As an interior designer, Megan Crosbie wanted the first house she purchased to double as a showroom for her business and a comforting, safe sanctuary. She longed for a project where she could completely transform the space—in part so the finished result could be used to advertise her abilities and aesthetic to potential clients. “I knew I didn’t want to move into a turnkey house,” she says. Previously, she had been living in a cookie-cutter new-build condo and was yearning to infuse more personality into her living space. In 2018, Megan and her fiancé, Merrick Read, a software engineer, found the perfect canvas for their future life: a semidetached Victorian home at the top of Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park, in a covetable neighborhood surrounded by trendy restaurants and coffee shops.
Though Megan looked at numerous homes in the process, this was the only one that felt right. “It just had good bones and a good feeling,” she says. It was much larger than comparable homes she had toured. Plus the large windows let in far more daylight than the average semidetached. Built in 1905, the property had been passed down through two generations in a single family and had only ever been renovated once, during the 1970s. Like many other Victorian homes in the area, the house contained both a show kitchen, on the main floor, and a working kitchen, in the basement. The show kitchen was in virtually mint condition, replete with iced oak cabinets and a fully-functioning 50-year-old Kitchenaid Whisper Quiet dishwasher. “It was really well-kept but outdated,” she says. “When I brought my parents through the house, my dad said, ‘That’s the dishwasher I had growing up.’”