Canadian interior designer Montana Labelle’s $5M personal home showcases her signature mix of warm tones, marble and combination of textures and patterns.
It’s “always the most fun” to bring your vision for your own home to life, says Toronto-based celebrity interior designer Montana Labelle.
Her four-bed, six-bath home has gone up for sale for just shy of $5 million and there isn’t one room where she hasn’t put her personal touch on it.
Her favourite room is the kitchen, she tells Yahoo Finance Canada.
“I just think it’s a very unique departure from the sort of typical white kitchen with the white Statuario marble,” she says. “It’s more of a classic kitchen and a fresh palette.”
Potential buyers will find marble finishes and an impressive mix of patterns and textures throughout the house.
Labelle and her husband Russell Gozlan, owner of home construction company Gozlan Group, haven’t owned the 3,800-square-foot home for too long.
They bought it in 2021 and over the span of a surprisingly quick nine-month period, they did a complete gut job and added a two-storey addition, which became the kitchen and master ensuite.
Gozlan says the ensuite is his favourite room because of the his and hers sinks and marble bathtub.
“There was nothing left of it except for the existing mainstream walls. Everything in this house is brand new, top of the line from the studs all the way up to the finishing,” Gozlan said.
Before the reno, the home was a “very basic Toronto home,” Labelle says. “There was really nothing to it that was super interesting or unique.”
But when she walks into a room, she says she can envision “pretty quickly” what she wants it to look like. She was already playing around with design ideas from the first day she saw the home, she says.
She describes her style as “lived-in modern.”
“While it definitely feels more on the contemporary side, there’s a lot of textures and just as much interest as possible to not make it feel sterile and cool,” she said.
“We always want it to have a great warmth and interest to it while, in my opinion, still feeling a bit classic and not too specific of an era. We never would want someone to look at it and be like, Oh, that was done in 2006 or 2012, we want it to stand the test of time.”
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
