Toronto Tech Week to launch later this year with backing from city, Shopify, Google

Lac du Bonnet slowly healing from devastating fire

LAC DU BONNET — Fifteen months after devastating wildfires ripped through Lac du Bonnet, claiming two lives and destroying more than a dozen homes, residents are trying their best to build back better.

Along the winding gravel path that is Wendigo Road outside Lac du Bonnet, new timber peeks through patches of charred forest. Homes and cottages are beginning to take shape after fire raced through the neighbourhood at record speed and levelled at least 18 homes on the road.

Table saws and nail guns ring in the distance while Brian Curtis plots out where his new cottage will go. Curtis bought his previous cottage 19 years ago and had recently levelled the foundation.

He and his wife, Pam, had been thinking about long-term renovations when the May 13, 2025 fire swept away all their work and memories.

The view from here: Phyllis Green. Boob Tree, 1975

Staycation: The Art of Being Here feautres more than 100 Manitoba-related artworks from the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq collection, spanning the past 50 years. These pieces reveal how the places around us are layered with memory, story and lived experience. Over the coming weeks, the Free Press will spotlight works from this eclectic exhibition, each one offering a new way of seeing home. Experience it in person and enjoy some staycation time at the gallery, on view until December.

Phyllis Green. Boob Tree, 1975

(Yarn, wood. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Acquired with funds from the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Naylor, funds administered by The Winnipeg Foundation, 2014-128. Photo: Ernest Mayer.)

The year 1975 was designated International Women’s Year by the United Nations, and in celebration, the WAG staged the show Images of Women, which explored how women had historically been depicted, an impressive selection but by mostly male artists. Amid pushback from the community, Sharron Zenith Corne and Marian Yeo organized a second exhibition, Woman as Viewer, which challenged those portrayals by only featuring works by women. It was called the first Canadian exhibition of feminist art. American artist Phyllis Green’s Boob Tree, a four-foot-tall crochet sculpture of a cluster of breasts, adorned the exhibit posters, which were so popular they were snatched by passersby! The sculpture is playful and unsettling, re-appropriating the objectification of women’s bodies.

Kinder, gentler drug crackdown finds support, tempered expectations in Main Street area

Drawing a lighter from his pocket, a shirtless man perched on a concrete wall outside United Way Winnipeg’s Main Street headquarters heats a substance in a glass pipe and moves the tube toward his mouth.

$60M, six-storey Harbourview Terrace due to open in June 2028

They donned high-vis vests and brandished shovels with gold-coloured blades Friday morning at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a multi-family residential development in northeast Winnipeg.

Concord Projects has started construction of Harbourview Terrace, the inaugural development by two-year-old real estate company Foxhill Properties. Located in North Kildonan at 1820 De Vries Ave., the $60-million, six-storey apartment building will contain 179 units.

Founder and president Frank Koch-Schulte, who runs the company with his wife Alisha, said Foxhill wants to develop and manage properties with integrity.

“This is kind of like my opportunity to try to do things our way, which I feel is a way that keeps tenants in mind,” Koch-Schulte said. “We live in this neighbourhood. We’re very much invested in seeing quality housing go here.”

Luxury and livability

Those in the market for a new luxury home tend to be looking for two things.

First, the home must be unique — which is to say it possesses defining design characteristics that set it apart from other homes. Second, while the home must be different, it also must be livable.

Problem is, many home builders get too focused on fashion, which often makes for a visually arresting home that, sadly, isn’t as functional as it could be.

Fortunately, that’s not the case in Maric Homes’ stunning bungalow show home at 2 Woodland Lane in Headingley’s Forest Grove Estates.