Forest Hill Lofts, 1001 Roselawn Ave: A Yarn Factory With Hydro Included

Forest Hill Lofts is the building I show buyers who say they want a real loft but can’t stomach downtown prices. It is a 1930s yarn factory with roughly 13-foot ceilings and exposed columns, and its maintenance fee covers hydro as well as heat and parking, which almost nobody offers anymore. The name oversells the postal code, though, and I’ll explain why that matters. I’m Jatin Dua, RE/MAX Quantum Realty.

A real factory, not a loft-style condo

There is a lot of marketing in Toronto that calls a concrete box with a high ceiling a loft. This is not that. 1001 Roselawn was the Canadian headquarters of Coats Paton, the textile company behind the Beehive knitting yarn brand, and the building dates to the 1930s.

The conversion kept what buyers actually pay for in a hard loft: ceilings of about 13 feet, large expanses of glass, and exposed structural steel or fluted concrete columns depending on where you are in the building. Some suites have a raised mezzanine or sleeping level reached by a steel staircase.

That industrial bone structure is the whole reason to be here. If you want the ceiling volume and the original columns without paying King West or Liberty Village money, this is one of the few places in midtown-north Toronto where it exists at this scale.

A conversion also behaves differently from new construction. Walls between suites were added inside an old shell, windows and roofs have their own replacement schedule, and services were threaded through a structure never designed for 137 households. None of that is a reason to walk away, but it is a reason to ask a few more questions than you would at a 2015 tower.

The fee covers your hydro, and that is rare

Look at the fee inclusions before you look at the fee. At Forest Hill Lofts, the monthly maintenance covers common elements, heat, hydro, air conditioning, building insurance, water and parking. Hydro inclusion has almost disappeared from Toronto condos, and in a suite with 13-foot ceilings and big factory windows, heating and cooling that volume of air is not cheap.

So when a fee here looks high on a per-square-foot basis, compare it honestly. A newer building with a lower fee usually sends you a separate hydro bill, often bills parking separately, and sometimes meters heat too. Add those back and the gap narrows, and in some months it reverses.

The other side of that coin: bundled utilities mean every owner shares the cost of the heaviest user, and energy price increases flow straight into the budget and then into your fee. Ask how much of the operating budget goes to utilities and how fees have moved over the last few years.

Layouts: big volume, modest floor area

Suites run from roughly 667 to 1,108 square feet, so there are no sprawling penthouses here. What you get instead is volume. A 700 square foot loft with a 13-foot ceiling feels very different from a 700 square foot condo with nine-foot ceilings, and the mezzanine plans add usable floor area that does not always show up in the listed square footage.

That cuts both ways when you compare prices. Ask whether a listing’s size includes the mezzanine, and measure it yourself if it matters. Open-plan sleeping areas also mean less privacy than a conventional two-bedroom, which is fine for a single owner or a couple and harder for roommates.

Some owners have renovated their suites back toward raw finishes, with polished concrete floors and exposed elements, while others still have builder-grade finishes from the original conversion. The spread in finish quality is wide, and it shows up in pricing.

About the name, and the daily reality of Roselawn

I want to be straight about this: the building is called Forest Hill Lofts, but it sits in Briar Hill-Belgravia in the former City of York, west of Forest Hill proper. Roselawn was an industrial street not long ago, and the surroundings are a mix of houses, low-rise residential and older commercial buildings rather than the leafy estates the name suggests.

For many buyers that is a feature. You are close to Eglinton Avenue West, and the Eglinton Crosstown, Line 5, finally opened in February 2026 after years of construction disruption along that corridor. The panel beside this review shows the nearest stations and walking times. A neighbour worth knowing is West Village Lofts at 550 Hopewell Avenue, a much smaller low-rise in the same pocket.

Pricing: a hard-loft premium, but not a downtown one

The building averages about $801 per square foot. That is a premium over West Village Lofts nearby, at roughly $713, and I think the ceiling height, the heritage character and the utility-inclusive fee justify most of that gap. It is still well below what hard lofts in the downtown west end usually trade for.

At the time of writing there were no suites for sale here and one for lease. A building of 137 lofts with no active listings is common for hard-loft stock: owners tend to stay, and the supply that does come up moves on condition and finish. The sold report on this page shows what has actually traded over the last 12 months; you can also request my building sold report for a fuller breakdown.

Because fees include hydro, judge value on total monthly carrying cost, not fee per square foot alone. Line this building up against a newer condo nearby with hydro, heat and parking added back, and the comparison is usually closer than it first looks.

Building specifications

Amenities at Forest Hill Lofts

The amenity list is short and practical: a gym, a rooftop deck, party and meeting rooms, and underground parking. Nobody buys here for amenities; they buy for the suites, and the modest list also keeps the operating budget focused on the building itself.

Jatin’s honest take on Forest Hill Lofts

Forest Hill Lofts — frequently asked questions

Looking at York Mills, Don Mills, Lawrence Park, Bathurst Manor and midtown-north Toronto more broadly? Start with my Toronto community guide — the neighbourhoods, what each pocket is like, and how they compare.