Peter Yu/Peter Yu
47 Woodfield Rd., Toronto
Asking price: $1,899,000
Land Size: 16.4 by 119 feet
Annual Property Taxes: $8,104.22 (2025)
Listing agent: Lani Fumerton, Union Realty Brokerage Inc.
The backstory
Choosing where to live is often one of those “sliding doors” moments: One of those times when one decision marks a fork in the road away from that other life you might have lived.
In July, Erika Casanova will celebrate her 10-year “Can-niversary” of immigrating to this country. Prior to touching down, she’d never even visited before.
“It’s funny because when I was looking for places to go I had wanted to go to the States. I had been to the States – everyone goes to the States – my sister lives there,” she said.
Ms. Casanova and her sister are part of a wave of Irish emigration that began after the 2008 financial crisis and peaked in 2014 with as many as 89,000 people leaving the country. That burst of immigration added to the Canadian-Irish diaspora that has built up to almost 15 per cent of this country’s population in successive waves over the past 170 years.
“I had friends that lived here and they all loved it. I figured ‘Okay, I’ll go.’ I might be there six weeks, and I’ll have tried it,” she said. “Omigosh, I made the right choice. Here I am 10 years later, very grateful to be a Canadian citizen.”
Ms. Casanova is not just talking about the dark turn of American life (“They are just going to grin and bear it, what else can you do?” she said) but also about how much she’s come to love the lifestyle in Canada. She used to visit her sister in Manhattan more often, but increasingly her sister prefers to travel north to the Casanova house, a little slice of the Canadian dream in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. “She comes here and she can’t believe it’s a 15 minute drive into the city and a 10 minute walk to the beach,” she said.
The Beaches house
Right time, right place has played a big role in Ms. Casanova’s life. Six months after moving to Canada, she met her future husband, Chris, an Air Canada pilot. She knew it was for real when on their third date he presented her with some of her favourite Irish-made Cadbury chocolates (made with more cream and less sugar than the Canadian varieties) when he returned from a trip to Ireland. “My friend said: ‘You have to marry that man.’”
They didn’t marry immediately, but they did buy a condo together fairly early on when they ran the numbers and realized it was cheaper to pay a monthly mortgage than pay monthly rent in downtown Toronto.
But by 2019 they’d grown weary of maintenance fees and managing two dogs in a small space and went on the hunt for a house that would suit their plans to get married and start a family. While it didn’t seem like a lucky stroke at the time, the first pandemic lockdowns were just beginning in early 2020 when they found a home that fit their needs: a beautifully airy and light-filled new-build semi-detached home just off Queen Street East that backed onto Johnathan Ashbridges Park (the western edge of a series of parks and facilities that connects to Woodbine Beach and Ashbridges Bay). They were willing to pull the trigger amid the uncertainty of what would turn into a once-in-a-generation health emergency, and it saved them almost $200,000 compared with the almost identical home – the other half of the semi – that sold a few months later as home prices skyrocketed.
Huge glass windows in the front of the house extend almost from the floor to the 10-foot ceiling, and the front foyer is a landing, with short flights of stairs down to the finished basement and up to the kitchen.
A sliding glass door opens to a covered back porch. The indoor-outdoor living space was a main draw for Ms. Casanova.Peter Yu/Peter Yu
Broad-plank oak floors extend throughout this level, and upstairs to the second floor. The kitchen is a compact but elegant set of mainly white millwork around the cooktop with some wood accents in the range-hood and under the island with its waterfall-edge quartz countertop (the same quartz slab forms a backsplash behind the range). It’s probably not something every homeowner needs, but there is a drawer devoted to treats from Ireland (such as cheese and onion crisps, Barry’s Tea).
A dining area sits in the transition between the kitchen and the living room with another set of tall windows filling the back wall. Beyond the stairway is a large gas fireplace mounted in a wall of oversized tile (TV mounted above). “I love a fireplace, I’ve always grown up with a fireplace – you have to have one in Ireland,” Ms. Casanova said.
A sliding glass door opens to the covered back porch with its view (beyond the home’s rear laneway parking) to the park. This indoor-outdoor living space was a main draw for Ms. Casanova, who is that rare Canadian who has come to love the country for its weather. “If I wake up and it’s a beautiful day, I say: ‘We have to go outside!’ In Ireland when it’s a beautiful day you drop everything else, otherwise it could be three weeks of solid rain,” she said. “Even when it is snowing, I love it. I appreciate the defined seasons here.” Indeed, in Europe only Norway and Iceland have fewer average days of sunshine than Ireland.
Her office on the second floor has the same view, situated in one of the two bedrooms on this level (along with the laundry room), and she’ll often keep the sliding glass doors to the balcony open. On the third floor is the primary suite (also looking onto the park) and her daughter Josie’s room, filled with more light from extra windows slotted into the dormers. The bedrooms on this level also have balconies with a little more privacy than some of the others, which was handy for morning feedings when her daughter was a newborn.
“I’d get up in the morning and feed her up there, Chris would bring me breakfast. It’s great for when you might still be in your pyjamas and you’re not ready to go out in public,” she said. The view from this room also offers another bonus: The CN Tower.
“I look at it every night. The CN tower holds a special place in my heart. It symbolizes Toronto for me. It’s one of the first things I saw when I came,” she said. She liked it so much she let a friend convince her to do the EdgeWalk (where visitors are tethered to the tower as they walk around a ledge on the outside, staring down the vertiginous heights): “It was so cool!”
Home is where you make it
The basement is fully finished with a full bathroom separating a living room on the front side of the house and a play room on the rear. There’s a separate exit to the rear of the house as well as a door that closes it off from the front stairs, so while it doesn’t have a full kitchen, it can, and it has served as a semi-crash pad or guest suite for a number of friends, including connections from Ireland leveraging the diaspora community to make a go at their own Canadian dreams.
“Funnily enough, I came here on my own, but we do have a group of friends now from the same small hometown in Ireland,” Ms. Casanova said, referring to her hometown of Navan (population 33,000) in County Meath about an hour north of the capital in Dublin. “Three of us went to the same school, a Catholic girls-only school, and we’re all here with Canadian partners and Irish-Canadian kids. The Irish community here is so large, so it’s quite nice to have that link: We’re each other’s home.”
For their next home they want a little more room for the dogs to run around in, which may mean moving out of the city, so long as they are within easy access of the airport. After all, there’s still more parts of Canada to visit.