The York Region Estate Home, Then and Now

There is a street in South Richvale where you can read forty years of taste from the sidewalk. A brick centre-hall colonial from the mid-1980s, its shutters still painted. Next door, a stone-fronted house from the late 1990s with a two-storey arched window over the door. Across the road, a flat-roofed modern house in dark brick and glass finished within the last few years, and beside that, a white farmhouse-modern with black windows and a standing-seam roof. Each was the estate home of its moment. Each still sells. This is a short account of how that happened and what it tells owners now.

The first generation: the 1980s and early 1990s

The modern estate home in York Region begins with land. Through the 1980s, the large lots of South Richvale, the old Thornhill streets east and west of Yonge, and the new planned estate subdivisions in Bayview Hill and Woodbridge gave builders and buyers something Toronto could not: a half-acre or more, often with mature trees or a ravine, within reach of the city. The houses built on them followed two models.

The first was the centre-hall colonial, in red or buff brick, with a symmetrical façade, a two-storey hall with the stair facing the door, formal living and dining rooms to either side and the kitchen and family room across the back. It was a conservative house for buyers who wanted to signal arrival without novelty, and it was built in enormous numbers. The second was the French château, with its steep hipped roofs, dormers, stone or stucco walls and arched openings, which carried a European reference that appealed strongly to the families, many of them recent arrivals from Italy and elsewhere in Europe, who were building in Woodbridge and Thornhill at the time.

What those buyers wanted was formality, separation and presence from the street. Rooms were rooms. The kitchen was for working, the dining room was for dinner, and the family did its living in a room at the back that guests did not see. Ceilings were nine feet on the main floor, sometimes less. Windows were sized to the elevation. The garage faced the street, because the car was part of the presence.

The second generation: the late 1990s and 2000s

By the end of the 1990s the houses had grown. Stone replaced brick on the front elevations, the entry foyer rose to two storeys with a curving stair and a large window above the door, and plans became more elaborate: a library, a conservatory or solarium, a main-floor office, a second staircase, a finished lower level with a theatre and a bar. Ceilings reached ten feet and more on the main floor. The French and Mediterranean references continued, joined by a vaguely Georgian formality in the Richmond Hill estate subdivisions and by the first Tuscan-influenced houses in Woodbridge and Kleinburg.

These houses reflected a generation that had built wealth and wanted room to display it, and they were planned for entertaining at scale. The kitchen moved toward the centre of family life and grew to match, but it was still a working room with a separate breakfast area, and the formal dining room survived. The garage was often three bays and still faced forward, now with carriage-style doors. This is the stock that fills the premium courts of Bayview Hill, the later phases of Islington Woods and Weston Downs, and many of the rebuilt lots in Thornhill. Much of it is now at the age where owners decide between a deep renovation and a replacement.

The third generation: the 2010s to now

The shift that began in Toronto’s established neighbourhoods reached York Region’s estate streets a few years later, and it is now the dominant mode for new construction: the flat-roofed or low-pitched modern house, in dark brick, stone, wood and large expanses of glass, with an open main floor and the principal rooms turned toward the garden rather than the street. Alongside it, two softer variants appeal to buyers who find pure modernism cold. The farmhouse-modern, with its white or pale walls, black window frames, gabled roofs and board-and-batten or standing-seam detail, has become the most common new house on many Richmond Hill and Vaughan streets. The transitional house, which keeps a traditional silhouette and symmetry but strips the ornament and enlarges the windows, is the compromise that suits the widest range of buyers.

What this generation wants is light, flow and the garden. The kitchen is the main room, often with a scullery behind it to keep the visible surfaces clean. The formal dining room has either vanished or shrunk. Ceilings are tall throughout, windows are scaled to rooms and views, and the garage, wherever possible, is turned to the side or set below grade so that the elevation reads as a house rather than a row of doors. Technology is built in and hidden. The lower level is a second living floor with its own light, not a basement.

The buyers are different too. Many are the children of the first generation, selling a parent’s château and building something lighter on the same kind of lot. Many are moving north from Toronto with a taste already formed by what they saw there. A good share are building for a multi-generational household, which is why the ground-floor suite and the separate entrance have become standard.

What holds value

Across all three generations, a pattern is clear. Style dates; land does not. The houses that have held their value through every shift are the ones on wide, treed or ravine lots with sensible plans and good proportions, whatever their elevation. A 1980s colonial with ten-foot ceilings, a square plan and a south-facing garden has been renovated into a transitional house more than once; a 1980s colonial with low ceilings on a narrow lot has been replaced. The château with stone walls and a generous structure gets a new interior; the château built lightly over a stock plan gets a demolition permit.

The second thing that holds value is restraint. Houses that pushed their style to the limit, whether a riot of columns in 2002 or an all-glass box in 2018, appeal to a narrower band of buyers at resale than houses that kept their proportions and let the lot do the talking. Transitional design endures for that reason; it does not ask the next owner to share the first owner’s taste.

The third is quality of plan and construction, which no elevation can disguise. Buyers walking through a thirty-year-old house are checking ceiling heights, structural spans, window sizes and how the rooms relate to the garden, because those decide whether the house can be renovated into the present or must give way to something new.

For owners now

If you own a first- or second-generation estate home in South Richvale, Bayview Hill, Thornhill or Woodbridge, the question is rarely whether your house is in fashion. It is whether the lot, the structure and the plan can carry the next generation’s expectations, and whether the right buyer is an end user who will renovate or a builder who will replace. Those are different buyers with different prices, and the answer shapes how the house should be marketed. We are glad to walk through and tell you honestly which yours is. Tell us about your home and we will arrange a time.