One Roxborough West, a 12-storey, mixed-used building, was developed to blend seamlessly into the Summerhill neighbourhood of Toronto in which it stands.NORTH DRIVE INVESTMENTS
A lot of people talk about the quantity of new real estate projects dotting Toronto’s downtown, but what about the quality, from a design perspective?
In the past, Canada’s largest city may have been starved for great design and architecture, but no more. Toronto is going through a transformation of its downtown. Putting up “cost-effective boxes,” as one architect put it, is a thing of the past, and what’s replacing it are well-designed buildings with good materiality and a good street presence, melding seamlessly with the neighbourhoods where they’re based.
North Drive Investments Inc. is an architecturally ambitious developer of upscale boutique condominium projects that has already made such a mark on the city with such projects as 10 Prince Arthur – a building of just 25 residences at Avenue Road and Prince Arthur Avenue and a past BILD award winner for Best Mid-Rise Building Design – and 36 Birch, which is located along a serene, tree-lined street in the Summerhill neighbourhood and features two-level, 25-foot wide Garden and Sky Residences.
These aren’t projects plunked down into any neighbourhood. North Drive’s objective is to attract the best designers, such as Richard Wengle, Michael London, Janet Rosenberg and Brian Gluckstein.
Trevor Wallace is principal of Reflect Architecture, which has worked with North Drive Investments on the architecture and design of One Roxborough West in Toronto.SUPPLIED
For its latest project, One Roxborough West, which is also located in the intimate Summerhill community, North Drive has teamed with Trevor Wallace. He is the principal at Reflect Architecture, a firm that has worked with the developer to conceive all aspects of the 12-storey, mixed-use development, including architecture, interior design, visual identity and branding.
“I feel strongly that the most successful projects have the perfect alignment of taste between the design team and the target market,” says Jordan Morassutti, co-founder of North Drive.
“The ethos of being contextually responsive inspires both Reflect’s and North Drive’s design process. One Roxborough West afforded us the opportunity to indulge in our personal aesthetics while delivering a design that reflects the refined sophistication of Summerhill.”
Wallace was born and raised in Toronto, and pursued architectural studies at Carleton University, where he completed both his undergraduate and master’s degrees. He travelled to different European cities, such as Barcelona, Paris and Stockholm, during his formative years before moving to work with the late Brian Curtner at Quadrangle Architects, with whom he worked on numerous award-winning projects for six years. Wallace launched Reflect Architecture in 2016.
Q: What inspired you when you were in cities like Barcelona?
Barcelona is incredible because there’s so much substance and a culturally significant existing architectural fabric. And they also have a keen ability to go in and infuse that fabric with new and very contemporary architecture. They use the contemporary architecture to revitalize the fabric of what’s there. And I think that approach, an avant-garde approach, to revitalizing existing architecture was something that was front of mind for myself when I was there, and it became an informing factor in my master’s thesis.
Many of those cultures [in European cities] are going through various forms of redesigning, appropriating the existing stock of architecture, and the methods and way they do that are, in many cases, forward-looking and quite innovative. But all of them are very complementary and thoughtful about how they touch the fabric that’s there because, in many of those cities, the fabric is so well defined.
Q. Let’s bridge that to Toronto. How do you think Toronto is evolving from an architectural perspective?
Toronto wasn’t the “it” city until the 1980s. Montreal had most of the excitement and the money, and culture was there. The challenges with identity and language and the FLQ [crisis] drove a lot of the larger businesses and their staff to Toronto and my family was part of that. Growing up in Toronto was pretty provincial. I’m not a historian by any means, but seemed to be an inflection point [in design] – the ROM, AGO and OCAD [buildings]. There were five or six major projects where they brought in “starchitects” to do works. That got people talking and I think started to pique the interest of Torontonians and people here around what good architecture has to offer a city. Toronto suffers a bit from being quite young in that capacity.
Q. Tell us about your interest in environmentally responsible architecture and why that’s such a focus with your work?
I don’t think it’s responsible for anybody these days to be building irresponsibly. It should be in all of our interests because it’s going to be all of our futures. We are not a firm that focuses exclusively on building, say, Passive House but I think every architect in every design has a huge responsibility today and tomorrow … to be designing intelligently around sustainability. I think that’s everything from how big you make a building, for what it needs to house and not to overbuild things, to mechanical systems and ensuring that we are approaching solar shading appropriately and designing for things like power grid interruptions in the future, and for much more dynamic climate circumstances.
I think we’re beyond just using recycled materials in a building. Obviously that’s important, but there’s a lot more going on. I think every opportunity we have when a client has an appetite to engage in that, which is not often enough because there’s a green premium that comes along with it, we take it, whether it’s carbon entrained concrete [a sustainable material where carbon is pumped back into the concrete] or good overhangs, or thermally broken design methodologies or keeping natural gas out of units and making sure anything gas has an electrical rough-in next to it. There are so many facets to be focused on and every part of it needs to speak to how we approach our future.
For architects, until the consumer demand is there, until the technology has been worked through the system in a way that it becomes more economical, it’s going to be very difficult for people to justify it – to use wood and concrete differently, to not do certain things that are building-industry standard, or even to not use concrete at all. There are very new technologies that come at a premium. Until the demand is there on the consumer side, there isn’t that incentive for the developer to do that other than that they, say, care about the future for their children, or [other] larger drivers, and it’s just going to come out of their pocket. We need to get the consumer awareness there so we can work with everyone to put these technologies in place and get them running like a well-oiled machine.
At One Roxborough West, Reflect Architecture was involved in every step of the process, including suite layouts and the materials used.NORTH DRIVE INVESTMENTS
Q: What’s special and unique about One Roxborough West?
That dichotomy [of a condominium building situated in a serene neighbourhood, but only steps from the bustle of Yonge Street] is something that we focused on from day one. We looked at the site. It sits on Yonge Street, one of the busiest streets in Canada. And it’s immediately, within meters, adjacent to some of the most substantial, historical, single-family Toronto homes and some of the prettiest tree-lined streets that the city has to offer. Transitioning from the bustling and exciting Summerhill neighbourhood on Yonge Street right into these single-family homes is something that was front of mind for us.
From a design perspective, we wanted to look at the heritage and streetscape. We looked at how those small retail stores running up and down Yonge Street looked and felt – what they’re made of, how they contribute to the neighbourhood. They are not your large-format, big-box stores. These are mostly independent shops. I think that’s a huge element that contributes to the neighbourhood feel … tons of character. We wanted to make sure that our ground floor read very consistently with that. We didn’t want the standard 4.5-metre-tall retail base. It wouldn’t have connected with that neighbourhood in any way.
And we disagreed with the City on it, which was ironic because the City wants it to feel in place and we’re saying, well, that is inherently not in place. We said the most natural thing to do would be to focus on small retail, focus on the cadence that’s adjacent to us in the neighbourhood, and then work up from there. The City came around, which was great. The developer is committed to there not being a Shoppers [Drug Mart] that takes up all five storefronts, because they want to be contributing to the neighbourhood.
The second piece we looked at is this building is on a very shallow site, and the fact we needed to transition from urban, crisp, sleek and sophisticated to a soft, tree-lined neighbourhood – generous and private – so we literally bifurcated the building. On one side of it, the east elevation, is this slick, sophisticated urban facade. And then as it turns around the corner on Roxborough [Street West], it gets into this pedestrian-forward, single-family neighbourhood, and the building pulls itself back inwards and then wraps itself in trees.
So, the idea is that, when you’re looking at it from Yonge Street, it feels quite urban; it feels contiguous with the nodes of Yonge and Bloor, Yonge and St. Clair, and Yonge and Davisville. Then when you walk down Roxborough and you look back at the building, it doesn’t have that same sort of hard, crisp, clear feel. It has this incredibly porous, incredibly human-scaled level of detail to it.
Not only does it perform environmentally – we’re shading the south and the west facades, which are heavily impacted by solar gains, with natural elements like trees and screens – but it also feels inherently green. It feels like the green carpet of the neighbourhood rolls itself onto the building. This was really a response to the unique nature of the site.
What we try so hard to do at Reflect, including when we do single-family projects, is we sit down with clients and ask what’s unique about you – that isn’t about other design and architecture – and then let’s try to draw an aesthetic or a project or an architectural design out of that. The demand of the site is what drove that.
The nicest part for us [with One Roxborough] is the client has given us the opportunity to see the idea from front to back, from the building itself and the interior layouts of the suites to the materials in the suites and the decorating of the sales suite. Once we established what we wanted this project to be about, after we sat down with the client in those early days getting a sense of what the client wanted to achieve with this project, and then merged it together with the demands and the needs of the site, that’s where those ideas came from. We have been able to work those ideas through every element, through the interiors, through the furniture selection and all the way to the soaps chosen for the sales suite. The client has allowed us to really run with it.
The reality is good architects should already know how the interiors are going to be. I don’t think that you can do good architecture until you understand materials, massing, how things connect, how spaces act as circulation spaces, how spaces respond to programmatic needs unique to that client, how materials respond to those, how lighting responds to that and how furniture responds to that. For you to create good architecture you need to understand these things.
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