Last month, Curated Properties submitted a rezoning and site plan application for a 6-storey, 25-unit building at 45 Dovercourt Road in Toronto. The project is known to the market as Cabin and you can register for it now.

The project immediately caught my attention (because of its design, because of its branding, and because I like the work of Curated), so I decided to dig in further and get a copy of their architectural drawings. Development applications and their supporting documents are all public. Anyone can request a copy. But the city isn’t great at making this known.

Since I’m excited to see more of these small scale urban infill projects in the city, today I thought I would highlight some of its key features and some of the things that are being proposed in order to make a project like this work.

The Homes

First of all, 100% of the suites are 2-storey. 76% of the suites are also 2 bedroom or larger.

The result is that the project is essentially a series of townhomes stacked on top of each other. I suspect that this will appeal to more end-users as opposed to investors. Hopefully, it will also attract more families to the area.

Here’s the third floor plan:

You probably can’t see it, but all of the suites are marked as “Level 1”, obviously indicating that there’s more than one level.

Also worth mentioning is the notch or cut out on the north side of the building. This is what makes the 2 suites in the middle of the floor plate possible. In order for them to have windows, they need to be setback from the (north) property line. It also means those suites get terraces.

The Parking

Turning to the ground floor plan, it’s interesting to see that they are proposing 8 triple car stackers that will be accessible off the rear laneway (right side on the plan below). That equates to 24 parking spaces in the building (8 bays x 3 cars per stacker).

On small urban sites like this one, it can be very difficult to accommodate parking. So it’s inevitable that we will see more parking stackers in the city and a continual reduction in parking minimums.

The Construction

Finally, I have been told that this project is expected to be framed in wood, as opposed to reinforced concrete, which is more typical of condominiums in Toronto.

As of the beginning of this year (2015), the Ontario Building Code was modified to allow wood-frame buildings up to 6 storeys. Before this change, the highest you could go was 4 storeys.

This change was done with the intent of reducing construction costs so that it becomes more feasible to develop smaller infill sites such as this one. So expect to see more of this.

I know that a lot of people would like to remain in the city even when they start having children. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find affordable low-rise homes. And not everyone wants to live in a high-rise tower. 

That’s why I think we will see more, not less, low-rise and mid-rise infill projects like Cabin. If you’re interested in this topic, also check out a post I wrote called 3 stages of intensification.

The rendering at the top of this post is from Curated Properties and the drawings are by RAW Design.

One of the things I noticed this past weekend when I was on my Porter Escape in Quebec City was that there’s still evidence of the seigneurial land use system. I saw it on île d'Orléans.

Established in 1627 in New France, the seigneurial system was a feudal way of distributing land and creating subsistence farming for those who occupied it. It was ultimately abolished in 1854, but you can still see vestiges of it.

With the seigneurial system, a typical farming lot was a long and narrow strip of land emanating from the water, which in this particular case was the St. Lawrence River. Here’s a map from 1641 showing what that looks like:

The reasoning behind this spatial arrangement was rather simple. By having long narrow lots, it meant that you could maximize the number of farmers who had direct access to water. This was needed for navigation, but also for many other obvious reasons. This was an efficient layout.

At the same time, the long strips meant that each farmer had access to a broad cross section of different kinds of land. They had fertile land for growing, land for their home, and frequently land with trees so that they had material to build, fuel to burn, and so on. It also meant that, despite the overall lot sizes, people actually lived fairly close to each other. It created communities.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the seigneurial system than just its physical form and there are reasons it was eventually abolished. But today I just want to focus on spatial layout. Because I think there are parallels to how we continue to plan our communities.

If you live in a city you’ve probably come across a narrow rowhouse, a narrow townhouse, and/or a long and narrow condominium – which many people like to pejoratively refer to as a “bowling alley” plan. In these cases, the width of the home could be somewhere between 10 and 13 feet.

If you stop and think about this, it’s exactly the same spatial principles as the seigneurial land use system. But instead of maximizing the number of people with access to the St. Lawrence River, it’s about maximizing the number of people who front onto the street and who have access to natural light.

In tight urban conditions, it’s not uncommon to have no “side yard windows.” In my case, I live in a condominium with 20′ feet of windows on one side only. The other 3 sides of my box have none. And that’s a fairly common urban condition.

I find this interesting because as much as the world is rapidly changing, some things don’t actually change all that much.

Image: Wikipedia