The Keg Mansion

Twenty-six rooms and seventeen fireplaces, and you can book a table in it.

The building at 515 Jarvis Street in Toronto was put up in 1868 for Arthur McMaster, nephew of the banker and senator William McMaster, and it was originally called Euclid Hall. Jarvis Street was then one of the wealthiest addresses in the city, lined with large manors, and this house sat back from the road inside big gardens with a stable and a substantial brick carriage house behind it.

Hart Massey and his wife bought it in 1882, newly returned to Toronto from Cleveland. The Masseys renovated, adding a turret, a verandah and a greenhouse, but they left the original Gothic facade largely alone. It is a gothic revival building with castle-like features and arched windows, a neutral palette with green brass over the windows and red shingles on the turret, using soft deep colours against hard crisp edges.

In 1915 the Massey family bequeathed it to Victoria College, a federated college of the University of Toronto. In 1976 The Keg took it over and turned it into a restaurant, which is what it remains: arguably the chain's most famous location, in a house that has kept the name Euclid Hall alongside the newer one.

The interior has been significantly altered since it was a dwelling, so what you eat in is not what the McMasters or the Masseys lived in, though the shell and much of the character survive.

It is one of the Toronto houses most often attached to ghost stories, and the Massey family connection is a large part of why those stories get told. Go for the building. A twenty-six room private house on Jarvis Street is a straightforward record of what money looked like in Toronto in 1868, and being able to walk into it is unusual.