Lukas Peters Photography
11B Gilead Place, Toronto
Lot Size: 16.17 by 42.49 feet
Asking price: $1,850,000
Property Taxes: $7,954 (2025)
Listing agents: Jill and Bill Parlee, Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd.
The backstory
When people talk about “dream houses” they don’t always mean that their sleeping hours are literally invaded by images of a house they want.
“I use dreams a lot – I have all my life – they help me inform my business; I had this dream about the house,” said Louise Lipman, one half of the couple that owns 11B Gilead Place, which they purchased a decade ago after Ms. Lipman’s real estate agent brought her to a showing that initially didn’t bowl her over. She wasn’t looking for a townhouse, wasn’t looking for the east side of Toronto. But that night her dreams turned to Gilead Place.
“Because I tend to dream visually; the actual architecture of the house got imprinted on me. I just couldn’t get it out of my head,” she said. “I just had to see it again – the way you do when you see great art. I told my husband, ‘You need to see this,’ and he had the same, exact impression.”
Ms. Lipman listens to her instincts – she’s been an art dealer and gallery operator for decades in Toronto and Los Angeles – but is not prone to making snap financial decisions. Still, with this home, she moved to buy it within days of visiting.
But a funny thing happened over the next decade: the house was filled with books and art and furniture and she organized each of the levels into separate “environments” that served their own purpose and she stopped seeing the whole. That’s when the modernist lines delivered by architect Brian Kucharski came back into focus for her, complimented by the finishes that were built into the space by original owner, Todd Wood (an industrial designer who played a key role in the look of some of the iconic BlackBerry devices when he was with the company between 2006 and 2014).
“When I think of the house now, it’s as a sculpture. But I never had before,” Ms. Lipman said.
Environment 1: Enter into the middle
The townhouses of Gilead Place are almost soldierly with their columns of slate brick separating the glass window-walls, which are uniform in their irregularity: Each section has multiple sizes of glazing and one or two panels of red-tinted glass on each level.
Up a flight of steps from the street you enter into the main living level, with kitchen and a short set of steps up to the living room/dining level. The kitchen with luminous white cabinets (and very little in the way of wall-mounted upper shelving) is from Antje Bulthaup (of the German kitchen brand) and was a custom addition to the builder’s original design. Many of the units in this row have their own customizations, according to Ms. Lipman. Mr. Wood favoured broad plank flooring, smooth lines, with the drawers uninterrupted by hardware or pulls. There is minimal colour on walls or built ins.
A long and tall kitchen table with a wavy live-edge is solid enough to look like a built-in island, but it was chosen by Mr. Wood as well. “I bought a bunch of their furniture: the kitchen table is fabulous, they had fabulous taste and it spoke to me,” said Ms. Lipman.
The kitchen looks out into the laneway, the living room looks to the Corktown row-houses and the rear laneway to the garages. This living area was often used as an office for Ms. Lipman – with a backdrop of a modernist bookshelf the stagers urged her to remove – and when the couple would entertain her desk would turn into a bar. There’s still lots of Ms. Lipman’s art around, and a bold blue feature wall at the rear of the room.
“It’s a seriously good party house, people would come in and wouldn’t want to leave,” she said.
Bedroom levels
The guest bedroom (above the kitchen) and the primary suite use frosted-glass sliding doors to achieve privacy while keeping the light flowing into the stairwell. The guest bedroom has a floor-to-ceiling sliding panel for its closet space and a second bathroom on this level sits just outside this room.
The primary bedroom uses the same frosted glass to separate the ensuite bath, which has more of the luminous whites of the kitchen on the counters and the subway tile in the shower. There’s also more light-grained wood in the cabinetry and oversized tile that picks up the same warm oaky colour.
Loft and terrace
Home of the Week, 11B Gilead Place, TorontoLukas Peters Photography
This final indoor environment opens loftlike at the top of the stairs, and when used as a workspace it’s almost “another world” according to Ms. Lipman, with views toward the downtown core from the balcony, that leads to the rooftop terrace.
There are many stairs in this townhouse of many levels, and they are all the same floating design with matte black steel treads and risers. Some homes in the row put wood on the treads, but the simplicity of the minimalist material here provides a pleasing contrast with the light walls and windows. It’s another choice by Mr. Wood that Ms. Lipman has appreciated more over time.
“He picked materials that are very sensual, very sensuous materials, they are beautiful to look at but they are more than just that … it really comes together,” said Ms. Lipman.
Environment -1: Half-basement studio
When they moved in, her husband, Simon Schneiderman, was a practising lawyer and litigator as well as an artist working primarily in watercolours. In the late 90s he wrote and illustrated a comic strip for Law Times based on his courtroom observations, but it was while on Gilead that he reinvented that observational work into a new series called Making Law.
“Because he was a lawyer he would be in court and people thought he was making copious notes, but he was drawing judges and people on the stand,” said Ms. Lipman. “When I saw the drawings in his sketchbook one day – he’s a writer as well, they were very funny – we have to figure out how to publish these.”
He had a studio in the nearby Distillery District filled with his work, but during the pandemic lockdown Mr. Schneiderman moved his studio into the basement, which is only a few feet below grade and has tall windows at street level (and also its own powder room). In a space that reads more like a second floor than a basement, examples of his work line the walls. If the mood takes you, you can raise the blinds and people watch the neighbourhood.
As the world shifted to zoom meetings and online sales Mr. Lipman realized there could be a new market for his prints and sketches. They shifted to making oversized vignettes celebrating and lightly joshing the black-robed community of working lawyers. As more and more courtroom hearings also go online-only, Mr. Schneiderman’s scenes from Canadian law may soon represent an essential record of a bygone era.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the name of architect Brian Kucharski.