Bedrooms without a view could be Toronto’s new normal

When designers Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik decided to move back to Toronto after 20 years of living abroad, they set out to find an apartment with an extra bedroom for their young child and quickly bumped into a term they’d never encountered, despite working as architects for the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron.

The condos they looked at, according to their real estate agents, had “outboard” and “inboard” bedrooms – development industry euphemisms for bedrooms with or without windows, respectively. Some, though not all, of the windowless bedrooms came fitted out with frosted glass sliding doors that opened onto a main room that did have an exterior window – an industry concept known, also euphemistically, as “borrowed light.”