21 Rosemary Lane
What: A circa 1910 house owned by interior design maven Kimberley Seldon in Toronto's Forest Hill neighbourhood. The two-storey home has five bedrooms and six bathrooms.
- Living space: 3,950 square feet
- Lot size: 50 by 130 feet
- Asking price: $3.25-million
- Taxes: $13,963 (2008)
- Agent: Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd., Johnson and Daniel division (Cindy Denwood)
Amenities: The main floor has generously sized principal rooms with cherry wood floors and wood-burning fireplaces in the living room and study. In the dining room, a bay window overlooks the garden, and a set of built-in bookcases and china cabinets line one wall. The study has a fireplace and walkout to a screened sunroom with stone floor.
At the rear, the interior was expanded to include a great room with a cathedral ceiling and doors leading to the stone patio. A staircase leads to a home office that opens to the great room.
The large kitchen has a centre island, granite countertops, Sub-Zero refrigerator and built-in Thermador wall ovens.
Upstairs, the master bedroom has an ensuite bathroom with a tub surrounded by marble, heated floors and an alcove that hides a television.
Outside, the pie-shaped lot has many tall trees, a pond and a gazebo.
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As Kimberley Seldon co-ordinates the frenzy of comings and goings at her Forest Hill house, her luggage arrives at the front door. The designer has been home only a few hours from France - where she led a shopping excursion through the boutiques of Provence - and Florida, where she appeared on the Home Shopping Network.
Meanwhile, she's keeping an eye on preparations for a dinner party she's hosting while a photographer tries to coax her to sit down long enough to squeeze off a few frames of Ms. Seldon "relaxing" on the living room settee.
She pops up again to continue leading a tour of the house and consult with real estate agent Cindy Denwood about replacing tired flower arrangements with fresh bouquets. Ms. Seldon prefers big, glorious hydrangeas.
Her house at 21 Rosemary Lane is listed for sale with an asking price of $3.25-million. Ms. Denwood has already had an open house for agents, and showings are planned for the weekend.
Ms. Seldon is also the host and producer of Design for Living, which airs in 65 countries worldwide. She has a regular gig on CITY-TV's CityLine, and she is the decorating editor of Style at Home magazine.
And in-between, she's selecting furniture, fabrics and artwork for clients in Toronto, Los Angeles and Muskoka, among other places.
All of that travel has Ms. Seldon thinking the time is right for downsizing.
"It's really quite a big house," she says.
Kimberley and Robert Seldon knew exactly where they wanted to live when they began house-hunting about 15 years ago. Mr. Seldon's family was firmly established in Forest Hill at the time and he continues to have lots of relatives living close by. But the couple found most of the houses were out of their price range in the exclusive neighbourhood. When they saw 21 Rosemary Lane, however, Ms. Seldon was taken by its beautiful layout, and knew immediately she wanted to buy the dilapidated old house.
"I fell in love with the house for the floor plan; my husband fell in love with the wide-plank cherry floors," she says of Mr. Seldon, who is in the lumber business.
At the time, there was little competition from rival house-hunters because the home was in "a sad state of disrepair" and full of detritus, she notes.
Another deterrent for some buyers may have been the apartment block that overlooked the yard at the rear.
The Seldons didn't hesitate - they put in an offer immediately. But they were confronted with a larger repair job than they had envisioned.
The cold water plumbing, for example, wasn't working. "When we moved in, we only had scalding hot water," Ms. Seldon explains. "That was a big shock."
So, the first task was to replace all of the plumbing.
Outside, the yard was so overgrown that it took years to tame it.
There was a pond on the property but the couple didn't know about it for two years, she says, looking out at the landscaped garden. It wasn't part of the real estate listing because no one knew it was there.
And the couple rescued the home's original iron gates and lanterns, which were hidden among the weeds, and had them reinstalled.
Ms. Seldon worked with the landscape architectural firm Juergen Partridge Ltd. to create a shady haven on the pie-shaped lot. Tall trees screen the adjacent apartment building, but Ms. Seldon says she has always been comfortable with having the building there because the residents are quiet and she likes the added security of having so many neighbours.
One of Toronto's rare beech trees stands just outside the sunroom at the front. The screened room, with stone floor, is a lovely place for summer cocktails at the end of the day, she says.
"I wish we could use it all year long - we miss it when it closes up after the summer."
In creating the interior, Ms. Seldon has been influenced by her regular trips to Europe. "It's a cerebral job for me," she says. "I really think about the architecture."
Her master bathroom, for example, was inspired by one in her suite in the Hôtel de Crillon on Place de la Concorde in Paris.
"I'm going to have this marble," she decided when she saw the Giallo Siena stone there. She spent a year tracking down a source in Canada.
Because the layout was so gracious, Ms. Seldon says, the only change she made was to enlarge the kitchen and add a family room at the rear. A staircase to the second floor allowed her to add a home office that overlooks the room.
Now the family room is furnished with pieces from Ms. Seldon's own line of furniture.
The kitchen is classic, she says, with white-painted wood cabinets and black granite countertops.
Over all, Ms. Seldon says she was influenced by the architecture of the "simple colonial" to create a house that is traditional but welcoming and informal.
"I wanted it to be really, really homey and comfy," she says of the transformation.
Carolyn Ireland