’s passionate about cars and it was one of the main reasons he wanted a new house in the first place. At the front of the house (shown in the first image above) is a single car garage, which conceals a parking elevator he sourced from the US.

It looks like this from the basement:

And it leads into this below grade parking area:

There’s enough room for all of his cars and it’ll be fully equipped so that he can work and tinker on them.

But what stood out to me most from my visit – more so than the scale of this project or all the fancy bells and whistles – was his attention to detail and his passion for design. Here is a guy who is worrying about baseboard details and the design of the space down to the centimeter.

Here’s his door detail:

In fact, he gave me a number of examples where a couple of inches here and there were having a profound impact on the experience of the space and he forced the trades to change it. He even spoke about how the 3" concrete floor topping had changed his experience of the outside (for the better). These are subtleties that most people don’t even notice, or care about.

But he sure does.

Of course, in some ways, this is the difference between building for yourself and building strictly for profit. When it’s a passion project, you do things that you love, but that other people will tell you don’t make economic sense. But sometime it’s good to be crazy. I mean, what do those other people know? 

So today, I thought we would play a little game on ATC where you try and guess what you think this home will be worth upon completion? Take a guess. There’s no wrong answer here. I’ll also randomly select somebody from the comments to receive a free ATC t-shirt.

I have a rough idea of the costs in my head, but I’d like to see what you come up with on your own first. I’ll also be forwarding this post to the owner, so make sure you respond in the comment section below as opposed to via email or on social media. I’m sure he’d love to see your numbers :)

To add one last piece to this story, I discovered midway through our tour that the owner of this house used to be my family’s veterinarian before he retired sometime in the mid 2000s. What a small world. He was an excellent veterinarian (my mom told me to tell him that), but that clearly wasn’t his only passion.