Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1146

To celebrate the launch of their Guide to Cosy Homes (2015) , Monocle Films produced a number of home tours. 

Die Es, pictured above, is the home of South African architects Gawie and Gwen Fagan. They started building their home in 1964, just as they were starting their practice. 

Because of this, they had little money and had to do a lot of the work themselves. They sold their car to buy a concrete mixer.

Although they didn’t set out to explicitly design a “Cape” house, it ended up that way, with heavy thermal masses, white walls, and so on. 

The architecture also relates very closely to the surrounding landscape – as it should – in the way in which it frames views of the water and mountains. 

The mediterranean climate also really comes through in the materiality of the home and the connections to outside.

If you’d like to watch the 5 minute tour of Die Es, click here .

Yesterday it was announced ( here , here , and here ) that Toronto-based Top Hat has raised $22.5 million (USD) in Series-C funding. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures .

I am always excited to see Toronto-based startups doing well and I am particularly excited by this remark in USV’s blog announcement :

“Also worth noting is that Toronto continues to impress us with its quality and diversity of companies. We now have five investments there, placing Toronto third as a location in the USV portfolio after New York and San Francisco.”

Here is another quote from Fred Wilson’s blog :

“Toronto is a great place for startups. In addition to five investments of ours that are HQ’d there, I know of at least one other USV portfolio company that has much of their engineering team in Toronto. The talent, mindset, and quality of the people in the Toronto/Waterloo tech/startup community is really top notch and we love investing there.”

Go Toronto. 

(Of course, Toronto really means Toronto-Waterloo. That’s the geography of the ecosystem.)

Anyone who has ridden Toronto’s King streetcar during rush hour can tell you that the service is broken. It’s unreliable. It’s overcrowded. And during peak times it can be faster to walk. Chart below.

Part of the problem is a misallocation of resources . Only 16% of the people who use the corridor are in cars. And yet 64% of the physical space is allocated to drivers.

Not surprisingly, this creates a bottleneck for the ~65,000 transit riders who use the service daily. (Busiest surface route in the region.) We are not optimizing for the right variable.

It’s for this reason that the city is working on a rethink of the corridor. I wrote about this initiative last year, but earlier this week it got a bit more real with the release of the following 3 pilot block options.

The plan is to launch a pilot sometime this fall (2017). This is good news. 

If you’d like to go through the full King Street Pilot Study Public Meeting presentation, you can do that by clicking here . The above images were taken from that presentation.