Toronto has few 75-year old housing projects with the urbanity of Ancroft Place. Conceived in 1926 as a way to redevelop a large, old estate with a minimal frontage on the east side of North Sherbourne Street above Bloor, it consists of 21 houses grouped into three blocks. Five dwellings face the main street (Sherbourne), while 16 others have numbers on Ancroft Place, a side street close to the south edge of the property. The units vary in size from six to nine rooms. Behind the buildings a lane leads to the service entrances and heated, private garages that are attached to each unit. The architects for the complex, Shepard and Calvin of Toronto, succeeded brilliantly in creating an informal pattern of clustered residences in the English cottage style, where none looks directly into the windows of a near neighbour. While appearing as separate dwellings, the houses are in fact in a single ownership and share a common heating plant.

Stephen A. Otto