The listing: 208 RIVERSIDE DRIVE, Toronto
Asking price: $1.795-million
Taxes: $17,882.18 (2010)
Square footage: 5,905, including lower level with walk-out and a self-contained studio on the property
Lot size: 120- by 152-feet
Agents: Donna & Nick Thompson (Harvey Kalles Real Estate Ltd.)
The back story:
When Holly Sedgwick's marriage went wrong in the 1990s, she packed her six kids into a car and drove north out of New York to Toronto, the city she had known as a girl when enrolled in a Canadian ballet summer school program.
"I remember first coming here on a bus, and it was the first time I had felt independent," says the American singer/songwriter/painter/dancer whose sister is the actress Kyra Sedgwick (married to actor Kevin Bacon) and whose cousin was Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol's late muse.
"Life changes, that's what I believe in, and I felt that in Toronto I'd find a fresh start." Her main objective was to give her children a safe and nurturing home and so she went looking for a large house in which to accommodate her sizable brood after first slogging it out in a rental in the suburbs. She eventually found what she was looking for in the city's West End, close to the Etobicoke School of the Arts where the majority of her kids were enrolled. The stately Tudor, built circa 1920s, boasts six bathrooms and seven bedrooms, one each for all the children under her skirts.
"I'm a Buddhist and I was fanatic about my religion when married to my Japanese husband. I felt my duty was to make children, and as many as I could, and so in six years I produced six. It was a miracle, and I was thrilled I could do it," says Ms. Sedgwick, who was born in Montreal 56 years ago. "They became my art, my true passion."
After moving into the house she adopted another child, a local boy who had befriended one of her sons and who came from a broken home. Having survived a less-than-rosy domestic situation herself, Ms. Sedgwick felt she could afford to be generous. "The house was big enough," she says, "and by bringing that child into our lives we all grew closer. The house nurtured us all through a great period of love and transition."
The neighbourhood:
High on top a hill with bucolic views extending over the nearby Humber River and Lake Ontario to the south, the house is located on Riverside Drive, a quiet, tree-lined and gentrified street, where Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery used to live. The house next door was her home, named Journey's End, and Montgomery lived there from 1935 until her death in 1942. A historic plaque dedicated to her memory stands in a nearby park. The neighbourhood's atmosphere of artistic creation permeates the Sedgwick house which has produced a few artists of its own. Ms. Sedgwick's son George Nozuka is today a rhythm and blues singer better known by his stage name, George, while Justin Nozuka is a singer-songwriter whose debut album, Holly, was named for-you-know-who. When her sons started touring, Ms. Sedgwick admits to feeling envious: Creating music was her dream, too. "So I turned the garage into an artist's studio and cut my own album," she says.
Best feature:
The house is designed with a surfeit of windows that flood the interior with light and warmth. One of the sunniest is the eat-in kitchen whose five slender and rectangular windows overlook the Humber River and the in-ground pool that Ms. Sedgwick installed shortly after moving in with her brood in 2002. Ms. Sedgwick calls the kitchen her favourite room in the house: "It's like a tree house," she says. She wrote her memoirs at the kitchen table, an as-yet-to-be-published book documenting her upbringing in Washington, D.C. as the step-daughter of Philip M. Stern, the American philanthropist, author and former Democratic Party activist who once worked in the John F. Kennedy administration. Ms. Sedgwick says she grew up used to having dinner with such illustrious guests as John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-American economist who frequently graced her parent's dinner table. Yet despite the nannies, the chauffeurs, the summers at ballet school, a teenager's apartment in New York's famed Dakota, Ms. Sedgwick's life wasn't the stuff of her famous sister's Hollywood movies. Darkness tinges her life's story, so much so that she has lately taken to converting her autobiography into a work of fiction -- the names changed to protect the guilty -- rewriting it all in her sunny Riverside Drive kitchen. "The house has been an inspiration to me," she says. "I've loved creating in it." When it sells the plan is to move back to Washington, to be close to her mother, a major influence on Ms. Sedgwick's book, art and fascinating life.