Small development firm ensures big projects become a reality
Kodem building $30M Jewish school, set to work on 40-storey condo building
Benjamin Sternthal said he’s always had a love of building.
“As a four-year-old, I was in my sandbox all the time, I had the best Tonka truck collection that any kid could ever have,” he said. “I spent all my days building sand castles and really nothing has changed since then, except the projects are real projects; the trucks have engines; and I use reinforced concrete, not sand, to build these days.”
These days, Sternthal is the president of Kodem, a development management firm he founded in 1997.
On Tuesday evening, the ribbon was officially cut on one the latest project his company worked on, a new private Jewish high school, Herzliah.
The $30-million school “has a rooftop terrace with a play area with all types of features on the roof,” Sternthal said. “There’s an agora for students to gather, the classrooms have flexible furniture, where the teacher no longer has to sit at the front of the classroom.”
The school also has a modern technology package and was built with security in mind.
“I love schools because the product is for kids, it’s such a great thing to be paid to do,” Sternthal said.
The company is currently completing work on private Frenchlanguage school, École Saint-Joseph.
Another private school, Collège Charles-Lemoyne, recently hired Kodem to build an expansion to its Longueuil campus. It’s the eighth time in around 15 years that the college has hired Kodem to manage a project, Sternthal said.
As a development manager, Kodem is hired by organizations or investors to run a development project.
Last year, the company finished work on a new 300,000-square-foot headquarters for Quebec’s largest labour federation, the Confédération des syndicats nationaux.
The company started working on the $65-million project in 2012 and was responsible for hiring the architects and construction companies that worked on it and supervising them throughout the process.
The project was delivered ontime and under budget, Sternthal said.
Sternthal said that working on different types of projects allows him to keep learning and trying new things. It also keeps work steady for the small firm.
“When the condo market or the residential market is down, we’re doing schools, we’re doing institutional buildings for Quebec institutions. When that’s down, we’re doing shopping centres,” he said.
The company works on about four to six projects a year. It also takes on one charitable project every year.
It has supported renovations at Share the Warmth, a Pointe-St-Charles organization that works to fight hunger and poverty and operates out of a former church built in 1891.
Though Kulam, a charity that he co-founded, Sternthal has built several schools and wells in Ethiopia, as well as taken on projects
When I look at what people are developing, they’re building these monolithic blocks of highrise towers with no feel to it.
in Rwanda and Cambodia. It has also supported medical services in Ethiopia.
The organization works with the Ethiopian government and a local NGO to identify areas where projects are needed and to ensure that schools will be staffed with teachers and wells will be maintained.
Closer to home, Sternthal is starting work on a new condo development on de la Montagne St. that will be more than 40 storeys tall.
He said the project will be different than most of the downtown condo developments, which he describes as looking like office buildings.
“When I look at what people are developing, they ’re building these monolithic blocks of highrise towers with no feel to it,” he said.
“When you’re walking in an urban centre, you should feel like you’re in a city and, to me, a city isn’t highrises with no relationship to the street, there should be a relationship to the street and as you go higher, there should be a relationship to the sky.”