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Urban designs with inner courtyards

Admiral Beez

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Whenever I go to Europe I admire single family homes with inner courtyards. They're close up against the street out front, while providing open air space inside. Are there any buildings like this in Toronto?
 
Whenever I go to Europe I admire single family homes with inner courtyards. They're close up against the street out front, while providing open air space inside. Are there any buildings like this in Toronto?

I know of one house with an open court yard near Casa Loma, but it's not right up next to the street. I'm sure there are probably some in the Bridal Path area too. There are two reasons why I think they are not very popular here. One is snow - I suspect it's difficult to get the snow out of your court yard in winter. Two is property line setbacks - most single family residential areas don't allow you to build right up to the property line so you need a really big lot to achieve an effective courtyard layout, which is only economically viable for the uber-rich.

In order to make it practical for the average single family home you would need to allow the building to go right up to the property line on all sides and that would have a negative impact on your neighbours unless they built the same style of house. In other words it's not easy to mix typical North American style homes surrounded by yards with zero-lotline courtyard style houses on the same block. If you were going to build courtyard houses you would probably need to build a whole block of them and get special zoning to allow it. Then you start to get into Ontario building code issues too.
 
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