[3] The City of Toronto recognizes a broader neighbourhood definition that includes the adjacent Seaton Village and Yorkville areas.

[6] The Annex is mainly residential, and streets are lined with tall trees dwarfing the large Victorian and Edwardian houses, most of them built between 1880 and the early 1900s.

The Annex is home to many examples of a uniquely Torontonian style of house that was popular among the city's elite in the late nineteenth century.

Examples of this style survive in the former upper class areas along Jarvis and Sherbourne Street, and also around the University of Toronto campus.

[8] The Annex style house borrows elements from both the American Richardsonian Romanesque and the British Queen Anne Revival.

Seaton Village, or the 'West Annex' as it is sometimes incorrectly known[citation needed], is west of Bathurst Street and includes the Koreatown shopping district at its southern border.

While Seaton Village shares several characteristics with The Annex (notably its architecture and its popularity with University of Toronto students), it is generally quieter, more family-oriented, and has smaller, less expensive homes.

Clinton Street features a house almost totally covered with circular "woodcakes" cut from billiards cues.

The Annex's first Golden Era lasted until the early 1900s, when the upper classes began to migrate northward above the Davenport escarpment to newer more fashionable suburbs in Forest Hill and Lawrence Park.

Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, lived on the south east corner of Lowther and Bedford Road.

Admiral Road in the Annex is home to the writer Margaret Atwood, as well as John Ralston Saul and his wife, the former Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson.

[14][16] CBC writer, producer and actor Ken Finkleman and members of the rock band Sloan also reside in the neighbourhood.

Katherine Govier, who wrote a collection of short stories entitled Fables of Brunswick Avenue (published in 1985), also lived on this street.