Canada's Most Honoured Builder

For many years Minto's slogan was “Canada's Most Honoured Builder”, and this was very true during the 1960s and 1970s. The company won dozens of awards including numerous Canadian Housing Design Council Awards, the Chatelaine Home of the Year (more than once), Good Housekeeping Award for Excellence in Architecture, and the American Builder Award of Merit (more than once). During the 1969-1970 Canadian Housing Design Council Awards season, 6 honours were given for the province of Ontario — and Minto won them all!

Bayview

Crystal Beach, Bruce Farm/Qualicum, and Skyline were areas with the most award-winning designs, but others could also be found throughout Ottawa. These award-winning designs included modest bungalows, such as the Bayview plan, demonstrating that a simple and straightforward layout could be recognized as a noteworthy design. Other award-winning designs included some of Minto's townhouse designs in Beacon Hill, and Canada's first high-rise condominium building, the Horizon House.

Dorset

Minto was also known to come up with some more unusual award-winning designs: The Dorset plan, with its asymmetrical façade, featured a decorative blank brick wall balanced with a floor-to-ceiling picture window on the other side. Another example, the rare Devon plan built only in Skyline, had a mysterious wood and brick façade with few openings and a screened porch that popped out halfway up the side of the house. Inside, the layout had multiple levels designed for an uphill location. Also only built in Skyline is the Fairmont plan that appeared as a bungalow at the front but was a two-story house at the back. The Fairmont had a noteworthy perforated brick wall that screened a front courtyard. These two designs built in Skyline added a sense of intrigue and revealed little about their layout from the street.

Devon: Plan

Few other builders have as many awards under their belt as Minto. By the 1980s, the Canadian Housing Design Council Awards were no longer given out, and many of the other awards won by Minto in the past no longer existed. Yet Minto maintains an innovative spirit in their designs and continue to win awards to this day — including the 2016 GOHBA Builder of the Year, Ontario's Builder of the Year in 2012 & 2014, and four times in the past five years Ontario's Green Builder of the Year.

Devon: Exterior

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