43 COWAN AVE.
WHAT: A renovated three-storey, semi-detached house in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood. Built in 1895, the Victorian-era home has five bedrooms and two bathrooms in approximately 2,200 square feet on a 23- by 80-foot lot.
ASKING PRICE: $599,000
TAXES: $3,431.94 (2009)
AGENT: Royal LePage, Johnston & Daniel Division (Isabel Beveridge)
Robin Kay has just put her house up for sale, and so let's skip past the newly renovated upstairs bathroom, the galley kitchen with an adjacent family room, the cedar deck in the backyard, the antique ceramic-tile fireplace in the open-concept living room (the colour of seashells) and get right to the meat - her walk-in closet.
Located on the second floor of her three-storey Parkdale semi, this is where the president of the Fashion Design Council of Canada - as Ms. Kay is professionally known - stores her to-die-for wardrobe, much of it culled during more than three decades as an arbiter of Canadian fashion and style.
There, in what used to be a small bedroom, is a doorless commode filled with black dresses and veiled hats, sparkling scarves and high-heeled leather boots. A bureau in the corner holds a shadeless vintage lamp in the shape of Japanese geisha. On it, Ms. Kay has draped robes of beads and pearls, some of which she plans to wear all next week at LG Fashion Week in Toronto where she's pretty much the queen bee, having injected the event - this year celebrating its 21st season - with a much-needed jolt of energy after grabbing hold of the reins a decade ago.
If it seems a discussion of fashion has little to do with the selling of her house then note this: Whoever purchases her property - located near Liberty Village, where Ms. Kay boldly relocated Fashion Week last year - gets not just the bricks and mortar, but all the clothes, as well as the modish furniture and shiny new LG appliances that go with it.
"I'm moving on," declares Ms. Kay with characteristic aplomb. She is sitting in front of her bay window, on her modernist couch, stocking feet curled under her small, spitfire-like body. "I'm selling it all," she continues. "Lock, stock and barrel."
The plan, now that her three children are grown, is to downsize into a condominium, east of the neighbourhood where she has lived on and off for the last 20 years.
Ever the retailer, Ms. Kay decided earlierthis week to spark buyer interest by dramatically reducing theprice of her house to $599,000 from its original list of $749,000. "In Robin's world, she does whatever it takes to get to Rome," commented agentIsabel Beveridge, valiantly keeping pace with her one-jump-ahead client.
Ms. Kay first discovered Parkdale when she was proprietor of a retail chain of high-end fashion stores founded in 1976 and called the Robin Kay Clothing Company.
"My factory was located on nearby Dufferin Street," she says. "And I used to drive by this very street all the time and look at all the grand old houses and think, why doesn't anyone live here?"
The answer is relatively simple: Parkdale, in the late 1970s, wasn't even close to experiencing the kind of gentrification that has turned the neighbourhood around, changing it from derelict row to an area where artists and other creative types, Ms. Kay among them, have come to set down roots.
Since buying the house six years ago, Ms. Kay has counted as her neighbours the playwright Paul Ledoux and the internationally acclaimed Canadian opera star Measha Brueggergosman.
"When I came back to the area, on the recommendation of a friend, I lucked upon this block of very talented writers and actors and singers. And yet the street felt very quiet and unassuming. There definitely was more of a community here than I had ever experienced before elsewhere in Toronto."
But while the creative vibe was there, the house, when she first saw it, was in need, as she puts it, "a fashion makeover."
She says the house, while renovated, had retained some of its original detail, for instance, a dark-brown wooden mantel that, the day she bought the house, Ms. Kay ripped away from the living-room wall with her bare hands.
"It was heavy," she says with a shrug. "I felt the house was instead full of beautiful, calm light."
To accentuate that virtue, Ms. Kay bleached all the original oak floors white and painted over the interior entirely in a colour she mixed herself and calls calling-card cream.
"It looks like parchment," Ms. Kay says delightedly.
"That's my biggest gift to this house. It used to be stark white and I'm now leaving it a little more mellow."
