70 BEATRICE ST.
70 BEATRICE ST., TORONTO
The Listing
Asking price: $969,000
Taxes: $5,967 (2010)
Lot size: 25.17 by 102 feet.
Agent: Kim Kehoe, Bosley Real Estate Ltd.
THE BACK STORY
He (Mark McLean) is a Toronto real estate agent.
She (Virginie Martocq) is decor editor for Chatelaine magazine.
Call it a marriage made in home renovation heaven.
"Renovating and designing houses is fun for us," says Ms. Martocq on a recent tour of her so-stylish-it-hurts Little Italy home.
"For other people it's work."
The amusement ride started in the summer of 2005 when she and her husband moved into their three-storey semi, built circa 1919, and located a mere stroll away from all the action on nearby College Street at Grace Street.
They didn't buy the house for its looks.
"It was ugly," says Ms. Martocq, not putting too fine a point on it.
"We saw it three times and we didn't have a strong emotional reaction. But we saw that it had big rooms and nice proportions and that it was bright."
As well, the four-bedroom, four-bathroom house was close to Pierre Elliott Trudeau School, whose French language program appealed to the bilingual mother-of-two who moved to Toronto from Aix-en-Provence at age 12, following the divorce of her Canadian mother and French father.
In Canada, she got to know better her maternal grandmother, a noted interior designer (still alive at age 97) whom Ms. Martocq credits as having influenced her own career path.
"Interior design is in the blood," she says.
Even if it weren't, both her grandmother, who has already passed down an impressive contemporary Canadian art collection, and her mother, who sadly passed away earlier this year from cancer, taught Ms. Martocq design by example.
"My mom wasn't in the business but she was very creative," Ms. Martocq says. "We moved all the time when I was young and my mom was always decorating. I remember often coming home from school and the dining room would be in the living room and the living room would be in the dining room."
When she was 15, Ms. Martocq recalls bursting into tears when faced with another of her mother's home renovation schemes.
It was a dilapidated house - "a total dump" - of which her mother was proud but which Ms. Martocq thought impossible to redeem.
"I didn't have the vision yet," she allows.
But after her mother renovated the teardown, turning it into a gem of a home for herself and her two daughters. Ms. Martocq absorbed an important lesson that has guided her through to today:
"You don't look at house for what it is but for it's potential."
It's an approach she took with this house that after a week on the market recently sold for $1.125-million, about 15 per cent more than the asking price of $969,000 as a result of a four-way bidding war.
"It already had a good roof and a good furnace, all the things you don't want to spend money on," says Ms. Martocq.
"So when we bought it we had money to play with. We could concentrate in just doing pretty things."
WHAT'S NEW
Prettifying the house involved transferring the kitchen from a back hall to the rear of the house where there was originally a staircase leading down to the now-finished basement.
This entailed the construction of a 50-square-foot addition with a wall of windows that floods the interior with natural light.
To get that light to reach into the basement, Ms. Martocq lined the walls of the new stairwell leading downstairs with mirrors and installed a glass handrail.
On the second floor, she removed a wall to create an enlarged family room with fireplace. On the third floor, she took a small bedroom and enlarged it into a large master bedroom with ensuite.
BEST FEATURE
The master bedroom, she says, is what she considers her home's best feature.
'"It's got a three-sided fireplace in front of the bathtub, and we each have eight feet of closets. I also have a built-in vanity where I apply my make-up and jewellery."
The master bedroom also has a window seat with views onto the CN Tower and the local Catholic church and it is here where Ms. Martocq likes to escape at the end of her design-dominated days.
"My life is busy, my kids are busy, this is the place where I can get away," she says.
"It's me time. It's adult space."