YOU know how it is. No new hotels for 15 years, then two come along at once: the sort that have see-through glass walls separating the bedrooms from the bath, Frette sheets and prose — “moist and twinkling, alien to our surface habits” — inscribed in the lifts.

Then the Nota Bene subscription-only travel review decides to take a design-led look at the city, devoting its entire September issue to Toronto. And if Nota Bene decides that Toronto is trendy, who are we to disagree? Nota Bene’s self-imposed mission is to go beyond gold-tap trappings to uncover cutting-edge, high-performance restaurants, hotels and shops. Its standards are exacting. In its opinion, the Soho Metropolitan, one of Toronto’s two new hotels, “lacks real panache and comes over a little cold and corporate for all its modish pretensions”.

The other — Le Germain — with its elevator poetry, is praised, despite a caveat (“are we not beginning to tire of brown?”) over the colour scheme in the bedrooms.

They’re right. The Soho Metropolitan is a bit bland, despite the underfloor heating, and Le Germain is fresh and humorous, with generous ceilings and a room rate (from £100) that belies the chainmail curtains in the lobby and the hotel’s high art content.

Three hot architects are also set to improve the city’s skyline. Frank Gehry is returning to his home town to build an extension to the Art Gallery of Ontario (due for completion in 2007), Daniel Libeskind is doing the same to the Royal Ontario Museum (December, 2005) and Will Alsop has designed an addition, to look like a cuboid spider, that will perch on top of the Ontario College of Art and Design, with primary-coloured columns, at angles, surrounding the original building. This is presented to the public from May.

Toronto is becoming hip, against huge odds. The truth is that Toronto isn’t exactly edgy. It is a city that feels as if it is peopled by lifelong scouts and girl guides. When you visit Toronto and yet another person insists on you taking a seat on a tram, you have to wonder how any place so polite can seriously be considered trendy? Sars undoubtedly rocked the city last year — tourism dived, and the city lost potentially lucrative film productions to other Canadian cities. “We’re beginning to see more US licence plates now,” says Diane Helsinki of Ontario Tourism, But the power cut that turned Toronto and the US eastern seaboard dark last August barely ruffled the city’s composure.

“Oh, I just went for some beers with my neighbours,” said one person. “You could really see the stars clearly,” mentioned another.

The United Nations claims that Toronto is the most ethnically diverse city in the world: its inhabitants speak more than 160 languages. There are four separate Chinatowns. A liberal approach to immigration has been in place since the 1970s but no discernible underclass has grown up alongside it.

So, with all this politeness and quality of life, just how did Toronto find its groove? You can take the purely economic approach to its renaissance. Toronto has thrived because it’s cheaper than comparable cities in the US. In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to stem the flow, but in recent years Los Angeles has haemorrhaged film and television productions to Toronto, including Chicago and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

And where films are shot, actors will go shopping and eat out, paparazzi in tow.

They also flock to town for the Toronto International Film Festival, which made headlines last year, partly because of three high-profile premieres — Richard Curtis’s Love Actually, Jane Campion’s In the Cut and Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men.

The festival was started in 1976 by a trio of filmmakers as a non-competitive alternative to Cannes, and although it still doesn’t award prizes, it is increasingly used by Hollywood to showcase Oscar hopefuls. All the stars (Robert de Niro downwards) love Sassafraz, where the food is French/Californian gourmet gruel and the absence of salt and pepper on the table is not an oversight.

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