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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Tag: junction house condos

  • Beautiful brick mid-rise proposed for Toronto’s Junction neighborhood

    Last week, Sierra Communities (developer) and my friend Gabriel Fain (architect of Mackay Laneway House fame) submitted the above development proposal for 2760 Dundas Street West in the Junction. It is a beautiful proposal. So not surprisingly, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Here are the first batch of comments from Urban Toronto:

    It also happens to be one block west of our Junction House project, so I definitely would have been annoyed if somebody proposed something ugly here. I am 99.9% biased, but I think the Junction has some of the best new mid-rise buildings in the city. Presumably, this is what “Mrgeosim” was getting at with their comment about “the number of good proposals for this neighbourhood.”

    But here’s the thing. This is a relatively small proposal. It’s a 6-storey mid-rise building with 28 new homes on top of a tiny 482 square meter site (16m frontage). This makes it a challenging new development to execute on. So the fact that this is required to go through the typical rezoning and site plan processes is, in my opinion, a painful problem.

    We should be doing everything we can to encourage these kinds of new housing developments all across the city. And that necessarily means removing as many barriers as possible. A pair of development applications and a few community meetings may seem benign, but they’re not. They add time and real costs that then need to be passed onto future residents.

    There is also a very valid question around what kind of development charges (or impact fees) we should be levying on projects of this scale. If you want to build a laneway suite in the City of Toronto, you can have the development charges deferred and eventually forgiven. Why? Because we want more rental housing and we have arguably recognized that it’s important for project feasibility.

    Should the same apply if you’re building 2 new homes, or perhaps 28 new homes? At what point should the “impacts” kick in and the fees be levied? And might there be an argument that adding many new homes on top of small 482 square meter parcels is actually an incredibly efficient way of using existing public infrastructure? I think so.

    Congratulations to the team on a beautiful proposal! I’m looking forward to this being our neighbor.

    Image: Gabriel Fain Architects

  • The 12 best design districts around the world

    Architectural Digest has just published the perfect article for gratuitous self-promotion. It is a list of “the 12 best design districts around the world”, and it includes The Junction, here in Toronto:

    Located in a tree-lined historic area of the city, The Junction gets its name for its past as the heart of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mix with locals on the main drag of Dundas West at boutiques including the minimalist homeware store Mjolk and modern stationery shop Take Note. A short 20-minute walk from this charming retail center, the Museum of Contemporary Art is worthy of a stop in too. (Current exhibitions include a site-specific commission by artist Sarah Badr and Seeing the Invisible, an augmented reality experience in the museum’s Jerusalem Botanical Gardens.) Then take a tipple at The Junction Brewery, which serves local craft beers within an Art Deco building that offers a glimpse of the neighborhood’s rich history.

    Early on in high school, I used to come downtown to primarily do two things: skateboard and walk Queen Street. This was the street. It was weird and artsy and we loved it. And so we would start at University Ave and walk west for as long as the street was interesting.

    For a period of time, it felt like things kind of fell off after Spadina Ave. So we would often stop there. But then west of Spadina started getting cool and interesting too.

    Years later in 2004, the Drake Hotel would open up on what felt like a far off location on Queen Street. And then seemingly overnight, all of Queen Street was cool. Parkdale had a taco place with absurdly long lines and loud hip-hop music, and cool started moving up Ossington Ave, presumably because Queen had run out of space.

    Of course, neighborhoods have cycles. Before it was the Drake Hotel, it was Small’s Hotel. And when it opened in 1890, it was located in one of the wealthiest areas of Toronto. Then the area became a lot less wealthy, and eventually the hotel became a flophouse, before once again becoming cool again. These are the cycles.

    There is no doubt that Queen Street remains one of the greatest streets in Toronto. But in my mind, 2018 was a turning point. This is when when the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) left Queen and moved to the Junction Triangle (or the Lower Junction, or just the Junction, depending on what you prefer to call it).

    This to me didn’t signal that Queen had in any way peaked. Far from it. But I think it did solidify the Junction as one of Toronto’s next cool and artsy neighborhoods. And now here we are with Architectural Digest calling it one of the best in the world.

    It would be hard for me to be more biased. But I’m a big fan of the Junction. And I am really looking forward to erecting our placemaking art later this year. It is one of the things that our team is most proud of, and we proposed it simply because we thought it would be cool and interesting. That’s important.

  • Placemaking art

    Back in 2017, when Superkul (architects) first started coming up with concept designs for Junction House, we all decided that it would be nice if we could do something to mark the important view terminus that exists with our site.

    We explored a few different ideas and then ultimately landed on a rooftop neon (or neon-like) sign that would read “Junction House.” The idea was to pay homage to the old signage that used to be present in the Junction and to some of the iconic rooftop signs that still exist around the world.

    Of course, the goal was never advertising. There is no economic imperative for us here. We just wanted to do something fun that at the same time could mark the entrance to the Junction neighborhood.

    After proposing this idea, we quickly learned that these are next to impossible to get approved. But to their credit, the City of Toronto fully got it. We heard things such as, “look, we can’t call this art, but we like the idea and we like what you’re trying to do.” Thank you for that.

    The compromise we ultimately struck was to remove the “House” part, leaving just “Junction.” This way it no longer referenced our project and instead referenced a place. By doing this, it became “placemaking.” And that is what is now baked in our site plan approval.

    Fast forward to 2022, and we are now getting ready to test our first 1:1 mockup of the sign. I can’t wait to see how this looks on site.

  • A conversation about families in condominiums

    I spent this morning filming a new short video for Junction House. My friends Adriana and Mateusz live in a beautiful boutique condominium building downtown. They are also raising their young daughter there, and using it as an office and design studio (he’s an architect). This is a story that we are looking to tell in a new campaign that we’ll be launching this fall, and so I very much appreciate them volunteering their time.

    We talk about this a lot on the blog, but there are deep cultural biases in Toronto (and throughout North America) around single-family housing. But that is changing. For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing to live in multi-family buildings and to raise families within them. We believe that there are many benefits to this lifestyle choice, and that it is ultimately a positive thing for our cities. So that’s what we were discussing this morning.

    Thank you both for your time, and thank you to Studio Haus for figuring out how to get the lighting right in a corner suite with copious amounts of natural light.

  • What might Toronto learn from this infill rental project in Tokyo

    This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):

    The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.

    The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.

    The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there’s a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.

    The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building’s overall efficiency.

    What is also interesting to look at this building’s dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.

    In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.

    But let’s scan more of Toronto.

    If you move away from designated “Avenues” (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.

    Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street — these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:

    Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.

    As I have argued many times before, I think one of the greatest opportunities to quickly do this sits along our majors streets.

    Architectural drawings: ETHNOS

  • Looking south toward High Park

    What a beautiful day in Toronto. I love the heat.

    I took the above photo this morning from the 7th floor of Junction House. It is a view south toward High Park. More specifically though, it is the view from the second and upper floor of what will ultimately become suite 607 (a suite that happens to be still available for sale).

    Now that the building is almost topped out, I’m planning to run through a bunch of the suites with my camera and photograph all of the different views. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this done before and I think it could be a pretty cool little photography project.

  • Practicing what I preach

    In yesterday’s post I wrote about happiness vs. satisfaction (among a bunch of other things). And I mentioned that I derive deep satisfaction from the work that I do, which is real estate development. On the back of this post, I received a question from a reader this morning that more or less asked me if I think about the impact of my work on other people’s happiness / satisfaction. Part of the point that was being made was that while it may be a positive endeavor for me, I may be completely destroying the satisfaction, happiness, and lives of others. Do I give this any thought? Lastly, a point was made that very few developers seem to live in their own housing projects, which should tell you something.

    I thought these were all very good points/questions and so I’d like to respond to them publicly:

    • I do think carefully about the happiness and satisfaction of others. In fact, part of the reason this work is satisfying is that, in my opinion, it is both challenging and important work. Growing cities require new housing and the reality is that almost all of this housing comes from private developers.
    • This may sound cheesy, but I also care deeply about beauty. This is something that is of course in the eye of the beholder. But I do want things to be beautiful. I want our cities to be more beautiful. And I don’t think we talk about this enough. I mean, just look at the garbage bins we have in Toronto.
    • Some people may not like or appreciate the form that development usually takes in cities such as Toronto, but the housing needs to go somewhere. As a result of restricting development in most areas of the city, we are now forced to highly concentrate development in relatively few areas. Many are reacting to this.
    • There will almost certainly be tensions between incumbents and new entrants when it comes to city building. That’s part of what makes this work so challenging and rewarding. Everyone involved in the building of our cities has to constantly problem solve and manage competing interests. It’s not easy.
    • I am in fact moving into one of our projects (Junction House). I am doing this because (1) I think our team is creating an awesome and beautiful project and (2) I believe that living in multi-family buildings in walkable neighborhoods is a more sustainable (and enjoyable) way to live. I want to practice what I preach.

  • Floor numbering conventions

    One of the things that is common in Europe is that building floors often start with zero for the ground floor and then go both up and down from there.

    This is different than most of North America where the ground floor is usually floor number 1 (regardless of what it might be called) and then the floors go up from there.

    Using the pictured example (above), the key difference is that, with the ground floor as zero, you end up with the above-grade floors being off by 1 and the top floor being 6 instead of 7.

    There is a certain rationality to the European approach that I like, but I am curious how suites on ground floors get typically numbered. I will seek this out and report back.

    At Junction House, our ground floor residences follow 101, 102, 103, etc. Following the exact same logic, the European equivalent would be 001, 002, 003, etc. This, admittedly, feels a bit odd.

    Which floor convention do you find more intuitive?

    Either way, I’m thinking about adopting the European approach for no other reason than that height is a sensitive topic in the world of development, so one less “headline” floor could be helpful. (Half-joking)

  • Mass timber construction next?

    We poured the last section of our level 4 slab at Junction House yesterday. As I was leaving the site, I tweeted this photo out from Watkinson Avenue. What you are seeing is the northwest corner of the building where we have seven two-storey towns that front onto our rear laneway. In response to this tweet, Andrew Williamson asked a most excellent question: “timber next?”

    My response was that we would love to do a mass timber building. We have certainly looked at it in the past, and we will continue to look for opportunities to use more sustainable building materials wherever possible. But there are challenges to overcome and a project like Junction House would have been far more difficult to do in mass timber. I’m not an expert when it comes to wood construction, but I will offer up three items that have come up for us in the past.

    The first is trade familiarity. We are in a highly inflationary hard cost environment right now. Everyone is hyper focused on costs and the market is competitive. So switching to a construction method that is less common comes with some additional risks. But this will almost certainly change over time as the market evolves and more people adopt mass timber.

    The second is water. The Junction area, or at least parts of it, have a relatively high water table. That is certainly the case with our site. One of the things you need to do during construction is dewater, or draw down the water level within your site so that you can actually build. In our case, we built a watertight below-grade parking structure, though that isn’t always the case.

    Dewatering comes at a cost and so generally you want to stop dewatering as soon as it is feasible to do so. But you need to make sure that you have enough weight to counteract the buoyancy forces associated with groundwater returning to the site. Generally this means you need to wait until you’ve finished constructing a certain level in the building so that there’s enough mass. The engineers will say things, “we can shut off the dewatering once we complete our level 4 slab.”

    The thing to consider with all of this is that concrete is heavier than wood, which means that you may need to run your dewatering program for longer (increasing your costs). Or, if your building isn’t all that big, maybe you’ll never have enough weight to offset the below-grade water forces and so you have to look at other methods for keeping your building from floating away. Again, this will increase your costs.

    The last thing I’ll mention is that mass timber buildings generally have higher floor-to-floor heights compared to cast-in-place concrete. What this means is that a 9 storey building in timber is going to be taller, in meters, compared to a 9 storey building in concrete — even if the clear heights within the suites are the same. This is a massive deal when you’re operating in an environment that is highly sensitive to building height.

    In the case of Junction House, we were negotiating our final height in centimeter increments — literally arguing whether it could be 50cm to 1.3m taller than some perceived maximum height. This is, in my mind, absurd, but it became a hill that people were willing to die on. The result is that our laneway towns (pictured above) went from having an entrance that was a few steps up off the lane to having an entrance that is now a few steps down off the lane. That is how we ultimately solved our centimeter problem.

    This wounded me to my core because, at the end of the day, what are people going to remark: The additional meter at the top of the building or the relationship that these towns will now have to the street? It will, of course, be the latter. So please know that our hearts were in the right place. But what this also means is that had we been trying to build in wood, we likely would have lost a floor during this negotiation and that would have killed the entire project.

  • Construction update: Junction House

    This is a photo of Junction House that I took this morning after our weekly construction meeting. The team is currently preparing for the first concrete pour of level 4 (each floor has been split up into three pours). We’re now flying our forms, which means that we’re able to move a lot faster. This is the exciting part of a new build mid-rise like Junction House. The underground garage part is like watching paint dry.

    We’re scheduled to be topped out by this summer, so expect some gratuitous view photos on the socials.