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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Search results for: “laneway”

  • Pine Hill Homes launches call for artists to design new laneway house facade

    My realtor friend Mark Savel tagged me in this earlier today.

    Pine Hill Homes has recently completed a laneway suite here in Toronto and they have now put out a call for artists to come up with something creative for its front facade. I think this is a great / fun idea and so I’m sharing it today on the blog.

    I think it also speaks to one of the differences between laneway suites and the main houses that now host them. Could you imagine a builder doing a call to artists for the front facade of a house not on a laneway? It seems less likely to me. But I think that the laneway side is viewed as a little less precious, and that creates an opportunity for playfulness.

    This, in my mind, is a great thing.

    If you decide to participate and your work is selected, you’ll have all of your materials paid for and you’ll also get an honorarium. I don’t know how much the honorarium is, or where this house is actually located, but I’m sure you can find these things out by contacting Pine Hill.

    I’m looking forward to seeing what ultimately gets selected and put up.

  • An imperfect laneway worth replicating

    We stumbled on Bar Volo last night on our evening walk (pictured above). It’s on St. Nicholas Street, which I guess is technically a street. But it feels and acts more like a laneway. I was naturally pretty excited by this discovery and so I tweeted this out. I was then called out for glorifying this laneway because: 1) this is only one small storefront, 2) the rest of the laneway is kind of pooey, and 3) there are other, better, examples of complete laneways in the city such as throughout Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. Okay.

    What got me excited is that this is a recent development — there’s a residential building above this welcoming bottle shop — that managed to successfully create fine-grained urbanism and activate a laneway frontage that could have very easily gone underutilized. Now imagine if every new development with some sort of laneway frontage did things as meaningful as this. Piece by piece, we would be building another layer to our city. (I like to think that we’re contributing to this vision with our laneway towns at Junction House. They are, by the way, 100% sold out. Go laneway living.)

    It’s easy to get excited by the bigger urban moves. A new tall building or a Ferris wheel on the waterfront, perhaps. But sometimes the answer is as simple as a small brewery, a narrow and imperfect laneway, and a roll up garage door.

  • Mackay Laneway House is now complete and available for rent

    Eleven years and a few setbacks later and we now have a completed laneway house.

    As Bill Gates once said, “most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

    Construction is all finished up and Mackay Laneway House is available for rent starting immediately.

    For photos and more information, click here.

  • Double height space at Mackay Laneway House

    The drywall started this week at Mackay Laneway House. This is a fun part of the construction process because it is that moment in time where, very quickly, the space transforms from a full on construction site to something that starts to resemble a livable space.

    What you are seeing above is a double height space (and 8 foot long skylight) that was incorporated into a sloping roof on the side of the house that faces the existing backyard. This is a design move that I felt pretty strongly about from the outset. Gabriel Fain, who is the project’s architect, likes to joke that it was really the only design directive.

    The move does a few things.

    1) It is a way to get light down and into the house without having a window facing the existing backyard. So it mitigates privacy concerns. 2) It frees up the north wall of the house, creating a place for a TV, art, photo backdrop, or whatever. You only have so many empty walls in a house of this size. And 3) it looks really cool and frames a large tree that overhangs the house.

    Stay tuned for more progress photos. The best way to do that is to follow @globizen.

  • Weekly link roundup — laneway housing to SPACs

    Here’s a weekly round up of links and articles that you may find interesting. The topics cover the sorts of things that we usually talk about on this blog.

    • The latest Mackay Laneway House update is now live on the Globizen Journal. The ground floor steel is complete, with framing currently underway. The post has some background on the challenges faced in order to get to this stage.
    • Brick comparison. Here’s a recent tweet of mine. I’m curious if any of you can tell the difference between these two brick finishes and if you have a clear preference. One of them is stamped concrete and the other is real brick (precast concrete with brick slips).
    • Pools as art. Apparently this is a trend right now, but it’s not necessarily a new one. Pablo Picasso accidentally created one when he “signed” the bottom of one in Spain back in the early 1960s. A pool would be fun right now. [FT paywall]
    • Alley house in King’s Cross by architect David Adjaye is currently on the market for £6.5 million. Lots of black. I love the mint green room with the exposed concrete ceiling. Oh, and there’s a pool.
    • Nightclubs are, not surprisingly, really struggling. Most have been closed since March. Unlike restaurants, you can’t really hack together a solution with outdoor dining, heat lamps and takeout. They’re predicated on people being proximate to each other. [Sorry, another FT paywall]
    • SPACs are so hot right now, particularly in the world of Chamath Palihapitiya and Social Capital. A good follow-up to this week’s earlier post about $IPOB’s merger with real estate startup Opendoor.
    • Monocle has just published a new book about “gentle living.” It’s a guide to “slowing down, enjoying more and being happy.” I’m trying to do more of this, or at least be more mindful about it. It doesn’t always/usually work. Perhaps I need this book.
    • “Decade of the home.” Opinion piece about the current desire for suburban over urban locations. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I am steadfast in my belief that urban life is going to prove to be incredibly resilient on the other side of this.
    • McKinsey report about the impact that lockdown is having on digital adoption, e-commerce penetration, and the overall customer experience. You’ll need to enter some information in order to download the PDF, but it’s free.

    Photo: Lost House by Adjaye Associates via The Modern House

  • Mackay Laneway House is now under construction

    Well, it only took 11 years.

    I still remember the first time I walked into Etobicoke Civic Centre and showed the lady at the counter my design for a laneway house. She didn’t know what a laneway house was and she couldn’t figure out where it fronted. “Wait, it’s behind the main house? It has no frontage. Where’s the street? Huh?” A lot has changed over the past decade, as I knew it would. All of the building permits are now in and Mackay Laneway House is under construction in Toronto’s Corso Italia neighborhood.

    Kilbarry Hill is overseeing the construction process. (Construction was supposed to start earlier this summer, but COVID-19 had something to say about that.) Regular updates will be posted on the Globizen blog and on the socials, with the goal of creating a kind of “how-to guide” for laneway suites. Expect detailed construction updates, a list of the individual trades that are being used, post-completion costing information, and probably a bunch more.

    The first order of business is the site servicing work, all of which has to be done via the existing house. No connections off the mains because, remember, these are intended to be secondary suites, similar to basement apartments. This raises the question of how best to submeter the utilities. Thankfully, the good folks over at Lanescape were kind enough to share how they have done it.

    Click here to subscribe to the Globizen Bulletin.

  • Deferring development charges on a laneway suite

    Currently, if you’re building an Ancillary Secondary Dwelling Unit (such as a laneway suite) in the City of Toronto, you can defer the payment of any development charges for 20 years from the date that a building permit is issued for the unit. But really what this means is that, if you don’t do anything bad for 20 years (event of default), you won’t have to pay anything. The payable charge goes to $0 at the end of the term and the agreement goes away. Cool.

    So what are some of the bad things that you’re not supposed to do?

    Well the main thing is that you’re not allowed to create a new lot at any point during the 20-year deferral period. This is because the laneway suite policies are designed to encourage the creation of new rental housing and not new for sale housing. So you can’t sever off the back of your lot. The other thing you need to do is make sure that if you were to ever sell your property that the new owner(s) assumes these same obligations.

    This all makes sense.

    There is some fine print to consider. The payable development charge amount that the City enters into these agreements is the rate for single detached dwellings. Currently that figure is $76,830. This is more than double what you would have to pay if you, well, just paid the DCs for your ancillary secondary unit instead of deferring them. The reason for this is because, if you do do something bad such as sever your property, you’ve now no longer built an ancillary secondary unit. You’ve built a detached dwelling. Rates go up.

    Moral of the story: Don’t create a new lot. For more information on the program, click here.

    P.S. I’m not a lawyer. Please don’t take this post as any sort of legal advice. This post was also revised from its original version to correct a misunderstanding on my part.

  • Laneway garage conversion in Toronto

    This isn’t a laneway suite per se, but Office Ou here in Toronto recently completed this garage conversion. The idea was to take a typical rear laneway garage and turn it into something that could better house a wide range of uses.

    As Toronto reconsiders its laneways and as fewer people own cars (a separate topic to be debated), we are likely to see many of these spaces rethought. In this case, the result is a true extension of the existing home. You probably want to have a nice looking car — a Porsche would do — if you’re going to continue to use it for that purpose.

    I’m drawn to spaces like this because I start imagining all of the different use cases: a dining room, an office, a studio for photoshoots, a place for Pecha Kuchas, and so on. In big and expensive cities it can be rare to have that bit of extra space that allows you to tinker and experiment. And I am a big fan of tinkering.

    Office Ou was founded by Nicolas Koff, Uros Novakovic, and Sebastian Bartnicki. Nicolas and I went to architecture school together both here in Toronto and in Philadelphia. Congratulations on completing a beautiful project.

    Photo: Adrian Ozimek

  • Tacos, snowstorms, and laneway suites

    Few things go as well together as tacos and snowstorms. And so that’s exactly what I did for lunch today given the awesome — I love snow — storm that we’re having in Toronto this weekend. The garnish you’re seeing below is grilled cactus. Dave, the owner of Playa Cabana Taqueria, grows it on location and uses it for special dishes like this one here. If you haven’t been, I would highly recommend it. They’re located at 21 St. Clair Avenue East.

    In addition to tacos, I also spent the morning with Gabriel Fain Architects working on our upcoming laneway suite collaboration. Some of you may remember that our previous laneway project was refused at the Committee of Adjustment back in 2017. Well now that laneway suites are permissible as-of-right, it’s time to get going. We are not planning to seek any variances from what is currently allowed.

    But if you’re thinking about building your own laneway suite, there are still a number of issues that you might run into depending on your property. Servicing, proximity to a fire hydrant, access, and trees are maybe some of the most common. I know that the city is working to resolve / streamline some of these complications, as the objective is truly to build laneway suites across the city.

    As Gabriel and I work through our project this year, my plan is to write about it here on the blog. And hopefully when the project is complete, the posts will serve as a kind of guide for homeowners. These suites are really setup to be built by individual homeowners, as opposed to by developers. If you don’t already email subscribe to this blog and are interested in learning more, sign up here.

    In the meantime, if you have any questions about laneway suites, there are a number of experts in the city, including Gabriel Fain Architects and the folks over at Lanescape.

  • Nelson, BC is running a laneway house design competition

    The City of Nelson, BC — which happens to be the launching pad for some of the best snowboarding in the world — is currently conducting a laneway house design competition. The objective is to come up with a set of “pre-reviewed” design options that homeowners can then purchase and build themselves. Here’s more about what they’re trying to achieve:

    The objective is to provide easy access to high-quality designs and code-compliant plans that strike the right balance between affordable construction and ecologically-sound design. They will be plans designed for Nelson, offering exceptional value-for-money for homeowners and making it easier for them to build a laneway house on their property. The contest evaluation criteria emphasise (sic) adaptability to various lots and topographies.

    Three designs will be selected, as well as a “people’s choice award.” Payment for a winning design will come in the form of a monetary prize and a $1,000 royalty each time the design is purchased by a homeowner. I’m not sure how many houses there are in Nelson, but I would imagine there are enough to make this a worthwhile exercise.

    I also think this is a good approach to making laneway housing more accessible to homeowners. The simpler they are to build, the more housing we will see. Nelson clearly understands that. If you’d like to submit, you have until September 2, 2019. More details, here. Apologies for the short notice.

    Thank you to Mason Studio for sharing this competition with me.