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A bricks-and-mortar man obsessed with the written word?

That was Edmund Peachey. From his early days in the 1930s erecting a smattering of single-family homes to later years as a builder of office towers and hotels, his constant companion was a little diary filled with thoughts and, whenever he saw one that tickled his fancy, quotations.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches — Robert Frost

One can imagine Mr. Peachey on the job site, sitting down and flipping through his little dog-eared digest — a coffee break for the soul — to find a tidbit of wisdom to ruminate on and recharge his batteries, like the above excerpt from Robert Frost's Birches, which is about the journey from boyhood to manhood.

In 1914, when Mr. Peachey was a boy of 12, his parents moved the family from London, England, to Toronto.

The next year, he was working as a telegrapher with Canadian National. In the 1920s, using information transmitted over the wire, he did quite well playing the stock market; in 1929, he lost everything.

A friend who owed him money was wiped out too, and, luckily for Mr. Peachey, paid the debt with real estate instead: two vacant lots on Bessano Road near Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue. So, the CN employee who'd just completed a night school BA in history and English decided in 1930 to become a home builder as well.

Intending to build a house for himself, his mother and sister (he wasn't married yet), he began by hiring a jack-of-all-trades to build during the day while he went off to work.

"He'd be there first thing in the morning before the guy started," explains his son, Peter Peachey. "He'd give him a list of things to do, go to work, come back at lunch hour, give him some more, come back at the end of the day . . .," he trails off, laughing at the thought of all those trips up and down Yonge his father made from CN on Front Street.

Life is a high building and there is plenty of room at the top, but it has no elevator. You must persevere and take the steps. — Unknown

Before the house was finished, a gentleman approached Mr. Peachey and offered to buy it. Using the small profit from that sale, he built another.

At the time, he was taking a three-year architecture course at Central Technical School, and was able to use what he learned to cut costs and maximize his profit on the new project.

Soon after, Mr. Peachey began building 16 duplexes at Avenue Road and Glenview Avenue (demolished in 1980), and got married to nurse Deane MacKay (whom he had met while in hospital for tuberculosis).

In 1944, the same year Peter was born, he finally quit his day job to become a home builder full-time. His first major development, Chestnut Hills at Dundas Street West and Islington Avenue, was a risk; Peter remembers the family living on site in a "rundown shack" because his father had sunk all of his money into the project.

By 1948, however, he'd built a "state-of-the-art" home for the family at 36 Wimbleton Rd. that had double-pane windows, hardware-less cupboards that opened with a simple touch of the finger, and a firewood "dumbwaiter" that carried logs up from the basement.

Don't be an imitator — rather be an originator — Unknown

The eldest of four children, Peter Peachey started working for his father in 1956. He says Edmund Peachey Ltd. may have been the first Toronto home-building company to use double-pane "twindows" and an experimental new product called drywall.

The company worked on what turned out to be its last major housing development in the early 1960s — West Deane Park, in which Mr. Peachey partnered with Alcan Inc. to offer homes with the then-innovative baked-enamel aluminum siding.

But then the rezoning of some of his company's land holdings near the airport prompted a decision to enter into the hotel business.

Hiring modernist architect George Robb and using a Scandinavian family trip as inspiration, the Valhalla Inn was born.

All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare — Spinoza

The hotel was an instant success — the crown jewel of a career that included the building of 1,500 homes in west-end Toronto.

The Valhalla was also a springboard for son Peter, who became president three years before his father died in 1978. The younger Mr. Peachey expanded the company, taking it into office towers with the creation of the Valhalla Executive Centre.

"There was no A-type office space in the suburbs," he remembers. "Everybody was only building stores over plazas, so I thought I was going to build a tiny, little Toronto-Dominion Centre on that site."

And yet, for all of Edmund Peachey's success, the quiet home builder who loved quotations didn't blow his own horn. Because of that, his name today may be less well known than others who shaped Toronto before and after the Second World War.

However, Peter Peachey, a quiet man of many accomplishments himself, is working on it.

"One of the things I want to do is to get my dad in the National House Builders Hall of Fame."

The happiest man is the one who thinks the most interesting thoughts — William Lyon Phelps

All italicized quotations are taken from Mr. Peachey's diaries, as reproduced in a Valhalla Inn 20th anniversary calendar published by the Peachey family in 1983.

Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Sunday mornings. Inquiries can be sent to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.