Over the next cou­ple of years, this city will get five new lux­ury hotels. It starts with the Thomp­son, which opens its high-concept doors this month and promises to be ground zero for the beau­ti­ful peo­ple

Maryam Sanati – Toronto Life

Lately, King West is an urban cloud nine: designer con­dos, old brick stu­dio spaces, fan­tas­tic carpac­cio. Only 15 years ago, no one had much rea­son to ven­ture down here—not for work, not to live, not for a din­ing scene, because there wasn’t one. There were no ad agen­cies, no Susur Lee joints, no Spoke Club and cer­tainly no bou­tique hotels. But now the dozen or so blocks bounded by Spad­ina and Bathurst, from Ade­laide down to Welling­ton, are a hum­ming, self-sustaining ecosystem—a model of how to retro­fit a vin­tage down­town neighbourhood.

Real estate agents call this part of town King West Vil­lage, a han­dle the locals find too arti­fi­cial to pass their lips, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the place isn’t yet fully formed. At every turn, there’s a con­struc­tion site, or a gap­ing hole in the ground, or a lot with a tar­get on its back, almost all of them bear­ing the same sig­nage: an art­ful graphic in lower case let­ters say­ing “freed.” It’s not an exis­ten­tial­ist state­ment; “Freed” stands for Peter Freed, the For­est Hill–bred devel­oper who has nine projects on the go in the area. No one has been a big­ger cat­a­lyst of the evo­lu­tion of King West, or cap­i­tal­ized on it more, than Freed. His real estate port­fo­lio, mainly con­dos, is worth $1 bil­lion, and much of it is geared to a highly spe­cific breed: a 35-ish, design-obsessed demo­graphic that wears Japan­ese denim, lis­tens to Phoenix, works in adver­tis­ing or bank­ing or con­sults in high tech, trav­els often and widely, and stays at prop­er­ties designed by Ian Schrager, the Man­hat­tan entre­pre­neur often cred­ited with found­ing the bou­tique hotel genre. In King West, Freed has pre­pared a land­ing strip for these hip­ster high fly­ers (and those who aspire to become them). They’re not rich, nec­es­sar­ily. Their ambi­tion is to be taste­fully in the know.

For them, Freed has invested in a crown­ing achieve­ment, a glee­fully antic­i­pated light box on Welling­ton: the 102-room Thomp­son Toronto, which is sched­uled to open its high-concept doors this month.

The Thomp­son Toronto is the first inter­na­tional arm of a New York brand, and it comes to a city that’s been slow to embrace its kind. Bou­tiques or “genre hotels” pour art and fash­ion from a cock­tail shaker. Guests see them as anti-generic, even though many are now multi­na­tional chains. The best of them become cul­tural hubs, a scene of art shows and film screen­ings staffed by mod­e­lesque bar­tenders. The Amer­i­can hote­lier André Bal­azs calls his bou­tique chain The Stan­dard, pre­sum­ably since that’s what it wants to be: the mea­sure of vitality.

Mon­treal saw the rise of bou­tiques in the early 2000s while the Toronto hotel mar­ket stood rel­a­tively still (unless you count the mas­sive over­haul of the Wind­sor Arms, which had closed a tatty shell in 1991 and reopened ele­gantly in 1999). The last real estate bub­ble made investors skit­tish, and the city’s infe­ri­or­ity com­plex fed the ret­i­cence. Were we world class? Not enough to deserve a bunch of nice hotels. Now, the GTA has swag­ger: a pop­u­la­tion boom, a cul­tural rebirth to flesh out its mer­its as a des­ti­na­tion, and for­eign investors snap­ping up our real estate.

In the first blush of these changes, well before the econ­omy turned, devel­op­ers began plan­ning sev­eral hotel projects to keep in step with the growth. The Ritz-Carlton, the new Four Sea­sons, the Trump Inter­na­tional and the Shangri-La should be com­pleted by 2012, at which point the city will have more than 1,000 new lux­ury rooms to rent. The big four will be con­sid­ered five-stars, in the rank­ings of the hotel world. (Until now, Toronto’s only five-star has been the two-year-old Hazel­ton Hotel in York­ville.) They come with alti­tude, rang­ing from 52 to 66 storeys.

At least a third of each of these struc­tures will be reserved for pri­vate res­i­dences, the con­do­mini­ums that make the devel­op­ments pos­si­ble. Banks are extremely reluc­tant to loan money for stand-alone hotels, deemed too costly and risky; pre-selling con­dos not only helps devel­op­ers get financ­ing, but their rev­enue boosts hotel oper­a­tions in trou­bled times. The condo own­ers also pro­vide hotels with an indige­nous population.

Toronto’s five new lux­ury hotels

Pri­vate res­i­dences cater to a velvet-robe-and-slippers crowd that wants the elevator-ride avail­abil­ity of a concierge and full-service spa, not to men­tion access to maids and room ser­vice. Those perks are sell­ing points at the Thomp­son, too. And they’ll be a strate­gic piece of the King Edward Hotel, bought this past March by a group of own­ers headed by the Israeli-born devel­oper Gil Blutrich. (A vast revamp is in the works.) It’s also the plan for Bisha, a 41-storey bou­tique devel­op­ment on Blue Jays Way led by the night­club impre­sario Charles Khabouth.

As for cost, Thompson’s con­dos run about $600 a square foot, while hotel guests will be asked to pay $300 or so a night. The five-stars have found buy­ers will­ing to pay $1,500 a square foot and, when they’re com­pleted, will drive up the thresh­old for room rates to well over $500 a night. And up and up and up until, who knows, a decade from now, we might lament the folly of new hote­liers in a sat­u­rated mar­ket. But for now, Toronto is open for business.

Peter Freed was a born entre­pre­neur, if you ask his mother, Hazel, who says he’s been sell­ing stuff since he was in kinder­garten. “When he was five,” she recalls, “Peter made about 20 paint­ings, took them around the neigh­bour­hood in his lit­tle red wagon, and sold them all.” His father was a lawyer, and the young Freed would inter­ro­gate his dad’s clients when they came to the house: “My name is Peter Freed. What do you do?” At age seven or eight, he mar­shalled neigh­bour­hood pals to col­lect tools, wood and five-inch nails. He out­lined the specs of a fort, and it was built in a day.

To earn money as a teen, he hauled boxes as a shipper-receiver for a King West jeans com­pany and, in his early 20s, laboured for a con­trac­tor. Work­ing on sub­di­vi­sion con­struc­tion in the outer sub­urbs, he saved $75,000 and invested it in build­ing town­houses in North York. After that project, he was offi­cially a devel­oper, and another 1,000 town­houses soon followed.

Freed had always liked the build­ings around the Rot­ter­dam pub, a ’90s insti­tu­tion on King West, and it was here that he saw pos­si­bil­i­ties. Freed Devel­op­ments opened its King West head­quar­ters four years ago. His mom works for him now, from time to time. “I call myself the fac­to­tum,” she says jok­ingly. Right now, she’s orga­niz­ing an office move.

An under­stated guy—not the ego­ma­ni­a­cal cow­boy that’s often the car­i­ca­ture of a developer—Freed knows his lim­i­ta­tions. The Thomp­son is his first hotel, which is why he part­nered in the deal with Tony Cohen, who in 1998 founded a restaurant-and-hotel invest­ment and man­age­ment com­pany called Global Edge. Though Cohen’s expe­ri­ence in hotels isn’t vast, he has been through good cycles and bad since open­ing Toronto’s Hotel le Germain—one of the city’s ear­li­est boutiques—in 2003 with the Ger­main fam­ily, sea­soned Quebec-based hote­liers. Cohen is 37 years old, a for­mer Mon­trealer with movie-star looks and an affa­ble way. He wears Pal Zileri made-to-measure and is fix­ated on the finer points of design—in other words, he’s exactly the Thomp­son demographic.

Freed, who’s 41, has aes­thetic inter­ests, too. His pent­house atop 66 Port­land Avenue—his first real estate devel­op­ment in the area—is 6,600 metic­u­lous square feet, half of that space a ter­race with a pool. He has said that his com­pany caters to “a down­town, design-oriented, play-hard, work-hard, fashion-savvy buyer”—cheesy but accurate—and his cor­po­rate tag line is “design based devel­op­ment.” He has hired local fash­ion design­ers, includ­ing Bus­tle and Smythe, to dec­o­rate floors of Fash­ion House, his loft devel­op­ment at 560 King West. But his per­sonal style is more casual than Cohen’s. He wears jeans, an untucked dress shirt and, on the after­noon I met with him, the look of heart­burn on his face. He was just days away from the birth of his first child, a son named Rowan, and a mat­ter of weeks away from the open­ing of the Thomp­son. “I have a lot of nights when I’m think­ing about the project,” he said, “toss­ing and turn­ing, half asleep, half awake.”

The Thomp­son hotel and con­dos, which will cost roughly $50 mil­lion to build, had already bro­ken ground by the time the econ­omy fal­tered in the fall of 2008. By the fol­low­ing year, occu­pancy lev­els in Toronto had reached a low of 60%, while hotel rates fell by nine%. Hotels mea­sure suc­cess on a fac­tor called Revpar, or rev­enue per avail­able room, and in 2009, that mea­sure fell by 16.3% to $75—pretty much a night­mare sce­nario. This year, things are look­ing up, but only by a point or two. The busi­ness is immensely depen­dent on the long term, on sus­tain­ing a fol­low­ing even when the ini­tial open­ing buzz dies down, on a solid busi­ness travel mar­ket, and on rid­ing out what­ever calamity the world eco­nomic order brings.

So much is up to the gods. But what Freed and Cohen can con­trol is the style of the place. Just look at the way Jeff Sto­ber mashed up bou­tique cool at the Drake on Queen West. The Thomp­son, for its part, has Freed’s trade­mark “live hard, play hard” way about it, which fits King West, though it sug­gests a cut­off age of about 45. As the “man­i­festo” of the Thomp­son group explains, the hotels are cre­ated for “good-looking rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies” who “col­lect Hiroshi Sug­i­moto pho­tographs, vin­tage Zippo lighters, match­books from cafés, quotes and, one day, Basquiat.” Those who don’t nat­u­rally iden­tify with these asso­ci­a­tions might just as hap­pily take this as a recipe for how to build a personality.

Like the Ritz, the Trump and the rest, the Thomp­son has had a long incubation—six years—during which money was secured, deals closed, designs made, and enough res­i­dences sold to enable con­struc­tion. To date, Freed and Cohen have found buy­ers for 315 of the 336 Thomp­son con­dos at 550 Welling­ton. Freed has also bought a nearby lot, for­merly a Trav­elodge motel, where 315 more Thomp­son Res­i­dences are now for sale. That makes a total of 651 Thomp­son con­dos to 102 hotel rooms, which means this is fun­da­men­tally a res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment with a bou­tique hotel piece, rather than vice versa.

When they came together, Freed and Cohen were pre­oc­cu­pied with the food and bev­er­age rudi­ments of the hotel, and they trav­elled widely for research—Manhattan, L.A., Paris. They knew they’d have to offer some­thing spe­cial. King West is flush with options (Marc Thuet, Rod­ney the oys­ter guy, Le Sélect Bistro, and so on), so for the all-important culi­nary bench­mark, Freed and Cohen decided to bring in Scar­petta, an out­post of Scott Conant’s high-Italian New York restau­rant. It will be one of three on the prop­erty, along with a chic 24-hour diner and a 150-seat off­shoot of the Muskoka-based sushi spot Wabora.

These guys have a sharp sense of how their demo­graphic works. The Thomp­son brand is a strong hook. Their tar­get will have stayed at 60 Thomp­son or Smyth Tribeca in New York, or have read about it. They will have eaten at Scar­petta, or have heard about it. And as much as they’d never admit it, the idea of New York com­ing to them—mountain to Mohammed—makes them weak-kneed. Tak­ing their Sugimoto-loving selves for mac-and-cheese in the diner at 3 a.m. is a plus.

Then there’s the Thompson’s look: a glow­ing white under­lit bar in the lobby, canopied by a hand-blown glass-and-bronze chan­de­lier; dis­tressed wide-plank floor­boards from Europe; mod­ernist fur­nish­ings from names you read in Wall­pa­per; a plush 40-seat Hol­ly­wood mogul–style screen­ing room; leather-wrapped and mir­rored walls in the pent­house suite; a rooftop infin­ity pool and bar; and on street level, next to a dra­matic “din­ing pavil­ion” and fac­ing the his­toric Vic­to­ria Memo­r­ial Park, a reflec­tive pool in sum­mer that becomes an ice rink in win­ter. (I still recall the day I bought a tuna sand­wich from the Globe and Mail cafe­te­ria and walked to this park, then des­o­late and depress­ing, and had the loneli­est 20 min­utes of my life. Times have changed.)

Most idio­syn­cratic of all is a 125-by-12-foot, hand-painted lobby mural pro­duced by the Philippe Starck of Spain, Javier Mariscal. A Valen­cian artist and designer of land­scapes and inte­ri­ors, Mariscal is con­sid­ered a brand­ing auteur by his cor­po­rate clients, which included the Barcelona Olympic Games. The piece for the Thomp­son is an inter­pre­ta­tion of the Toronto sky­line, set on a jet-black back­ground, with the build­ings painted in lumi­nous white strokes, almost like light­ning flashes. Every few feet, the mural will go 3-D, so that cer­tain build­ings will appear to punch free from the wall, as if break­ing out of the munic­i­pal grid. The piece, in Tony Cohen’s words, takes this “ever-expanding sky­line and rein­ter­prets it in a whim­si­cal way with­out los­ing the seri­ous­ness of it.”

Cohen says the part­ners spent “well into the six fig­ures” to light the art and design fea­tures of the hotel, so an illu­mi­nated mural will be vis­i­ble to passersby on Welling­ton. Cohen and Freed think that every­one who arrives at the Thompson’s doorstep—and not just overnight guests, but you and I and the next-door neighbour—might linger over the piece to pick out their touch­stones and land­marks. Another inven­tion, then, from this part of King West: bou­tique civic pride.

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