Tracy Hanes – Toronto Star

Peter Freed was mus­ing about the kind of place where he and the peo­ple he knows would enjoy living.

“You’d like to be able to order up a cheese­burger and an ice bucket with a few Heinekens or be served break­fast in bed once in awhile,” he says.

When Freed, the devel­oper who has put a styl­ish stamp on his King West neigh­bour­hood, gets such an idea, trust it will hap­pen. Buy­ers at his newly launched project, Thomp­son Res­i­dences, will be able to take advan­tage of burger and beer on demand, not to men­tion catered gourmet meals and in-room spa treat­ments. It’s the tenth project that Freed has launched in the Fash­ion Dis­trict neigh­bour­hood since the shovel went into the ground for his first, on Port­land St., in 2005.

Thomp­son Res­i­dences buy­ers will be able to access all hotel ser­vices on a pay-per-use basis across the street at the Toronto Thomp­son, a chic lux­ury brand hotel adjoined to 336 con­dos, slated to open at 550 Welling­ton Street West in May. The hotel was devel­oped by Freed in part­ner­ship with hote­lier Tony Cohen. It will epit­o­mize the urbane developer’s vision for a sophis­ti­cated project that com­bines food, music, design and ser­vice with three restau­rants and a “des­ti­na­tion” lobby bar.

The 314-unit Thomp­son Res­i­dences will rise on the site of a for­mer Trav­elodge in two 12-storey build­ings. Because they can pick and choose their hotel ser­vices and pay on demand, condo fees aren’t impacted. As well as the room ser­vice, the perks include house­keep­ing, laun­dry and dry-cleaning ser­vices, access to per­sonal train­ers, pri­vate car ser­vice, pet ser­vices, gro­cery deliv­ery, and a screen­ing room. Freed also expects own­ers will become reg­u­lar patrons of the hotel’s lobby bar, restau­rants and rooftop infin­ity pool bar.

Thomp­son Residences

“We were try­ing to buy this (Trav­elodge) prop­erty five or six years ago and were excited when the oppor­tu­nity was pre­sented to us a year and a half ago,” says Freed. “We were just fin­ish­ing the Thomp­son Hotel and the con­dos attached to that hotel. We con­sid­ered build­ing another hotel condo, but the res­i­den­tial mar­ket had really heated up so we decided to do mostly res­i­den­tial (for a total of 310 condos).

“The more we thought about it, it made sense to uti­lize the hotel we’d already built, cre­ate some addi­tional ameni­ties and con­nect it as one large urban play­ground,” says Freed.

“Urban play­ground” is not a term one likely would have used to describe the area on the fringes of the Fash­ion Dis­trict a half dozen years ago.

“There were not a lot of peo­ple walk­ing around the neigh­bour­hood and it still had a real indus­trial edge to it, with some beau­ti­ful old build­ings mixed in,” recalls Freed. “It was not until two years ago that the aver­age per­son could pic­ture liv­ing here. It’s now one of hottest neigh­bou­hoods in the city. Loblaws is open­ing at Port­land and Queen and more great restau­rants, fash­ion and retail is com­ing in.”

Freed says his first build­ing on Port­land St. “was def­i­nitely a leap of faith and the first two or three were def­i­nitely riskier moves. But at the same time, there was some­thing that was really attrac­tive to some buy­ers, to be in an older brick and beam build­ing neigh­bour­hood with mod­ern archi­tec­ture. There was some cache to it.”

With 10 projects in the neigh­bour­hood now, Freed has been able to design the area almost like a mas­ter planned community.

“In 2005, we first put the shovel in the ground. We started with 80 units and a $25 mil­lion project. It’s evolved into 300 unit plus, $750 mil­lion projects. I never thought it would evolve into such a large pro­gram,” he reflects. “I do one build­ing at a time, but at the same time try to make each build­ing dif­fer­ent from the last to give it its own character.”

For the Thomp­son Res­i­dences, Saucier+Perrotte Archi­tects of Mon­treal were recruited to cre­ate some­thing “con­tem­po­rary but dif­fer­ent from the other build­ings. We put in a pedes­trian con­nec­tion from King to Stew­art St., right through to the park. It’s really an excit­ing oppor­tu­nity – now there’s pedes­trian move­ment from Welling­ton to King – one giant step to being a com­mu­nity with some flow to it.

“With the (Thomp­son Res­i­dences) build­ings, we wanted to address the look of bal­conies so they don’t look like bal­conies. We love work­ing with glass and when walk­ing down King St., you will feel con­nected to inte­rior of build­ing and vice versa.”

Freed’s early buy­ers tended to be cre­ative, design-based clien­tele who worked for mar­ket­ing, film and Inter­net com­pa­nies. His clien­tele still tends to in their mid to late 20s to early 40s, but they may also work in finan­cial ser­vices or for air­lines. “They are now liv­ing and work­ing down­town, def­i­nitely the ‘don’t drive to work’ type. They work hard, play hard. The live down­town move­ment is def­i­nitely alive and well and that’s exciting.”

Freed him­self is a “don’t drive to work type.” He lives in a pent­house one floor above his bustling Port­land St. devel­op­ment offices (in the first condo project he built in the neigh­bour­hood) and can walk to most busi­ness meetings.

He believes that a suc­cess­ful “urban play­ground” needs more than just archi­tec­turally pleas­ing condo build­ings. That’s one of the rea­sons that he and Thomp­son Hotel part­ner Cohen embarked on a cross-continent trip some months ago, inter­view­ing restau­ran­teurs at some of the finest eater­ies in the United States. They found what they were look­ing for at Scar­petta in New York’s Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict, where renowned chef Scott Conant serves up inno­v­a­tive Ital­ian dishes.

“They really put it on for us. We had a menu tast­ing and they kept throw­ing dishes in front of us,” recalls Freed. “I was most full I’d ever been.”

Scar­petta will be the Thomp­son Hotel’s sig­na­ture restau­rant, com­ple­mented by a sushi restau­rant, 24-hour railcar-style diner and a lobby bar, fea­tur­ing a mas­sive hand-painted, three-dimensional mural of Toronto’s sky­line painted by Span­ish artist Javier Mariscal.

“This is going to be a des­ti­na­tion lifestyle hotel with many dif­fer­ent restau­rants,” says Freed. “It will be like the Hud­son Hotel in New York where peo­ple drive from all over to have din­ner or a drink at the bar. There’s lots of social inter­ac­tion, where is dif­fer­ent from the old tra­di­tional hotel where there’s one guy at the bar drink­ing a scotch telling his tale to the bar­tender. This will be about engag­ing people.”

(Freed is also one of the own­ers of The Bea­cons­field, a hip bar lounge on Queen West.)

Freed says his favourite spot will be the “rooftop pool bar, which in my opin­ion will have the best view of the Toronto sky­line.” Thomp­son Res­i­dences will also have its own rooftop infin­ity pool with the same spec­tac­u­lar views, says Freed.

He believes the trend, either for condo hotel suites or con­dos part­ner­ing with hotels to offer res­i­dents access to their ser­vices, is gain­ing momentum.

“I pic­ture many more of these projects and I’m aware of a hand­ful already going through the zon­ing process,” says Freed. “It does have mass appeal and is a proven prod­uct in U.S. And see­ing the suc­cess of the Ritz-Carlton, Four Sea­sons and Shangri-La has meant peo­ple have cer­tainly bought into this lifestyle in a major way.”

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