Book celebrates 'patchwork city'

Each Toronto neighbourhood has ‘distinctive look and feel’

As a new book sets out to illustrate, Toronto delivers something for just about every architecture aficionado and is moving away from its reputation as a ‘beige’ or ‘safe’ city when it comes to design.

“Toronto is a bit of a patchwork city, with 158 official neighbourhoods, each with a distinctive look and feel and many smaller enclaves within each one,” says Catherine MacIntosh, author of Toronto Interiors: Modern Residential Design (Figure 1 Publishing, Sept. 9, 2025).

“You have Victorian rowhouses in Cabbagetown, neo-Tudors in the Kingsway, post-war bungalows in East York, beautiful Edwardians in Rosedale and, of course, the many brick semis downtown. It’s densely woven, too, so any new build has to find a way to fit in – a w