From the entrance of Unit G1, a ground-floor apartment in a 1950s rental building in Danforth-East York, it’s clear this home wasn’t in the original plan. Its most eye-catching feature, a fire-engine red front entrance, opens up to a yet-untouched one-bedroom apartment, bathed in a fresh coat of white paint.
In the middle of the living space, there’s a small glint of metal on the floor from a drainage cleanout access cover. But there are few hints, otherwise, that this space wasn’t always an apartment: until recently, it was a garage.
What was once a row of nine garages at the base of a 26-unit, four-storey rental building — garages the owner says were mostly used as storage in recent years — has been gutted and rearranged as apartments, with a one-bedroom and three studios. It’s one of the latest cases in Toronto of “adaptive reuse” — or using different types of buildings to add housing, like the recent efforts to convert underused office spaces into living set-ups.
Brayden Irwin, whose company bought the rental building at 325 Sammon Ave. in 2019, says this is how he always imagined using the ground-floor space. He pointed to the new picture windows and polished concrete floors in the one-bedroom that he says aimed for a “loft” feel. The splashy red doors, he said, were the idea of architects from Steven Fong Architecture.
“There is, I think, a missing segment in the rental market,” Irwin told the Star, saying they aimed to create “stylish” units without sky-high prices. “I’m not talking about the least expensive units on the market — but what we’re trying to do is offer a really high-quality product in that middle-market range.”
At $2,300 per month for the one-bedroom and $1,900 for a studio, the new units are a few hundred dollars below the average price of a new-build rental in Toronto, which as of late 2025 was about $2,500 for a one-bedroom and $2,200 for a studio, per market research firm Urbanation.
To proceed with its garage conversion plan, the company of which Irwin is president, 2712866 Ontario Ltd., needed permission from Toronto’s committee of adjustment.
At a hearing in late 2022, a neighbour raised concerns about noise and a lack of discussion with neighbours. The committee, too, was hesitant to say yes, and asked for more clarity on what would happen to the asphalt outside of the new front doors: could vehicles still park there, or would it be new green space?
At a second hearing in 2023, Irwin’s team presented a new site plan that showed a walkway replacing the asphalt where cars used to park, with gardens, greenery outside the doors, and trees along the property line. It was enough to win over their neighbour, who said they fully supported a plan to add more rentals and “much-needed green space.”
There was no on-site parking planned for the building, which is located about ten minutes’ walk away from Greenwood TTC station.
Work began in earnest in 2024. Changing use wasn’t a simple process, Irwin said: in their case, it included breaking up the concrete below the old garages, replumbing then repouring the concrete, plus months of back-and-forth over whether the building’s electrical system needed upgrading, which he said could have cost more than $100,000. That wasn’t ultimately needed, he said.
“Something like that would have really been the difference of us being able to do this project and not,” Irwin said. He felt the process of getting clarity on the path forward was more drawn out than needed: “It shouldn’t be this difficult, especially when there’s such a need for this type of housing.”
This kind of adaptive project in an existing space can be cheaper than building new, Irwin said. He said their team, which finished the new units in January, wound up spending between $300,000 and $350,000 per apartment.
On chilly day in mid-March, the space in front of the new apartments was covered by a thin layer of snow. A row of young cedar trees had been planted near the property line, and the asphalt had been replaced with a walkway, soil and pea gravel, with Irwin noting that some spaces had been earmarked for garden beds. The design of the outdoor space isn’t finished, he said, noting they were consulting with a landscape architect on what to add.
“There are a lot of things I would love to do, but we’re restrained by how much things cost. At the end of the day, it’s an investment. There has to be a return on that investment,” he said, noting additional landscaping would likely take place in the spring or summer.
To Matti Siemiatycki, a University of Toronto expert in housing and city planning issues, the renovation on Sammon Avenue is a case study in “gentle intensification” — and the kind of inventiveness he’d like to see replicated.
“On their own, these types of projects are a drop in the ocean. But combined and done at scale, they can start to have an impact,” Siemiatycki said.
“If we look at all the assets of the private sector, the city, different NGOs and various stakeholders, there are likely thousands — if not tens of thousands — of these types of spaces that are, in one way or another, underused.”
Of the four new units, Irwin says three have so far been leased. One has been rented to a couple moving from Brazil, he said — one had secured a work permit and the other was pursuing a graduate degree. Another unit was rented to a man who used to live in an upstairs unit, Irwin said, who moved out of town for a while but wanted to return to the same community.
Irwin sees projects like theirs as adding more housing choice — and an option for tenants who are looking to live outside of areas filled with highrises.
“We obviously have a housing shortage in the city, and I think that is something that has been known for quite some time,” Irwin said.
“I think a lot of people want to live in areas where they have a connection to the ground and the neighbourhood around — as opposed to being in a box in the sky.”
