Jody Latimer/Jody Latimer
312 Beech St., Collingwood, Ont.
Asking price: $1,799,000
Lot size: 66 by 158 feet
Taxes: $4,786.30 (2023)
Listing agent: Sherry Rioux, Broker, Clairwood Real Estate Corp.
The backstory
It can be great in life and real estate when you get what you want, but it’s even better when what you wanted isn’t even the best part of what you got.
Wally Crowder wanted to live in Collingwood so he could be closer to skiing. He raised his five kids and ran his labelling business in Stouffville, Ont., in a big house but had started coming up to Collingwood in the mid-90s for hockey tournaments and invitations to ski at Blue Mountain.
“I knew the area, and I had friends that had moved up,” he said. “In 2007, I was getting close to retiring and we started looking, and my wife found this home: the guy who built it was also a skier.”
The former owner was apparently a homebuilder by trade and built the house on Beech Street in 2005. When it came up for sale, the house was also the right size for Mr. Crowder to entertain his children and 11 grandchildren.
But as luck and life would have it, Mr. Crowder’s dreams of skiing through retirement weren’t to be.
“We skied for a while, but then a few years ago I ended up with a knee replacement, and that took away the skiing,” he said.
Along the way though, Collingwood itself became the draw: a growing community with lots of amenities for locals and visitors. Even though the couple is downsizing again (their first home was even bigger than this house’s approximately 2,800 square feet if you include the finished basement) they are staying in Collingwood. “It’s probably one of the best four-season towns in Ontario,” Mr. Crowder asserts.
The house today
Home of the Week, 312 Beech St., Collingwood, Ont.Jody Latimer/Jody Latimer
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In Mr. Crowder’s view, he’s on one of the best “tree streets” in Collingwood. By way of explanation, the streets that extend west from the town’s main road Hurontario Street are in order: Pine, Maple, Beech, Birch, Oak, Cedar, Walnut, Hickory, Spruce and Elm. Beech dead-ends at Fifth Street (the streets that walk south from the waterfront are numbered, starting with First) so that limits through-traffic.
Businesses and restaurants are now beginning to expand from Hurontario onto the tree streets, so Beech is literally steps away from a lively downtown.
The street is filled with century-old homes, a style the original builder of Mr. Crowder’s home tried to emulate with coloured siding, scalloped shingles in the gables, tall farmhouse-style windows and a wraparound front porch with a cupola on the corner.
The front door opens directly into a formal sitting area, with a small office on the right. The kitchen is the heart of the floor plan, either through the sitting room or through a short hall with closets, and access to the garage. A large island with bar seating centres the kitchen and maple hardwood floors run through here and up a short flight of steps into the family room, which is open to the kitchen with cut-out in the wall.
The dining space occupies the left side of the family room, and the floor-to-ceiling stone mantle for the fireplace focuses the seating area. This room is tallest on the kitchen side, and slopes to the rear access to the large back porch with built-in pergola and stone patio and grassy yard beyond.
“I’ve got a good-sized lot that’s west facing, so the backyard gets lots of sun in the summer,” said Mr. Crowder. The grandkids still have a whale of a time on their visits, but they are getting a little too good at popping baseballs over the fences. “We’ve got good neighbours so they throw ‘em back or they come back in a basket next week: they know where they came from.”
There are four bedrooms on the second level, three that share a main bathroom and the primary suite with its own ensuite. The fifth bedroom is currently in use as the office on the main floor.
Hometown comforts
The home has a wraparound front porch.Jody Latimer/Jody Latimer
Sometimes folks from back in Stouffville overestimate how far north Collingwood is, but Mr. Crowder swears he can get to Toronto in less than two hours when he needs to come south for business or pleasure. Though he is retired he still has a licence to provide apparel for the Matco Tools Inc., for whom he contracts out to supply the branded hats and shirts shoppers get as extras when buying from the company’s tool trucks. That said, he does prefer to stack up a couple appointments so he can limit his big city days.
More importantly, even though the community has been snowed in twice since he’s lived there – cut off from the rest of the province essentially – it’s actually a pretty good place to be stuck for a day or two when there are no day-trippers coming into the town’s many restaurants and bars.
“Downtown Collingwood, after 6 p.m. they shut their stores down but during the day there’s hardly a parking place to be had,” he said.
The pace of growth in the town has picked up in the past 40 years: Collingwood had fewer than 10,000 people for all of the 20th century until the early eighties, but just since 1996 has jumped from about 15,000 to almost 25,000 residents. Things have been growing so quickly the town council imposed a building moratorium on developments in 2021, though some infill developing continues apace.
In other words, right now they aren’t building any more Collingwood, which is just fine with most folks who live there now.