Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Travel

  • A few observations about Salt Lake City

    Utah is beautiful. See here.

    People in SLC are really nice. Strangers greet you on the street. Motorists are also more polite and patient. I had no idea how to respond. I suspect it might have something to do with there being less traffic and, in turn, less frustration. But again, even if you ignore what happens on the road, people are nice.

    You will need a serious utility vehicle to navigate the topography of this region. Venturing into the surrounding canyons requires 4-wheel drive or chains during snowstorms. I was only there for a week and already I have visions of a classic Defender in my mind. Do they come in electric versions?

    The streets are too wide for proper enjoyment as a pedestrian. This is a challenging problem to fix, as I have mentioned before. That said — and this is going to be an unpopular opinion — the city felt void of any sort of real traffic. The distances travelled are great, but the highways actually flow freely. You also never really need to worry about parking.

    Electric scooters are popular in SLC. As is cycling — both for getting around and as a reason to wear tight-fitting bright clothes.

    SLC feels as if it is both under the radar and also rapidly emerging. My new favorite restaurant in SLC is a place called Post Office Place. We walked in without a reservation on a Friday night and they gladly took us. I couldn’t understand why the place wasn’t rammed. I mean, they have Marseille-style panisse on the menu!

    The Granary District is an area to watch. It is a former industrial area to the southwest of downtown. It is already home to breweries, food halls, and creative offices. But it needs some more time to properly fill in. We stayed at the Evo Hotel in Granary (highly recommend). The campus amenities include a rock climbing facility, an indoor skatepark, and plenty of places to work and Zoom.

    Most of the new infill housing appears to be mid-rise in scale and most of it is wood-frame construction on top of concrete.

    By my estimation (and by estimation I mean that I have a spreadsheet for this), the ski and snowboard communities surrounding SLC are some of the most accessible in North America. Land at SLC airport and you’re in the mountains in 20-30 minutes.

    Park City-Canyons is the most well-known ski destination. But if you’re a more aggressive skier — the kind that keeps your gloves together with duct tape and counts the number of ski days per season — you’ll want to head over to the Cottonwood canyons and places like Snowbird and Brighton.

    Snowbird remains one of my all-time favorite ski destinations for two reasons: the mountain itself and the brutalist architecture at the bottom of it. There’s none of that faux alpine crap over here — just exposed and unabashed concrete and wood. And who doesn’t love brutalism, right? (I haven’t been to Brighton yet but one of my local friends told me that it’s a great snowboarders mountain.)

    The Canyons Village at Park City is developing really nicely. As I understand it, it’s only about 30-40% built out at this stage. The Pendry Hotel just recently opened (announcement here) and I can tell you that the restaurants were generally busy every night of the week (summer experience). The project team did a wonderful job creating a place and a new anchor in the village.

    What did I miss in this list?

  • New NFT collection — Utah

    Our week of working remotely in the mountains of Utah has come to an end. Being on mountain time meant early mornings every day. But it also meant being able to enjoy the evenings, including sunsets like the one shown here at the top of Ensign Peak. This was my first time really experiencing the Salt Lake City area in the summer, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. It is a beautiful place, and one that still feels under the radar once you exclude its global draw as a ski and snowboard destination. I also had a great time capturing it on my camera. So I’m excited to share my latest NFT photography collection — Utah. All of the photos were taken on my Fujifilm X-T3 (35mm) and can be viewed and purchased over here on Foundation.

  • The fast-foodification of cities

    Greg Isenberg recently wrote about what he refers to as the fast-foodification of everything — including cities. His arguments are that (1) we have reached peak sameness (Toronto is largely indistinguishable from, say, Sydney) and (2) the best brands and companies going forward will be local, unique, and community-driven.

    I don’t know how to assess whether we have reached peak sameness, but I do know that, whatever we are experiencing right now, is at a minimum 100 years in the making. The International Style (of architecture), which emerged after WWI, is exactly what the name suggests. The intent was to fashion an approach to architecture that worked anywhere in the world. Location, climate, and context were all irrelevant.

    This approach has been widely criticized for the reasons you might expect and for the reasons that Isenberg outlines in his post. But sameness is not exclusively the result of European architects who wanted to eschew ornament and local flourishes. As the world continues to globalize and become “smaller”, there is an inevitability to this growing and continued sameness. Business wants economies of scale.

    But there is no question that, more than ever, people are craving unique and local experiences and places. And if you can create that in our globalized world, you are going to win.

  • Accessible modernism

    One of the most extraordinary things about Salt Lake City is that you can land at its airport and then, in 20-30 minutes, you’re in the mountains looking at landscapes like this:

    By my estimation, this makes it the most accessible big city and mountain town combination in North America.

    Historically though, Salt Lake City hasn’t really been known for modern architecture. There is, of course, one glaring exception and that is the work of architect John Sugden.

    Sugden was originally from Chicago, had trained under Mies van der Rohe, and is credited with bringing a similar kind of International Style to Utah.

    The house pictured above is one of Sugden’s projects.

    I’m not sure when it was originally built, but it was meticulously renovated by Brent Jespersen, and featured in Dwell magazine back in 2009. If you’d like to take a closer look, click here. (It is again being renovated right now.)

    When I was researching who in Salt Lake City and Park City was building cool stuff, Brent’s name immediately came up. So I appreciate him taking the time to tour me through some of his projects this evening. Thank you, Brent.

    What is now clear to me is that this whole not being known for modern architecture thing is quickly going away.

  • A network of smart homes across the globe

    I was reading about Wander last night before bed. For those of you who aren’t familiar, they are a startup that is building a network of smart homes around the world so that people can live and work remotely. You rent these homes like you would a home on Airbnb, but the difference here is that Wander owns all of the homes and is working to create a very unique and consistent kind of experience. They also offer a membership that costs $200 per year and gives you benefits like discounts on bookings and early access to new properties. So far the company has raised $27 million to help build out this vision.

    This is all very interesting to me because I think it’s a great idea, and because 20 some years ago I wrote a business plan with a friend of mine that was almost identical to this. We were both still in undergrad and we had this hypothesis that a lot of people would love to find a way to live as citizens of the world. We obviously never did anything with that plan, but in looking back we were probably too early, even if we were right about people’s latent desires. Today, things feel very different. I think there’s little doubt that knowledge working has become more flexible. So I suspect we will see a lot more of these kinds of ideas going forward.

  • Design-forward vacation rentals

    What I was getting at with the above tweet is that I think there’s way more demand, for places like this and this, than there is supply. Click on the first link and you’ll see that it’s booked up all summer long. And as for the second link, I just booked one of their rentals for this summer, but I have been trying — for years — to book it in the winter.

    I think the unmet use case is as simple as this: I live in a big city, and I want to get out of the city and go somewhere cool and design-forward. There are, of course, some options. But there’s a need for a lot more. Generally speaking, it feels to me like the majority of the supply is either (1) an expensive/large cottage or (2) an old “classic luxury” kind of hotel.

    I’m specifically referring to Toronto and southern Ontario with these options, but judging by some of the responses I got to my tweet, this appears to be an opportunity in many other markets as well. But I would be curious to hear from all you in comments or on Twitter. What “local” hospitality offerings are missing in your market? Where would you like to travel to and stay, but can’t?

  • Sick day

    I somehow managed to get food poisoning in Amsterdam. I feel awful and I’m not in the headspace to write anything remotely thoughtful today. So regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow — hopefully.

    P.S. It looks like Toronto will be getting its first Michelin restaurants guide. Good timing given this recent post.

  • Toilet seat heights in Amsterdam

    I am in Amsterdam right now for the very first time. And after I took in all the bicycles, the beautifully tilting buildings, and its iconic canals, the first thing that struck me was — get this — the height of its toilet seats.

    Now don’t get me wrong, I am a reasonably tall guy. So it’s not that the bowl in my hotel room isn’t comfortable or anything like that. It actually feels quite luxurious. I just know that this thing has got to be taller than your average bowl.

    A typical toilet seat height can be anywhere from 15 to 19” when measuring from the floor to the top of the seat. But I think 17-19” is the most typical range. So how much taller is my Dutch bowl?

    Sadly, I forgot to pack my tape measure on this trip. So I instead used the tallest book I could find in the room as a measuring stick. It happenend to be the above book by Hollywood photographer Matthew Rolston.

    Matthew’s book is 36cm tall and so, by using everything I ever learned in architecture school, I am now fairly confident that my seat is currently sitting at around 21-22” off the ground.

    Dutch people are tall. And so too are the bowls, it would seem.

  • Les banlieues of Paris

    One of the things that I notice about people from Paris is that they’re always very clear on whether they live in Paris or outside of Paris in the banlieues (the suburbs). They’ll say things like, “No I don’t live in Paris. It’s too expensive. I live in such and such a place in the banlieues.”

    I suppose this isn’t entirely different than saying you don’t live in New York, you live on Long Island, or you don’t live in Toronto, you live in Burlington. Except that there seems to be a greater sense of division when they say it here in Paris (although it’s entirely possible that it could be my rusty French that is leading me to believe this).

    There is a sense that you’re either inside the Boulevard Périphérique, or you’re really not. And this seems like a shame. Cities regions care less about administrative borders and more about the movement of people, ideas, and goods.

    And as much as I love Paris (the central part), it is, from what I can tell, far more static than some of its surrounding areas in terms of new people (immigration), new buildings, and probably new ideas.

    Paris can sometimes feel like a perfectly curated museum. It’s beautiful and precious and should not be touched — please stand behind the ropes mesdames et messieurs. But perhaps it’s time to equally celebrate les banlieues and recognize what they have to offer.

  • Shoes follow built form

    I have remarked this before, but I’ll say it again anyways: sneakers are very popular in Paris. Everybody seems to be wearing cool and colorful sneakers, regardless of what the rest of their outfit happens to look like.

    Full business suit? Why yes, you should be wearing cool sneakers.

    But why is that?

    Paris is a famously walkable city. At any given time, you’re on average just about 500m from the closest subway station. So my entirely unproven sneaker theory is this: shoes follow built form.

    If you build a city around people walking everywhere, one will ultimately choose the most appropriate kind of footwear.

    Photo: Rosa Bonheur sur Seine