Richmond Mews

History of Richmond Mews

Nobody has pinned down exactly when 287 Richmond Street East was built. It is missing from the 1924 Goad's fire insurance map, but it is there in the city's 1947 aerial photos, so it went up sometime in between. Who built it, and for what, is unknown.

What is documented is its life as a photo lab. Benjamin Film Laboratories was founded in Toronto in 1952 by George Benjamin, a chemist who had worked in Germany and England after the Second World War, to develop colour film. A July 5, 1982 Toronto Star ad for Benjamin Quality Photofinishing, sold through dealers across Ontario, gives its retail location as 287 Richmond Street East, and Benjamin ads ran in the Star through 1991. Listing photos from 1992 and 1996 still show the “Benjamin Film Laboratories Ltd.” sign across the front, over a row of green awnings; the 1996 sale is the one that led to the conversion.

Back then the building was only two and a half storeys of brown brick, with the lowest floor partly below the sidewalk. Around 1997 it was converted into 15 lofts on five floors: two storeys were added on top, the outside was finished in stucco, and the small domed canopy over the front door, a fixture for decades, was kept. Owners began reselling units in 1998, the year the building was registered as condominium corporation MTCC 1206.

Inside are high ceilings, hardwood floors, wood-slat ceilings and big multi-pane warehouse windows framed in exposed brick. Units run from just under 800 to about 1,300 square feet, on one level or two, and the two-storey lofts up top open onto private rooftop terraces. There are no amenities to speak of; parking is a surface lot behind the building. It shares the corner with two other conversions: Imperial Lofts, which shares the parking lot, and Liberty Lofts across Sherbourne and Adelaide.

Stories you'll hear

“It was a musical-instrument factory.” This is the story most listing sites repeat, but no record backs it up, and nobody can say what kind of instruments were made here. One theory, unproven: the story drifted over from the old Heintzman piano factory a block away at Sherbourne and Adelaide.

“Alan Gordon converted it.” Often repeated, but there is no developer or architect of that name on record; an Alan Gordon does appear among the first owners who resold units.