Dave LeBlanc – Globe and Mail

Toronto’s churches have seen the best of times and the worst of times.

Dur­ing the age of fool­ish­ness, when con­gre­ga­tions moved on, the last vis­i­tor to these sacred spaces was usu­ally a wrecker’s ball. Now, it seems as though a spring of hope is upon us, as more and more churches become homes.

But the path to archi­tec­tural enlight­en­ment is strewn with obsta­cles, says archi­tect Paul Oberst. The Junction’s 1890 Vic­to­ria Royce Pres­by­ter­ian was “a very tough nut to crack” and turn into “Vic­to­ria Lofts.”

Iron­i­cally, it was the Annette Street building’s mag­nif­i­cence, he says, that drove him nuts. Specif­i­cally, on the inside, it was the mas­sive, beau­ti­ful – and very nec­es­sary – wooden roof trusses: “As you go higher up the build­ing, those diag­o­nals get in your way,” he explains. “The lower level, the suites are all rec­tan­gu­lar … but as soon as you get to level two the truss­work is start­ing to hap­pen and you just have to fol­low the line, because if you don’t, you can’t walk from one-half of the suite to the other, there’s just too much crap in the way.”

Quite the oppo­site, it was the lack of detail on the mas­sive brick façade that cre­ated headaches. Unlike Gothic churches with their rhyth­mic but­tresses that pro­vide hidey-holes to place win­dows or bal­conies, Victoria’s is dead flat, with big triplet win­dows tak­ing up half of the area – “And are you gonna go punch­ing holes in that?” asks Mr. Oberst rhetor­i­cally – and curves appear­ing only at the tower’s cor­ners; inter­est­ingly, sim­i­lar curved cor­ners appear on another build­ing Wilm Knox and John Elliot designed around the same time, the Con­fed­er­a­tion Life mas­ter­piece at Yonge and Rich­mond streets.

Mr. Oberst’s solu­tion was to cre­ate inset bal­conies by plac­ing large, three-sided glass boxes behind the large win­dow open­ings (which had the dra­matic and fig­ural stained glass removed and donated to St. Paschal Bay­lon in Thorn­hill). Now, light could be brought into mul­ti­ple rooms with­out destroy­ing exte­rior cleanliness.

Where new win­dows have been added, they are so clev­erly dis­guised they look orig­i­nal. For instance, pho­tos of the church before the con­ver­sion show a trio of ultra-slim arched win­dows about two-thirds up the tall, stocky tower. Today, there is another unarched trio below – these allow light into the penthouse’s mas­ter bed­room – and a duo below that; proper bricks were imported from Eng­land to com­plete the vous­soirs above.

A tour through the 2540-square-foot pent­house – cur­rently on the mar­ket for $1.56-million – reveals the jux­ta­po­si­tion of wooden struc­tural spider’s web and old brick, with new dry­wall and lux­ury fin­ishes. It’s hard to believe this is the first time the 60-something archi­tect and Rivet Development’s Fred Dyer have ever tack­led a reli­gious build­ing (they’ve done four non-religious projects together).

Although the city’s Her­itage Preser­va­tion depart­ment was on board when they saw Mr. Oberst’s enlight­ened scheme, Mr. Dyer laments that the process can be “a bit lengthy.

“It’s too bad they can’t shorten it up for the smaller projects; it’s becom­ing harder and harder for the smaller guys to com­pete with the same process of a 20– or 30-storey tower.”

Per­haps, he con­jec­tures, that’s why only a hand­ful of churches have been saved. “Bernard Watt did the one on Dover­court,” he fin­ishes, laugh­ing, “and talk­ing to him I don’t think he’ll do another one, either.”

“Well, we did do another church, but only as archi­tects,” cor­rects Mr. Watt on the tele­phone from his office in the Annex, “and, in fact, hav­ing done that church has brought us quite a few jobs.”

Com­pleted a few years ago and fully occu­pied, the con­ver­sion of Cen­ten­nial Methodist into “The Church Lofts” at 701 Dover­court Rd. saw Mr. Watt wear both developer’s and architect’s hat.

While he, too, dealt with a “some­what unusual” build­ing – an 1891 church existed at the back of the lot, so the newer 1906 build­ing has a square foot­print that pushes right to the side­walk and prop­erty line – he was able to tuck bal­conies and mod­ern win­dows into the Neo-Gothic nooks and crannies.

And speak­ing of win­dows, orig­i­nal stained glass had a botan­i­cal, Art Nou­veau design rather than a reli­gious motif, so it was decided to keep them even though “it required a real will.” A George­town, Ont.-based glass artist removed and num­bered each pane and then cleaned, repaired and stored them dur­ing the two years of con­struc­tion. Like­wise, to pre­serve a giant octag­o­nal sky­light on the roof, Mr. Watt cre­ated a hotel-like, three-storey cen­tral atrium and wrapped the suites around it.

“He did a great job,” say third-floor res­i­dents David and Lezlee Fleish­man, who were the first to pur­chase a suite. A tour of their light-filled, two-storey space con­firms that inte­rior details were as impor­tant as exte­ri­ors to the trans­planted South Amer­i­can archi­tect. Rough brick meets smooth dry­wall; light pours down from sky­lights onto century-old steel trusses and spat­ters bits of colour onto the floor from the wall of stained glass.

“I’m not a fan of big places,” offers Mr. Fleish­man. “Small places are usu­ally designed bet­ter because every inch is archi­tec­ture.” It helps, too, that many of those inches are filled with Mr. Fleishman’s clever fur­ni­ture designs, such as the “Tec­tonic Sphere” mag­a­zine stand (if this piece is famil­iar, it may be because a sim­i­lar design was penned for pow­er­house Umbra).

“Light is an impor­tant thing for me.”

In addi­tion to slow city approvals, Mr. Dyer says other things can bedevil church con­ver­sions, from the usual sur­prises behind ancient walls (which then require imme­di­ate, on-site revi­sions), to the sad fact that estab­lished trades often won’t touch reli­gious build­ings, says Mr. Watt.

Despite this, Reserve Prop­er­ties is hard at work trans­form­ing the for­mer Belle­fair United in the Beaches, while Dog Day Devel­op­ers take on St. Mary the Vir­gin and St. Cyprian on West­more­land near Bloor Street West.

Cer­tainly a far, far bet­ter thing than the wrecker’s ball. “Churches have the addi­tional karma that comes along, and that brings a lot of things with it,” fin­ishes Mr. Watt. “It’s not only a phys­i­cal building.”

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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