Featuring 250 houses and more than 400 color photographs, this book explores the Toronto's older homes illustrating more than 20 architectural styles from ten distinct neighborhoods.

Chosen as one of Style at Home's Top Ten Coffee Table Books.

The Estates of old Toronto is a bittersweet look at a less harried age and at the great properties that were ultimately swallowed up by Canada's largest modern city.

An exploration of home architecture from the late 18th to the early 20th century in Southern Ontario, combines detailed photography with a lively and appreciative text. Rural and inner city Ontario has a good number of restored homes - these are the best.

Celebrating Toronto’s built heritage of row houses, semis, and cottages and the people who lived in them. Despite their value as urban property, Toronto’s workers’ cottages are often characterized as being small, cramped, poorly built, and in need of modernization or even demolition. But for the workers and their families who originally lived in them from the 1820s to the 1920s, these houses were far from modest. Many had been driven off their ancestral farms or had left the crowded conditions of tenements in their home cities abroad. Once in Toronto, many lived in unsanitary conditions in makeshift shantytowns or cramped shared houses in downtown neighbourhoods such as The Ward. To then move to a self-contained cottage or rowhouse was the result of an unimaginably strong hope for the future and a commitment to family life. Through the stories of eight families who lived in these “Modest Hopes,” authors Don Loucks and Leslie Valpy bring an important but forgotten part of the Toronto narrative to life. They illuminate the development of Toronto’s working-class neighbourhoods, such as Leslieville, Corktown, and others, and explain the designs and architectural antecedents of these undervalued heritage properties.