Tag Archives: residential project
Looking up
Ryan Starr – Toronto Star
Anyone pondering the current state of Toronto’s condo market may want to take note of the rip-roaring success of Tridel’s recently launched Ten York project.
The 65-storey glass tower — which will rise from a wedge-shaped site at York and Harbour Sts. — has been regarded as a bellwether, a development whose sales performance this fall would offer an indication of the health of a condo market that some analysts believe has become oversupplied.
Of the 600 units at Ten York released to date, 532 had been sold as of early November. If the Toronto condo market is cooling, “you sure as heck wouldn’t have known that from what was happening at our sales office,” notes Jim Ritchie, Tridel’s senior vice president of sales and marketing.
Comment: Which is the funny part. Those in the business know that things are just fine. Those on the outside are the ones calling for disaster. Who do you trust? Those who do this for a living, or those who don’t?
In all, Ten York will have 694 residences, ranging from 564-square-foot one-bedroom units to 3,858-square-foot three-bedroom suites. Prices start at $345,000. Occupancy of the project is slated for summer 2017.
Tridel is developing Ten York in partnership with Build Toronto, an independent and self-funding real estate and development corporation with a mandate to maximize the value of under-utilized real estate previously owned by the city.
The development is the first joint residential project on which Build Toronto has partnered with a private builder.
Suites at Ten York — designed by II BY IV Design Associates — will have nine-foot ceilings and engineered-laminate plank flooring.
Kitchens will have granite or quartz countertops and AEG stainless steel appliances. Bathrooms come with white quartz countertops and five-foot soaker tubs.
Suites include a stacked Energy Star front-loading washer and dryer, and will have individual metering of electricity, hot water and heating/cooling.
Ten York’s amenities include a gym and studios for spinning, yoga and cardio; and an outdoor pool, spa and saunas. The building also will have a billiards room, media/games room, theatre room, party room and private dining room, as well as guest suites and a concierge.
Battling ‘doom and gloom’
In spite of Ten York’s impressive sales, headlines proclaiming a condo market downturn have created quite a few headaches for Ritchie and his team. “Our biggest challenge is consumer confidence,” he says.
Comment: No kidding! Like articles about 30% fewer new condo sales that forget to mention that there are 30% fewer new condos to buy. Either the press purposefully skews the data, or they just don’t dig up all the facts. It is hard to say, but wow… read the headlines and then read the data for yourself. You can see for yourself what I mean.
“People read headlines and they don’t really understand what’s going on, so they just see it as doom and gloom. The more this stuff is written about, the harder it is to convince somebody they should be buying a condo.”
Ritchie acknowledges “we’ve had challenges in the marketplace over the past few months,” however, he suggests that Ten York’s location and design have had a lot to do with the project’s success.
“We did a tremendous amount of market research and testing our prospect database (which included more than 5,000 registrants), and it told us that in spite of what you might read in the papers, there were buyers for this in the community.
“Tall buildings in the downtown core with water views are in demand, and I think we’ve proven that.”
Design changes
Ten York generated big buzz last fall when preliminary plans for the project were unveiled.
The tower design has since undergone a number of significant changes in response to feedback from the city.
Most significantly, Ten York’s height has been reduced to 65 storeys from the originally proposed 75 storeys.
The look of the building has been tweaked, as well, becoming more triangular in form to correspond better with the wedge-shaped site on which it will sit, located between the Gardiner Expressway and the York St. off-ramp at the northwest corner of Harbour and York Sts.
“(Changing the design of the tower) allowed us also to push the building, including the base, further to the west, which will create wider pedestrian access along York St.,” notes Ritchie.
The tower redesign also saw the parking garage, originally proposed to be above-grade, moved underground, freeing up space in the podium. The base of the building will now feature a glass-enclosed lobby with 30-foot-high ceilings.
“We’ve created a pretty spectacular lobby space,” says Ten York’s architect Rudy Wallman. “Because it’s so high and transparent, it will act as an extension of the sidewalk.”
Despite the tower being knocked down from 75 storeys to 65, changes to the form of the building resulted in a negligible reduction in the number of suites, from 774 to 694.
The new building design also minimizes the use of balconies. West-facing suites will have them, as will units on the northeast and southeast corners of the tower, but the north and south facades will be glass curtain walls.
“I think that’s a huge bonus visually,” Wallman says. “We don’t have to deal with inset or projecting balconies, which really give residential buildings the look they have, which tends to be cluttered if not handled well.
“Here it’s going to be very sleek and finished looking; more like a commercial building.”
Still an icon
Ten York is no longer in the running to become one of Toronto’s tallest residential towers, but Ritchie maintains the 224-metre building will be iconic all the same.
“When you look at some of the renderings we created — we went out over the lake with a helicopter with a steady cam and shot the core of the city, and then had the building rendered into it so we could see what the overall effect is — I think it looks pretty darn good at 65 floors.”
“It won’t make us the tallest, but we’re right up there,” he adds. “And besides, it was never the race to be the tallest. We wanted the right solution
Details
Location: 10 York St.
Developers: Tridel, tridel.com, and Build Toronto, buildtoronto.ca
Architect: Wallman Architects
Interiors: II BY IV Design Associates, iibyiv.com
Size: 65 storeys
Units: 694, one-bedroom to three-bedroom.
Prices: From $345,000
Amenities: Gym, pool, party room, theatre, guest suites
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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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A Toronto condo hemmed in by heritage
John Bentley Mays – Globe and Mail
Long-time readers of this column know how I think downtown Toronto’s new condominium projects should look (and too seldom do): sleek (but not entirely glassy), urbane and formally imaginative, and free of allusions to comfy, antique high styles.
In fact, they are best without references to any kind of pre-modernist styling, including that of the Victorian and Edwardian factories and warehouses standing thick on the ground in the core’s former blue-collar districts.
I don’t hate Toronto’s proletarian architecture, by the way, or the rugged old low-rise and mid-rise industrial buildings that have survived from the past into the present – even if few are as interesting as those in, let’s say, the Distillery District. It’s good that developers have saved many of these elderly structures – or at least some of the better ones – from destruction by transforming them into handsome apartment and office blocks. And it’s surely not entirely bad that the city’s planning and urban design bureaucracy, by its insistence on “contextualism,” is continuing to remind local developers and architects of what their forerunners got right a hundred years ago.
My problem with contextualism comes out of a belief that contemporary Toronto architects, while they ought to be good students of the things that have historically made cities work well, should be able to design mid-rises and high-rises without having to worry about forcing their new buildings to curtsey to old ones. Under the city’s current planning regime (and also, of course, due to the conservatism of many Toronto developers), that’s exactly what the architects of downtown residential stacks do worry about. The designs that result are sometimes sober and serious, but even the good ones usually lack the high visual voltage our inner-city neighbourhoods need badly.
For an example of the phenomenon I’m talking about, take the new residential project known as Fabrik Condos.
Fashioned for Menkes Developments by architect Ralph Giannone, a founding partner in the Toronto firm of Giannone Petricone Associates, in association with Giovanni A. Tassone Architects, this 16-storey, 169-unit building is slated to rise near the garment-district intersection of Spadina Avenue and Richmond Street West. The available suites range in area from 424 square feet (for a studio) up to 1,388 square feet (for three bedrooms). Prices start at under $300,000.
The Fabrik site is located in a gritty, former workshop and warehousing patch of central Toronto that the city has targeted for redevelopment since the 1990s. This encouragement of property-owners to gentrify, however, has come with a proviso: that new construction in the district sing in harmony with the old brick-and-beam structures round about. (It hasn’t always done so, by the way: Residential developers have recently gotten away with multi-unit designs varying across the stylistic spectrum from a kind of awful baroque to Art Deco and some quite decent modernism.)
Menkes Developments, at least in the case of Fabrik, has tried to honour the city’s architectural intentions for the zone, and Mr. Giannone has designed accordingly. The grid-like face of the building’s 11-storey podium, which is framed with embossed precast concrete, is a respectful nod to all the century-old warehouse façades in the neighbourhood.
The futuristic five-storey glass box Mr. Giannone has dropped atop this podium might mitigate the factory-like plainness of the base it rests on, if it were larger or the whole building were taller. (The box, the architect told me, is meant to terminate the view from westbound cars coming along Richmond Street.) And the polka-dot patterning of the concrete, an interesting touch that creates an appearance of what the architect calls “tough lace,” might offset the machine-age solemnity of the podium, if its improbable delicacy and playfulness were allowed to infect the form.
As we have it, however, Fabrik is a studious, unsmiling work that bows in all the right directions, doesn’t get above itself, and certainly doesn’t shout. It promises to stay nestled down well among the older items of garment-district architecture that it imitates.
I can appreciate Mr. Giannone’s energetic effort to bring Fabrik into line with the historical character of the area. It’s harder for me to appreciate the politeness of the outcome.
Not every new residential building has to make a great fuss about itself, of course. But just because Toronto’s main streets are dowdy and tired, and the downtown’s former industrial strips are dull, developers should take every new condo–block commission as a fresh opportunity to make something terrific and freely contemporary. I am under no illusion that the development community will take my suggestion seriously. But even now, some members of it appear to have arrived at the same conclusion I’ve come to: that, in a city where the historical context is so pedestrian, contextualism really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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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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New developments give a nod to the future and a bow to the past
By John Bentley Mays – The Globe and Mail
A few days ago, I dropped by a couple of downtown Toronto residential projects that were still twinkles in their architects’ eyes when I first wrote about them a couple of years ago. Both designs — the Hudson apartment tower at the corner of King Street West and Spadina Avenue, and the Gardens at Queen, on Bathurst Street — have since put on bones and flesh, and are nearing completion. So it seemed a good time to pay a visit, just to check out how the architectural realities have lined up with what I imagined they would be.
Designed for Great Gulf Homes by David Dow, principal in Diamond and Schmitt Architects, the Hudson stands in a district of old factories and warehouses near the bottom of Spadina. Globalization long ago swept away most of the manufacturing enterprises that gave the neighbourhood its industrial character, but workaday architecture lingers on to remind us of the past.
As Mr. Dow explained when I wrote up the scheme in 2004, the Hudson was designed to echo its historic context — and, indeed, it does so. The flat rooflines of the Hudson’s elements (a 21-storey tower and lower buildings, all joined on the bottom storeys) reinforce the flat-topped skyline of the area, and make the compact complex seem at home among its neighbours.
But despite all its best efforts to be polite to its surroundings, the Hudson is not really one of the blue-collar guys down on lower Spadina. It is lithe and athletic, while the warehouses tend to be chunky. The buff brick — an old Toronto standby — that Mr. Dow has deployed on the Hudson’s exterior may be a nod to ordinariness, but its use here is elegant, even chic — more GQ, in other words, than Truckers News.
It was clear to me from the designs that the Hudson would be more refined than what’s around it. I was less certain, however, of this sophisticated building’s ability to hold its own on the noisy, busy intersection of King and Spadina. Now that the project is done, it’s clear that my hesitation was unfounded. The Hudson, as things have turned out, is a confident, handsome corner monument — not imposing itself on the streetscape, but marking an important downtown crossroads with modern grace and modest authority.
The Gardens at Queen, by Chestnut Hill Homes, never had an intersection to live up to, so it could afford to be more playful than the Hudson. And playful it is, in the way a “historical” setting in a theme park so often is: awash in nostalgia, brimming with references to a glamorous past, but, in the end, rather bare under its decor and doodadery.
This project of 177 units in seven 31/2-storey buildings would sweep us away from Toronto to 19th-century Paris, or so its early advertisements proposed. The Gardens, as built, sweep us (if anywhere) to Regency London: The exteriors are pale yellow stucco in the British manner, not Parisian grey limestone. Flights of steps lead to upper-storey entrances, each framed by a ponderous little porch, again in the British townhouse manner. The superficial effect — and it is superficial — is poshy and stodgy, and as jowly and bluff as an English bulldog.
There is a durable market for this kind of historical fantasia, both downtown and in suburbia, so I expect to be seeing new specimens of it for the rest of my days on Earth. But if architects must provide such storybook pageantry, then let it be done in a spirit of faithfulness to the finest examples of the historical style. The best Regency domestic architecture, for example, is light and trim. The buildings at the Gardens at Queen are overdressed and heavy-handed, and crowned with parapets that, like the other trimmings and flounces, are ostentatious — as though we would not otherwise get the point that the project is seriously old-fashioned.
When I talked with Clifford Korman, the architect, about his project two years ago, he said he intended it to be a “catalyst for the neighbourhood.” Whether the Gardens at Queen will energize its rundown Victorian context remains to be seen. But if it does change things, what will it change them into? More historical pastiche? Is this the kind of Toronto we want? Or is it merely the best we can hope for?
As things stand so far, the Gardens is hardly an isolated island of antiquarian architecture in the midst of a 21st-century city. Many other contemporary residential projects around town self-consciously hark back to some style hauled up from the past. If it’s not Second Empire, then it’s bully-boy Victorian or pompous Edwardian. We will know that our city’s architectural conscience has come of age when we see more buildings done boldly in the spirit of the current age.
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