John FitzGerald's photos with the keyword: domestic

It's getting harder to find old photos that fit with the season, so I thought I'd add some photos of supposedly unique Toronto building styles. One of the reasons I say these styles are supposedly unique is that outside Toronto this house would be considered a variety of Queen Anne Revival, the variation being the Romanesque ground floor. In Toronto, though, they're called Annex houses because the style started in a neighbourhood called the Annex. And this is the first one. It was built in 1887 and designed by E. J. Lennox, the leading Toronto architect of the day. He is best known for Old City Hall and Casa Loma.

The bay-and-gable is another domestic architectural style that many consider unique to Toronto, although I have seen a photo of a similar example from Northern Ontario. Anyway, a bay and gable is a Gothic Revival house with a door on one side and a bay window on the other that rises two-and-a-half storeys into a gable. This one retains its original gingerbread in the gable, which is increasingly rare, for understandable reasons. Its mirror-image neighbour has lost its. The Richardsonian-style porch is looking better than most such surviving porches in Toronto -- usually the pillars and piers splay outward, A lot of these porches have been replaced by wrought-iron ones or just removed. There was a craze in Toronto in the 1960s for tearing off the porches of these houses, painting the brick white and the detail black, and replacing any lawn with gravel. Today, though, that style has disappeared and the bay-and-gable has become a meme in Toronto, with many new buildings going up in a stripped-down version of it.