Areas we serveLeaside
Stone masonry & landscaping in Leaside.
Heritage-era stone masonry in Leaside. Ten years of matching old-Toronto brick, house by house, without a heritage district requiring it.
A heritage study was recommended for Leaside in 2018. It never proceeded.
What stayed instead was the neighbourhood itself: a planned early-twentieth-century garden suburb, and the homeowners who still take its age seriously even without a plaque to make them.
Is Leaside a heritage district?
No. A heritage study was recommended for Leaside in 2018; it never proceeded. Leaside's homes are heritage-era, old enough to deserve careful matching, without carrying a formal heritage designation or the permit process that comes with one. That doesn't lower the standard of the work; it just means the standard comes from us, not from a permit office.
Can you match brick that isn't made anymore?
Sourcing from the heritage brickmakers who can still produce a discontinued clay brick and recreating it on-site ourselves aren't a strict either/or; which one a given repair needs depends on the wall. In practice, on-site recreation more often means a dye-matched facing than a whole-brick remake, since every brick in an old Leaside wall was already a little different from its neighbour.
We’ve worked heritage-era homes in Leaside for close to ten years, not because the neighbourhood has a heritage district, but because the houses themselves are old enough to deserve the care of one anyway. A heritage study was recommended for Leaside in 2018. It never proceeded. What stayed instead was the neighbourhood itself: a planned early-twentieth-century garden suburb, and the homeowners who still take its age seriously even without a plaque to make them.
Heritage-era, not a formal heritage designation
Worth saying plainly, because the two get confused: a heritage-era home is simply an old one, built when Leaside was young, with the brick and brickwork of its period. A home with a formal heritage designation carries a city listing and the permit process that comes with it. Leaside’s homes are mostly the former.
Matching what a decade of practice knows
Ten years in the same streets teaches you what Leaside brick actually looks like, decade by decade, and what to do when the original stock isn’t made anymore. Sourcing from the heritage brickmakers who can still produce it and recreating on-site ourselves aren’t a strict either/or; which one a given repair needs depends on the wall. In practice, on-site recreation more often means a dye-matched facing than a whole-brick remake, since every brick in an old Leaside wall was already a little different from its neighbour. That same decade of practice extends to stone: on landmark and heritage-significant work, it’s matched by hand-chiselling rather than swapped for a machine-cut replacement. The goal on every Leaside job is the same: work that looks like it was always there, not work that was added later.
Get in touch
If you own a heritage-era home in Leaside, we’d like to hear about it. Get in touch, and let’s talk about what the house needs to keep looking like itself.
Recent work
Location & project details confirmed with Daniel before publish
