We finally took some proper photos of our future home and shop! Ain’t she a beaut? This part of Dundas Street West has some pretty special looking historic buildings, whether it be like our three-storey with bay windows or the old-timey store fronts with grand entranceways all 1950s tiles, decorative windows and original hardwood flooring. The current owners of our future building are Urbanscape, an architectural firm and gallery. They refinished the front of the building up to historical codes and threw in a modern store front for good measure. The only thing left for us to do is to create our own identity through altering the wood slats and signage, get new bay windows sometime down the line (the windows are old and not very efficient) and to get rid of the roosting pigeons because I have been royally pooped on in the past and have a sort of neurosis when it comes to stuff from above.

A close up of the upper two floors and the cute decorative peaked roof. John wants to change the colour of the shingles at some point. It’s actually pretty neat looking at this photo because I didn’t realize how much detail there is!

We’re hoping the kikis will like sitting in the big bay windows. Sadly, there will be no sun in these giant windows as we are north facing.

Modern store front! We will change the signage (obviously) and the thin red slats are going to be replaced with thicker overlapping wood slats stained black–think Norwegian cottage meets Victorian Toronto!

The nice big windows and recessed door create a fairly large display area.

Originally we thought we were going to open the shop only using this front part but we are realizing with 3 living and 3 dining sets (to meet 3 price points), PLUS an awesome children’s section, kitchenware, antique/vintage rugs, home accessories and lighting, we are going to need to use all of our first floor space, so thank goodness it stretches back to about double the size you see here.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the store transformation from Urbanscape gallery to our shop (still a bit of a secret for now…). Until then…

…we’ll see you across the street at Margret, our soon to be local with dangerous proximity to our front door.