Once a one-car garage, this family’s Briar Hill-Belgravia studio cottage offers a space for family, and saves their kid some cash.
Source From: THE STAR
David Crawford is the owner of the very first garden suite built in Toronto, according to the city.
Nick Lachance / Toronto Star
Last spring, deluged by six weeks of rain, David Crawford’s backyard was a pit of mud and clay.
There was a trench carved down the roughly 150-foot lot, outside the two-bedroom house he and his wife bought last year in Toronto’s Briar Hill-Belgravia neighbour. It was nothing short of a mess.
Little by little, though, something novel rose in its place, as the old single-car garage morphed into a studio apartment — becoming Toronto’s very first garden suite.
Crawford’s unit is 500 square feet and meant as a living space for family, including his university-aged son.
Nick Lachance / Toronto Star
Finished late this summer, the tiny home was a milestone not only for Crawford and his family, but for a city trying to open the door to new housing in neighbourhoods traditionally restricted to single-family homes. A garden suite is one of the newest permitted housing types — also called a granny flat, they were approved by city hall last February, and legalized in July. Unlike laneway housing greenlit in 2018, garden suites don’t require an exit onto a lane.
According to the city, 35 garden suites were under construction as of mid-August out of 67 approved building permits and 175 total applications. They confirmed Crawford’s was the first to be completed.
To get to that point, Crawford and his wife — whose garden suite was built to house multiple generations of family — navigated stiff real estate competition, budget renegotiations and a new set of city rules. The process offers a glimpse behind the scenes at the work required on an individual level, as many others in Toronto have expressed interest in the newly legal homes.
“I feel like something like this is going to help the community … it seems, in Toronto, we have these high rises and then single-storey houses next to each other,” said Crawford. “It would be nice to spread that out more.”
Their family’s backyard vision began in the fall of 2021, when they were suddenly thrust into Toronto’s red-hot real estate market.
Crawford and his wife had spent the preceding decade living and raising their kids on the campus of Upper Canada College, the private school where both worked as teachers. While the school sets aside a number of on-campus homes for its educators, Crawford explained the unique setup has a 10-year time limit.
So, just as Toronto’s real estate market was hitting a fever pitch, the empty nesters found themselves needing a new place to live.
“My stomach churns whenever I think about the three or four months I was looking,” Crawford recalled. Repeatedly, houses they’d look at listed for less than $900,000 would fly off the market with offers closer to $1.3 million.
During the process, conversations with their realtor sparked the idea of a secondary unit. While Toronto’s elected officials hadn’t yet approved garden suites, a staff proposal was making its way through city hall. So Crawford started making notes of the homes that might fit the bill.
But securing a house — let alone one with enough space for a secondary unit — gradually started to feel out of reach, as they repeatedly lost out in fierce bidding wars. They talked about shifting their focus to condos, Crawford said, in an effort to find something that would sell for closer to their budget.
Then a modest home in Briar Hill-Belgravia hit the market through a private sale by the owner, shielding it from some of the competition seen elsewhere. Soon, the two-bedroom midtown bungalow — with a bonus suite in the basement and within cycling distance of work, mostly along the leafy Beltline trail — was officially theirs.
By then it was February, the month city council officially said yes to garden suites. It was time to make a decision — could the basement unit be enough to house family, or was a garden suite a good call? When they decided on the latter, Crawford said the idea was that they would rent out the basement in their home instead, to keep costs at a more affordable level.
They enlisted a designer, only for the city’s new rules to be put on ice by appeals from multiple residents’ associations — who wanted the new rules to differ according to neighbourhood. That was no deterrent, Crawford said, recalling their designer’s assurance that work on their proposal could keep chugging ahead. “We’ll just call it a yoga studio, don’t worry,” he recalled them quipping at the time. “We’ll keep working on this.”
Weeks turned into months, something Crawford hadn’t expected. “It took longer than we thought,” he said. But in early July, the Ontario Land Tribunal dismissed all of the appeals, siding with the City of Toronto argument that Ontario’s Planning Act only allows changes to a city’s Official Plan and zoning rules to be appealed by the provincial housing minister.
Garden suites were officially legal in Toronto — and Crawford’s proposal was ready to go.
They went through a few hiccups, still. Originally envisioned as a one-bedroom unit, city hall required it be changed to a studio suite, due to a planned window that was too close to their neighbour’s property. Sheer costs also limited their choices. They would have loved to have heated floors, but since they didn’t have a gas hookup to the backyard building, that would mean a significant retooling of the property’s infrastructure.
“It would have been too expensive,” Crawford explained. While the first cost estimate they received for the project was outside of their budget, they managed to keep things affordable by agreeing to do many of the finishes — flooring, paint, tiling, trim, and the installation of kitchen fixings from Ikea — themselves during their summer vacation, with some help from their kids.
For budget reasons, he and his wife, both teachers, did much of the interior features themselves, including the Ikea kitchen.
Nick Lachance / Toronto Star
There were also constraints related to converting the garage instead of starting the building from scratch — but that came with its own benefits, Crawford said, allowing them to build within two feet of their fenceline instead of the otherwise required five-foot distance.
“We didn’t want to lose those three feet in the back,” he said.
The process overall was smooth, Crawford said, with responses from city hall usually taking two to three weeks when new details were submitted. By August, the studio cottage was ready to open its sliding glass doors — the final form painted in a warm cream shade with black trim, with a tidy paved walkway curving past a tree and towards the entrance.
Within weeks, the suite had housed both Crawford’s mother and his nephew, who is enrolled at the University of Toronto. More recently, it’s been a place where the couple’s university-aged son can live while completing a co-op placement in Toronto — without having to face the city’s competitive and expensive rental market.
He hopes the vaulted ceiling and privacy will be attractive features for him “mum.”
Nick Lachance / Toronto Star
“For us, it’s nice, and I’m hoping it’s somewhere my mum might want to come,” Crawford said, noting the suite offers more privacy than staying in their basement, and the vaulted ceiling they included makes it feel more spacious than its roughly 500-square-foot layout.
Considering the number of garden suites under construction at the time his own was finished, Crawford sees uptake so far as a “drop in the bucket” compared to the potential of garden housing citywide. He wonders if some people might be hesitant given the more intimate nature of the garden units, since unlike laneway suites, where residents can enter through the lane, a garden suite means a resident has to cross through the primary home’s yard.
Heading forward, Crawford hopes the city will encourage more people to consider building the backyard homes as a way to open more doors in walkable lowrise neighbourhoods.
According to the city, 35 garden suites were under construction as of mid-August out of 67 approved building permits and 175 total applications.
Nick Lachance / Toronto Star
As for their own unit in the yard, he’s hoping it keeps their family closer — an idea that prompts a chuckle.
“It’s a little bit of a bribe in that way,” he said.
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