Negin Javaherimilani/Negin Javaherimilani/DreamOcean
71 Lee Ave., Toronto
Asking Price: $3,099,999
Taxes: $7,702.00 (2023)
Lot Size: 50 by 120 feet
Listing agent: Shea Warrington, Royal LePage Estate Realty
The backstory
For more than 117 years, four generations of the Clayton family have lived in and preserved the house at 71 Lee Ave. The home, across the road from Kew Gardens and a leisurely stroll to Balmy Beach and the boardwalk, commands a prime spot in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood.
Margot Clayton said her great-grandfather owned the local butcher shop up the street (at 2018 Queen St. E, now a Hero Burger). He sold a lakeside cottage and used the money to buy building lots on Lee Avenue when it was first being developed; numbers 59 and 71, with 71 being a double-wide lot. His son, Harry Clayton, carried on the butcher business. Harry died in 1955.
Ms. Clayton’s father, William, grew up at 71 Lee Ave. and worked with his dad in the butcher shop – delivering cuts of meat on his bicycle. He raised Margot and her siblings in the house, too.
Long-time residents of the Beaches will recognize 71 Lee for its unusual side lot that for decades was almost completely given over to formal gardens.
“The family were all gardeners – great grandpa had roses galore – and part of our life was weeding that garden and learning to get those weeds at the root and pull,” Ms. Clayton said. These days, there’s more sod than planned horticulture. “My mom’s been gradually covering it over. … It was getting a little bit much for her.”
The family is bundling the side lot into the sale, but since they had severed it a number of years ago the two 25-foot-wide lots are for sale separately (for $1.799-million and $1.29-million), according to listing agent Shea Warrington.
The House Today
The house has been well preserved on the exterior. The wooden siding is almost entirely original: Growing up, Ms. Clayton’s father insisted on stripping it back to the bare wood and repainting it at least once a decade. The wire fence across the side lot was handmade in 1906 and has been painted and repainted countless times over the years. “I was always told, no matter what you do, never take this fence down,” Ms. Clayton said.
The complex latticework over the front porch has been replaced but was painstakingly redone to mirror the original.
“That to me is that house: There’s a picture of my grandpa and my grandmother sitting on the veranda reading Life magazine, in the exact same chairs that are still there,” Ms. Clayton said. “We had so many parties: We’d get our dinner and sit on this veranda and we’re right across from Kew Gardens. There’d be bands in the park, it would be packed with people.”
Home of the Week, 71 Lee Ave., TorontoNegin Javaherimilani/Negin Javaherimilani/DreamOcean
1 of 25
Her mother – now 92 years old – still owns the house, but the family has agreed now is the time to sell. Still, it’s been an emotional experience packing up.
The house still has its original stained-glass windows, solid oak doors, even the original brass doorknobs and switch plates. Some of the wood floors are covered in carpeting, but the wood trim, brick fireplaces and built-in leaded glass cabinetry still shine bright.
A foyer with stairs heading upstairs connects to a sitting room at the front of the house that opens into the back half of the main floor.
The dining room, 18 feet long, is separated from the kitchen and sitting room by doors. When she was growing up, Ms. Clayton said, this was one of the central spaces in the house.
“Those homes have huge dining rooms. There’s a table there from the butcher’s, a gorgeous table that could easily sit 12. We have pictures of the generations sitting there,” she said. “We’d always have these great meals – my dad, he still had all the bone knives. We had a lot of good times in that dining room.”
The kitchen is a mix of eras: As far as she knows, said Ms. Clayton, the rubber tile floor is from 1906 while the tin ceiling was removed from the Queen Street butcher shop when it closed in the postwar period. The cabinets are a more recent update.
“That floor is just beautiful. Most people would have put tile down,” said Ms. Clayton, but her parents always focused on preserving and maintaining the home as it was. “They took incredible care of things. It was that generation: everything wasn’t just replaceable.”
There are five bedrooms on the second and third floors. Unlike a more modern home, none features an ensuite bathroom. In fact, there’s only one bathroom in the whole house: It’s on the second floor and it has an original cast-iron tub. And no, it does not have a shower.
The primary bedroom connects to a large sunroom with skylights that runs across the front of the house above the front porch.
A house of another era
Ms. Clayton is 61. Despite having grown up in the 1960s and 70s, in many ways, her childhood in the house sounds like it came from an earlier era. Unlike many of her contemporaries who lived in suburban homes with big rec rooms or TV-oriented living rooms, her house was designed for life before television (for that matter it pre-exists commercial radio) and the family was never keen on reconfigurations to sync with modernity.
And anyway, who needs to veg out in front of a TV when Kew Gardens and Balmy Beach are your rec room? “We were an adventuresome family; we all sailed at Ashbridges Bay and went to the Balmy Beach canoe club, always on our bikes on the boardwalk going here and there,” Ms. Clayton said.
After leaving for university, she eventually moved back to the neighbourhood (her brother did the same) drawn as if by a magnet back to the home waters.
“Once a Beacher always a Beacher,” she said. “It has gotten more busy, but still, relative to the rest of the city, we are a small town.”