8 Crown Park Rd., Toronto
Asking price: $14,799,999
Lot size: 214 by 138 feet
Taxes: $28,368 (2025)
Listing Agent: Shea Warrington, Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd.
The backstory
Sometimes you choose a house, and sometimes it seems as though the house chooses you.
David Poppleton felt as if he had “no choice” in the matter when purchasing 8 Crown Park Rd. and completing a renovation that pushed what was known as Longwood House to new heights, particularly once he first got a close look back in 2019.
Mr. Poppleton was semi-retired after a financial services software business he had led was sold. He had dabbled in real estate investing with custom-home builder Frank Blasi and when Mr. Blasi called him up to tell him 8 Crown Park was up for sale, it struck a chord. Mr. Poppleton knew the property well: his primary home has been around the corner for more than a decade.
“The plan was: this is a huge lot, you could put in a few homes on it,” said Mr. Blasi, whom Mr. Poppleton hired to undertake the renovation.
Inside, the home had been subdivided into six apartments, and much of the turn-of-the-century charm had been erased. But as soon as Mr. Poppleton saw the unusual clinker bricks used on the exterior and stood in the living room looking out into the semiwild yard below, the plans changed. He knew there was nothing else like this house in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. He felt he had no choice but to breathe new life into the property.
Today, walking around the home, Mr. Poppleton will stop to admire some feature, to explain a choice, almost in awe of its transformation.
Owner David Poppleton felt called to buy and renovate this Beaches property in Toronto.Negin Javaherimilani/Dreamocean
“Just look at this clinker brick,” he points at one of the iron-rich bricks on the home that had been fired too hot and then broke, lost its uniform shape or even merged with another brick. It’s a look popular with the Arts and Crafts movement that lasted until the early 20th century (when this home was built), but “the Beach is pretty well the only place in Toronto you have these,” he said.
The house today
The home is located in a pocket of the Beaches that’s well known for its leafy roads that wind down through slopes decorated with all manner of homes as the landscape descends toward the lakefront. From the outside, it seems like a fairly normal house, a bit wider than average perhaps, sitting at the end of the cul-de-sac with land falling away from it to the west.
Inside, it has more than 8,000 square feet of living space spread across 20 rooms on three levels.
The house feels even larger thanks in part to the almost 10-foot-tall ceilings and an open floor plan on the half of the main level that covers the living room and kitchen. The exterior shell was kept and lovingly repaired, but most of the interior has been replaced. Mr. Blasi compliments the original builders who used steel beams inside the home to create wide, inviting spaces, quite unusual for a 100-year-old residential structure.
Wide-plank white-oak flooring fills most of the house, where it isn’t interrupted by tile. A huge free-standing fireplace in the living room defines that space from the large entertaining kitchen behind (a large butler’s pantry helps keep some of the kitchen prep work out of this showroom).
Mr. Blasi’s team added some curved and rounded design elements – softening the corners of that fireplace, a stone kitchen counter peninsula ending in a semicircle and marble tiles in a scalloped pattern in the foyer, evoking the Art Deco era. Mr. Poppleton had to be brought around on some choices – he generally prefers straight lines and squares. He insisted the windows must all line up across the main floor and all have the same rectangular Bauhaus-inspired black-painted frames.
With white walls, lots of windows and generous space, each of the main-floor rooms – from the formal dining room to the separate office to the eat-in kitchen area – could serve as an art studio (as a recent house-hunter suggested). On the back of the house, there’s access to a large outdoor deck fitted with all the hookups needed for a full outdoor kitchen.
The basement level was going to be a dark, pub-like man cave, but again, Mr. Poppleton felt the generous amounts of light coming from the at-grade walkout to the enormous side yard meant it should stay light and inviting. A wide patio wraps around on the ground level with multiple exits to connect the inside to the landscape beyond.
The home's asking price is $14.8-million.Negin Javaherimilani/Dreamocean
A media room, a games room and a wall of glassed-in wine storage set the table for entertaining. A nanny suite on this level makes for the fifth bedroom, with the remaining four on the top floor.
There are laundry rooms on the top and basement levels, as well as three furnaces (one just for the top floor) to keep everything cozy.
The primary suite takes up almost a third of the top floor with its five-piece ensuite and walk-in closet. A coffee bar installed next to the deep covered balcony means Mr. Poppleton doesn’t need to traipse down to the kitchen for his morning java.
What’s fair is fair
It wasn’t until this summer that Mr. Poppleton realized the house had made another decision for him.
Work on the house took about 18 months, but there were niggling landscaping issues that took time (and a lot of money) to work out. Mr. Poppleton had gotten used to taking his poodle for a stroll in the yard to check on progress, and it struck him on one of these jaunts that he still hadn’t moved in full-time like he’d planned.
“I was just doing a lot of travelling in the spring with my sons and I have a cottage up on Lake Joseph,” where he spends most of the summer, he said. “I hadn’t been in the house for a while. I just said, ‘It’s really not fair to this house, you know, that we restored and did all this stuff, and it doesn’t have a family loving it.’”
He had envisioned barbecues, graduation parties, weddings in the backyard – the kind of memories a family could make together. Memories he wasn’t finding the time to make.
While he had “no choice” but to fix up the house, perhaps it was time to sell, and allow someone else to enjoy the fruits of that labour.