Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Toronto Life

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HE SAID HIS NAME WAS MIKE BORAC AND THAT HE COULD BUILD HOMES FASTER AND CHEAPER THAN ANYONE ELSE. BY THE TIME HIS CLIENTS REALIZED HIS CLIENTS REALIZED HIS PROMISES WERE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, THEIR MONEY WAS GONE ONE warm July evening in 2021, Amin took a post-dinner walk, as he often did. He’d been living in Lorne Park, a quiet, leafy neighbourhood in southeast Mississauga, for more than a decade, sharing a modest home with his immediate family and his parents, who often stayed with them. As he wandered past some of Lorne Park’s bigger residences, Amin kept an eye out for details that he could use as inspiration for his next house. Amin (who agreed to speak with me on the condition that I not use his…

A warm family home that blends old and new WHO | Jaclyn Genovese, founder and principal designer at Spaces by Jacflash; Adrian LeRoy, a wealth adviser; Rocco, 22 months; and Roman, a newborn (not pictured) WHERE | Dufferin Grove IN 2016, Jaclyn Genovese bought a 100-year-old semi at Bloor and Ossington. It was in rough shape, but she loved its quirks, and as a designer, she saw its potential. It had high ceilings, an ornate oak fireplace in the living room and a solid oak front door. “You don’t see that in newer homes,” says Jaclyn. She wasn’t deterred by the idea of making some upgrades. The main floor was a congested mess of tiny rooms, so Jaclyn tore down the wall between the dining room and the staircase. To…

Ben Denham and Ashley Lloyd, White Lily Diner WHERE: WHITE LILY FARMS, UXBRIDGE BEN DENHAM AND ASHLEY LLOYD lived a streetcar ride away from their Riverside restaurant, White Lily Diner, but when the pandemic hit, they decided to sell their Parkdale home and buy a 10-acre farm in Uxbridge. “We had talked about moving out of the city one day,” says Denham, “and when restaurants shut down, we pulled the trigger.” The first phase was defined by unbridled enthusiasm at the bounty they could grow—including fun crops like pink Japanese okra, purple tomatillos and blue Japanese corn. “We learned what not to grow the hard way,” says Lloyd. “What looks really cool in a seed catalogue isn’t always what grows well in our climate or what we can sell to restaurants.”…

“I’m not about yelling. I don’t believe in that kind of leadership”—Darko Rajakovic, p. 22 Here, inside a city hall committee room, budget chief Shelley Carroll is shaping Toronto’s financial future—and it looks rough. According to a report from Ernst and Young, the city faces a $46.5-billion shortfall over the next 10 years if it fails to employ new revenue tools. The report also says that $1.1 billion from property taxes is currently funding federal and provincial programs. Potential fixes include a municipal sales tax, road tolls and the selling off of city land. And failure to adopt them would mean cancelling desperately needed housing, transit and climate initiatives. Carroll now has the daunting task of ushering in the 2024 budget, which will surely be loaded with tax hikes. Nobody…

$1 Discounted price of hot dogs at a recent ball game between the Jays and the Orioles, prompting one fan to shower his fellow attendees with wieners—before being ejected by security. $10,000 Market value of aluminum little-league bleachers allegedly stolen by 28-year-old Naithan Bachiu-Tait of Hamilton. Police say they found the missing bench seats at a recycling facility close to the ballpark, being sold as scrap metal. $2,640,000 Price that Brook Trafton, a Toronto retail worker, fetched for his one-of-a-kind “One Ring” Magic card, which he sold to rapper Post Malone. Trafton plans to keep his day job despite his newfound wealth. $8,600,000 Estimated cost to rename Dundas Street. While council voted in favour of the initiative in 2021, critics assert that the city is currently too broke to follow…

GRANT BRAMMER could fix anything: cars, plumbing, electrical. So, when he bought a 20,000-square-foot plot of land in the Kawar-thas in 1963, he couldn't wait to start building the cottage he'd long dreamed of for his wife, Donna, and their three young children, Daniel, Laurie and Diane. Most weekends, Grant drove the two and a half hours north from the family’s home on the Scar-borough Bluffs to their property in Highland Grove. After six years of hard work, the cozy three-bedroom, one-bathroom wooden bungalow was finally finished. Over the next two decades, the Brammers spent every summer at the cottage, playing badminton on the front lawn, boating on nearby Hudson Lake and going to festivals in town. Eventually, Daniel, Laurie and Diane had their own kids, expanding the family. In…

ONE OF TORONTO’S undisputed leaders of the slow design movement, Arounna Khounnoraj started out as a sculptor before launching Bookhou with her furniture designer husband, John Booth, in 2002. The brand’s handcrafted goods—patterned canvas totes, sculptural wooden vases, and one-of-a-kind items like woven linen quilts and embroidered stools—have been in high demand ever since. More than 20 years (and half a million Instagram followers) later, the couple still make everything from scratch in their downtown studio. Khounnoraj has also penned several books on crafting, including one on punch needling, which she single-handedly put back on the map in 2017, when a video of her practising the quaint art went viral on Instagram. Her latest guide, Winter Celebrations, is an ode to holiday crafting. We asked her to tell us about…

But it wasn’t enough. In 2014, he struck up an affair—not his first—with a woman named Adellene Balgobin, a clerk at the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee, a little-known provincial department. Its mandate is to manage the affairs of Ontario citizens who have no one else to look after them, which includes ensuring that the estates of these people are properly administered after they die. Their stories are often heartbreaking accounts of mental incapacity, loss and abandonment. One day, a tantalizing file crossed Balgobin’s desk: a man named Heinz Sommerfeld had passed away after a long and lonely battle with dementia. He was estranged from his half-brother, and his estate was worth $834,000, unusually large for someone in the OPGT’s care. Seized by avarice, Balgobin and Konashewych pillow-talked…

The Raptors conducted an extensive search for their new head coach. Any idea what set you apart? I walked into the interview with a lot of confidence, but it came down to compatibility. The diversity of my experience was also an asset. I’ve been coaching for almost 30 years now, and I have a reputation for helping young guys get better. The Raptors are a championship club, but the roster today is entirely different from 2019. My job is to lay the ground-work for another championship. Your boss, Masai Ujiri, talks incessantly about winning. How will you do that if you’re focused on player development? There’s a fine balance between trying to win and giving time to youth. If a player is struggling for a game or two, he shouldn’t…

Every time Janet Zuccarini launches a new restaurant, she swears she will never do it again. Why would she? Opening a restaurant is a nightmare. Every step takes twice as long and costs twice as much as it’s supposed to. In fact, there’s an entire documentary about the hellacious 2017 opening of Felix, Zuccarini’s restaurant just off Venice Beach—and the first foray out of Toronto for her restaurant group, Gusto 54, where Zuccarini is founder and CEO. The film is titled Funke, in honour of Evan Funke, Felix’s fervid, woolly-bearded chef. In the doc, the renowned pasta maker and Wolf-gang Puck protégé is clamouring for a win after his previous restaurant, the celebrated Bucato, imploded. Citing irreconcilable differences with his partners, Funke had vamoosed. Lawsuits from unpaid vendors ensued, and…

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THE BUYERS: Emile Studham, 45, a performance coach for executives and athletes, and Andrea Esteves, 38, a teacher, with their 11-month-old daughter, Lola, and five-year-old son, Rio. THE STORY: In late 2022, Andrea and Emile were living with their kids in a three-bedroom townhouse in Long Branch. They loved the neighbourhood, but their three-storey home wasn’t suited to a young family: it had too many stairs and lacked a backyard. So, in December, they set a $1.3-million budget hoping to score a move-in-ready two-storey detached with a yard and a rentable basement, ideally no more than a few blocks away. OPTION 1 ALDER CRESCENT near Kipling and Lake Shore Listed at $1,348,000 Sold for $1,235,000 Right before Christmas, Andrea and Emile saw this three-plus-two-bedroom, three-bathroom detached. The two-storey home had…

THE BEST THINGS TO SEE, DO, READ AND HEAR THIS MONTH IN TORONTO BUILDING ICONS: ARNOLD NEWMAN’S MAGAZINE WORLD, 1938–2000 Opens Oct. 21 | AGO ON ITS FACE, a photo portrait may seem like a straightforward affair: there’s the person, the pose, the flash. For Arnold Newman, it was an art. The prolific portrait photographer brilliantly captured artists, politicians and other influential figures for the great magazines of the 20th century. More than 200 of his masterful works are on display for the AGO’s latest exhibition, Building Icons. Here, AGO curators SOPHIE HACKETT and TAL-OR BEN-CHOREEN share the stories behind some of Newman’s most famous photographs. Georgia O’Keefe, 1968 Commissioned by Holiday Magazine for a story about Santa Fe, New Mexico, Newman captured modernist painter Georgia O’Keefe before a blank…