We finally took some proper photos of our future home and shop! Ain’t she a beaut? This part of Dundas Street West has some pretty special looking historic buildings, whether it be like our three-storey with bay windows or the old-timey store fronts with grand entranceways all 1950s tiles, decorative windows and original hardwood flooring. The current owners of our future building are Urbanscape, an architectural firm and gallery. They refinished the front of the building up to historical codes and threw in a modern store front for good measure. The only thing left for us to do is to create our own identity through altering the wood slats and signage, get new bay windows sometime down the line (the windows are old and not very efficient) and to get rid of the roosting pigeons because I have been royally pooped on in the past and have a sort of neurosis when it comes to stuff from above.

A close up of the upper two floors and the cute decorative peaked roof. John wants to change the colour of the shingles at some point. It’s actually pretty neat looking at this photo because I didn’t realize how much detail there is!

We’re hoping the kikis will like sitting in the big bay windows. Sadly, there will be no sun in these giant windows as we are north facing.

Modern store front! We will change the signage (obviously) and the thin red slats are going to be replaced with thicker overlapping wood slats stained black–think Norwegian cottage meets Victorian Toronto!

The nice big windows and recessed door create a fairly large display area.

Originally we thought we were going to open the shop only using this front part but we are realizing with 3 living and 3 dining sets (to meet 3 price points), PLUS an awesome children’s section, kitchenware, antique/vintage rugs, home accessories and lighting, we are going to need to use all of our first floor space, so thank goodness it stretches back to about double the size you see here.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the store transformation from Urbanscape gallery to our shop (still a bit of a secret for now…). Until then…

…we’ll see you across the street at Margret, our soon to be local with dangerous proximity to our front door.

Today we spent the morning in the Junction, checking out our new store space. But before that we grabbed some breakfast at The Beet, a yummy organic cafe and market located on our block. Housed in a grand old TD bank building, the space boasts super high ceilings (as do many Junction buildings) and perfect corner lot (with a cute patio we will be frequenting next summer!).

A view of the streetscape from the patio. Check out the cool black lampposts, the last frontier style buildings, and the slightly random but kinda neat Rue Morgue House of Horror located in what used to be a funeral home (from what I gather, they have a magazine and put on horror related events and film screenings).

Besides having eco food, The Beet prides itself on eco-friendly interior design. The pendant lights hanging above the counter area we just saw in the basement of local reclamation shop Post & Beam. Some of the tables and chairs are from local shop Forever Interiors while the rest are made from sustainable eco materials. Read the rest of this entry »

We were strolling Bloor Street and stopped by Book City and discovered a copy of Dwell’s “Make it yours” special issue ($9.99). It’s a look back at some of the most memorable homes in the recent years and a look behind the ideas that made each space unique. It’s essentially a compilation of some of the best decor ideas out there, with a complete buyers guide for kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, home offices, bedrooms, outdoors, dining rooms, & kids’ rooms.

We wanted to share some of our favorites with you!

1) Dan Hisel’s Z Box. We loved the idea of “Sleeping cubes” as opposed to large bedrooms. This idea works well in loft style spaces, where there is a large communal living area, with several cozy cubes that are used only for sleeping.

2) Zizmzor residence: “Green Screen” by Brad Zizmor & landscape designer Kari Katzander. A more affordable alternative to custom wooden planters was using acacia wooden boxes from IKEA. It seems that this could be a totally doable DIY green wall.

Feld Residence: Kitchen, by designer Larissa Sand. We love the look of these frosted glass sliding doors, they work perfectly with the floating shelves and provide some relief when they get a bit messy.

The blue house, by Pieter Weijnen. We love the Finnforest pine ceiling contrasted against these dark ceramic tiles and sunken bathtub. The best thing about this space is the skylights above the pine paneled ceiling bringing in natural light.

Hiller Residence: living room. We love the large sliding glass doors that open to the great outdoors, but the best feature has got to be that Dominique Imbert designed fireplace.

As we mentioned before we are making the move to the Junction. It’ll be hard to leave Harbord Village but we’re very excited about the new neighborhood, and all the new possibilities for sprucing up our apartment! That includes coming up with some solutions for our very small 3 pc bathroom that hasn’t been renovated for at least 15 + years. We were lucky enough to have the experience working on the cottage bathroom reno, but now we’d like to invest a bit more and come up with really smart efficient solutions.

I was really excited to see this photo of a sink in the Michelberger hotel, I love the black linoleum covered plywood and the little shelf for holding a hand towel. Linoleum is a really neat material, it’s easy to clean and antibacterial.

via Remodelista

Of course DWR has to go and make a sink with storage and ruin everyone’s lives by selling it for $1100. Don’t you have enough products yet DWR? Maybe let the small business bathroom people have some business too. But seriously, I really dig this sink it’s a far cry away from the $150 dollars we spent on our pedestal sink but it may still be a possibility.

via DWR

Sometimes I dream of a beautiful white hallway (or if we knock all the walls down it’ll be just one big living room) leading to a bold coloured tile bathroom, when the bathroom door is left open it almost acts as an accent colour for the room.

via Pretty Practical

Of course it doesn’t have to be mosaic tiles, I really love these earthy green and brown tiles from Catherine Bailey & Robin Petravic’s bathroom, the couple that run Heath Ceramics.
via Design Sponge

Another really neat solution that I liked are “Wet Rooms” which we used a lot of in Scandinavia. Now I know Juli doesn’t like these because it gets water all over the floors which makes it very unpleasant for anyone wanting to use the bathroom after someone had just had a shower, but c’mon! Hear me out, and look at these nice pictures!

Now this is a great image of a wet room being used in a small space, it allows for the same floor to be used throughout the bathroom and gives you a lot more visual space. Now this isn’t necessarily the best example for a wet room, I think I would have to add one more thing to get the thumbs up from Juli.

That’s better. A glass partition and good drainage would be the most practical solution to make any smaller sized wet room fully functional.

Check out the article here

Or get out there and grab a copy for yourself!

I came across this beautiful image on Poppytalk yesterday, a gorgeous teak piano paired with an Arne Jacobsen side chair. I play a lot of music so I really like having instruments at the ready, hanging out in the living room. So it was really nice seeing a big piano working wonderfully in someone’s living room especially with a Scandinavian aesthetic… Right now we have Juli’s mother’s piano, an old Wurlitzer electric piano, and my electric guitar sitting in our living room and since they’re all vintage and cool looking instruments I think it all works.

But where can you get a fab Danish piano like the one in the first photo? Denmark of course! This one is $1153 USD from Klassik. Honestly this would be in our house right now if it weren’t for the shipping price.

Here are a couple acoustic guitars hanging on the wall in Zoe Deschanel’s home.

How do you feel about hanging guitars on the wall?

To finish off the post here is a video of Yazo Kayama live in the 60s.