Tag Archives: residential projects
Canderel is building the tallest residential skyscraper in Canada
Tracy Hanes – Toronto Star
They have raised the bar quite high: Aura at College Park, being built at Yonge St. and Gerrard St. W., holds the title of tallest residential skyscraper in Canada, soaring to 78 storeys once it’s finished in 2014. Aura also boasts Canada’s second largest penthouse, priced at $18.3 million, with 11,370 square feet of living space and unimpeded views of the city. (The L Tower has the biggest penthouse, at 11,600 square feet.)
The fully integrated real estate corporation, founded in 1975 with headquarters in Montreal, operates under the leadership of chairman Jonathan Wener.
Canderel has acquired, developed, managed or co-ventured more than 13 million square feet of property, including commercial, industrial and residential projects, and has created or has under construction more than 4,000 condo suites in the GTA.
Canderel’s philosophy is that a project has to be well located and constructed to provide the tenants or residents with a lifestyle they enjoy, says Wener, to the extent they will want to move to another Canderel project.
The company was a pioneer in the transformation of West King West from derelict industrial area to the vibrant, fast-growing neighbourhood it is today.
The company acquired the heritage 1883 building that had housed the Massey Harris tractor factory and created one of Toronto’s first authentic loft conversions in 2003, an innovative concept at the time. The original facade of the Georgian-style red brick building was meticulously restored and 46 stylish lofts constructed, with features such as exposed brick walls, timber columns and oversized windows.
DNA (Downtown’s Next Address) further established Canderel’s brand in the neighbourhood. The project, geared to first-time buyers and completed in 2005, offered distinctive architecture, providing high-quality finishes as standard (granite countertops, 9-foot ceilings, stainless steel appliances and gas cooktops) that other builders were offering as upgrades, and open-concept layouts.
Canderel Residential’s sales and marketing vice president Riz Dhanji created an innovative marketing campaign that included wrapping two Hummers in DNA colours and hiring young people to hand out “Rave Card” invitations to the sales centre. The centre was used an event space for fashion shows, a Toronto Indy party and several musical performances, which further built DNA’s profile.
The building was a hit with young professionals and so were the follow-up projects, DNA2 and DNA3, which included retail space at grade and a host of amenities.
For DNA3 — on the site of a former Chrysler dealership at King St. W. and Shaw St. — Canderel gathered feedback from existing buyers and included them into the plans. (All of the DNA buildings have sold out.)
“We were trying to create something different,” Dhanji says. “We wanted a unique condo brand and lifestyle associated with the building.”
Canderel had demonstrated its skill with areas in transition when it built Newport Beach townhouses and condominiums, the first towers on what had been a seedy motel strip along the Etobicoke lakeshore, now a desirable waterfront residential neighbourhood.
For, the Waterford, at 2101 Lake Shore Blvd. W., Canderel modelled the 10-storey building after some of the world’s finest hotels, adding luxurious hotel-like finishes and fine architectural details and floor-to-ceiling windows that provided commanding waterfront and city views. Directly behind it, the Waterford Towers offered smaller, yet still luxurious suites.
Canderel has also been instrumental in the revitalization of downtown with the Residences of College Park on Bay St., which is just to the west of the landmark Art Deco College Park, designed by the same architectural firm that designed the Royal York Hotel and Maple Leaf Gardens. The original heritage building with a limestone and granite facade houses 180,000 square feet of upscale retail and offers a direct link to Aura.
The Residences of College Park includes two towers, a retail podium and townhouses overlooking a three-acre park and Aura will be the third and final tower (not to mention the tallest).
Aura, at Yonge and Gerrard, is described as Canderel’s “master work” will have 985 units and four storeys of retail. Dhanji says only a handful of suites remain in Aura and the 11,370 square-feet penthouse is still up for grabs. The grandiose oval-shaped suite features five bedrooms and six bathrooms and has views in every direction.
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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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David Feldman is a man for all seasons
Pat Brennan – Yourhome.ca
Has David Feldman run out of ideas?
The man has made many impressive contributions to Toronto’s skyline while building about 50 condominium projects over the past 35 years.
“One of the things I am most proud of is that none of our buildings look the same. We’ve built 50 condo projects and they each have their own distinctive look,” Feldman says.
And his firm, Camrost-Felcorp, has just unveiled two new highrise residential projects that’ll certainly become icons for our city. But they are already very familiar to most Toronto residents and even to people around the world.
Feldman is converting the 32-storey Four Seasons Hotel on Avenue Rd. at Yorkville Ave. into a mixture of luxury and affordable condos, calling it Yorkville Plaza.
He’s doing the same thing to the 21-storey former headquarters of Imperial Oil — Imperial Plaza — on St. Clair Ave. west of Yonge St. It was built to withstand a nuclear explosion in downtown Toronto, so Feldman won’t try making any changes to its exterior.
Converting these two Toronto landmarks into homes isn’t Feldman’s first venture into the renovation world.
In 1997, a 40-year-old concrete liquor warehouse occupied one of the best residential sites near the Etobicoke waterfront. Feldman bought the McGuinness Distillery Warehouse, known today as Mystic Point, which has become one of Toronto’s most popular communities for young people trying to break into the challenging home-ownership ranks.
Attempting to dismantle the huge concrete structure would have bankrupt Feldman, plus he saw those thick concrete floors separated by thick concrete pillars as a unique asset.
“There is 18 feet between the thick floor plates and that’s an ideal height to create New York-style lofts,” Feldman says. He knew the warehouse was too wide to place condo lofts in its core, so the interior became a ready-made parking garage five stories above ground instead of five levels below ground. The lofts, with their 18-foot-high windows, wrap around the exterior of the old warehouse.
Again, because of its thick concrete structure, Feldman opted to add four floors of penthouse suites on the roof of the warehouse. He said there was nothing like it in North America.
Today, the 16-acre site on the south side of the Gardiner Expressway at Parklawn Rd. is a gated mixed community with both newly built midrise condo towers and Victorian-style townhomes.
The Etobicoke waterfront has been a fun place for Feldman.
It was a fun place for a lot of people when Feldman first started touting the potential of the area’s notorious motel strip, which at the time was the city’s busiest red-light district.
The 50-acre site of scrubland running along the edge of the lake between the Humber River and Mimico Creek was home to coyotes and hardy hobos living in makeshift shacks. In 1988, Feldman proposed a $3 billion community of highrise condos, upscale retail shops, waterfront recreational boating facilities and public parklands. His company owned or had options on half the 50 acres.
His proposal certainly got the ball rolling on a waterfront strip that local politicians and planning boards had been endlessly debating for decades.
The strip stands today as the principal welcoming sight for people entering the city from the west side and is considered one of the most attractive waterfront communities in North America.
In its early planning stages, the Bob Rae provincial government stepped forward with its own development plan. It involved plenty of land expropriations, but was roundly rejected by Etobicoke council, motel strip landowners and most Etobicoke residents.
“The province can make all the plans it wants on my lands, but they can’t make me build on them,” Feldman said at the time. “With the plan they’ve brought forward I won’t be building there and I doubt anyone else will either.”
At about the same time, Marina Del Rey, a three-phase condo project Feldman had created on the west bank of Mimico Creek, was designated “the best planned, conceptualized and integrated condominium community in Ontario,” by the Urban Development Institute.
In 1990, Feldman and Rae did agree on one matter: they both said Toronto needed more highrise condo communities to help preserve food lands and put municipal infrastructure and public transit to much more efficient use. They together predicted that some day condominiums would account for up to 40% of Toronto’s new home market.
Today, nearly 80% of new homes built in Toronto are condominiums.
Imperial Plaza was built in 1957 as the headquarters for Imperial Oil, Canada’s largest corporation at the time, and its board of directors wanted their HQ to reflect that status. There was no expense spared in its interior finishes, particularly in the lobby and public access areas, and Feldman plans to retain those features.
Architect Alvan Mathers designed the building in 1955 to be Toronto’s New City Hall, but it didn’t win over Mayor Nathan Phillips, who rejected the look and called for an international design competition. Finish architect Viljo Revell came up with the clamshell design that overlooks Nathan Phillips Square today.
Imperial Oil liked the broad-shoulders look of Mathers design and adopted it to create its new headquarters on the highest piece of land in the old city of Toronto at 111 St. Clair Ave.
St. Clair runs along the sandy northern shore of what used to be Lake Iroquois, the prehistoric lake that formed 13,000 years at the end of the last ice age and eventually shrank down to Lake Ontario.
That means the condo suites Feldman will carve into the office tower, plus the two-storey multi-million dollar townhome penthouses he’ll add to the roof, will have some of the most panoramic views in the city.
The Imperial Oil HQ was being built in one of the city’s most prestigious — and therefore influential — residential neighbourhoods and the construction noise was not going to be appreciated.
To reduce much of that noise, Imperial chose to weld its metal framework rather than use hot rivets driven by jackhammers. Today, Imperial Plaza is the largest welded-frame building in the world.
Civic leaders in the paranoid Cold War days liked Imperial’s small windows, thick walls and its location outside the city’s financial core and designated it as ideal for a survivors’ hospital if and when Toronto was hit by the big one — an atomic bomb.
The guest list at the Four Seasons Hotel reads like an international Who’s Who. It was so prestigious that this writer was surprised that the Calgary Stampeders would stay there on a visit to Toronto to play the Argos. Eight big guys dressed in sweat clothes came thundering past me in the lobby one day. I thought it was some visiting Stamps out for a pre-game jog, but on a closer look it was Madonna going out for a jog with her security detail.
When Isadore Sharp bought the 7-year-old hotel from Bramalea Ltd. in 1979 and rebranded it to his Four Seasons chain from the original Hyatt Regency, he reduced its room numbers to 338 from 620.
Feldman has hired the architectural firm of WZMH (then known as Webb, Zerafa, Menkes, Housden Partnership), that created the original design, to rework the building into a condominium residence. You’ll see most of the changes in he first two floors, which will be occupied by high-end retail shops.
The condo suites above that will be designed by The Design Agency, headed up by Allan Chan, Matthew Davis and Anwar Mekhayech. Their team is also designing the residences going into the Imperial Plaza.
And of course there’ll be some impressive public art included in the new exterior look: Feldman is big on installing art that inspire conversation.
The huge egg beater sculpture was one of the interesting additions to his World Trade condo at the foot of Yonge St.
At Marina Del Rey, stainless steel sailboats appear to be sailing along the public boardwalk.
But only a handful of friends got to see Feldman’s favourite piece of public art.
He commissioned actor Anthony Quinn to sculpt a lovely mermaid for a water fountain he was placing in the middle of a circle driveway at his Hollywood Plaza condo project in downtown North York.
The beautiful mermaid arrived in Toronto looking very authentic. She was topless and Quinn had been very generous to her.
Some said she looked a lot like the 18-year-old girlfriend Quinn brought to the condo’s opening party.
However the mermaid’s public unveiling was delayed several months while another metal sculpture draped her with a shawl.
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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.
—————————————————————————————————–
Incoming search terms
Related posts:
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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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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information
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