Urban cabin
Not just another Queen West condo
Three years ago, there was a condo sales centre in the city that looked like it cost a million bucks to build ( it probably did). The showpiece suite was expansive, loaded with marble and featured a pretty fancy kitchen for a place that was going to be demolished to make way for the condo tower itself, as it was weeks later. Seeing the dusty remains afterwards made that feel ike a colossal waste of money.
But Gary Eisen and Adam Ochshorn, the principals of Curated Properties, have come up with a nifty idea to curtail such waste: Make a model suite out of seven stacked shipping containers.
Which is what they did for their new project, Cabin ( cabintoronto.com), at 45 Dovercourt, just south of Queen Street West.
With architecture by RAW Design and interiors by Mason Studio, the two-storey units range in size from 717 square feet to 1,554 sq. ft. and are priced from $499,900 to over $1 million. Each comes with a large terrace or a rooftop garden.
“We went with shipping containers because we were tired of knocking down every sales centre and putting it in a landfill,” says Adam Ochshorn, whose firm is famous for invigorating overlooked side streets with small, savvy buildings. Though in Cabin’s case that stretch of Dovercourt is past the upand-coming stage.
Curated Properties is also behind the dapper dozen at 455 Dovercourt and the 20 townhouses that make up Edition Richmond; like Cab- in, Edition’s model suite had a twist, as it was housed in a gussied- up garage that was painted white and felt very modern art gallery.
“By using shipping containers, there’s a sustainability angle to what we’re doing,” Ochshorn says. “When we’re done with the sales centre we’re going to auction them all off.”
Ochshorn has had inquiries about the containers from people who variously own land in Prince Edward County and Caledon, who want to use them as a cottage or a second home.
The shipping containers seem almost too swanky for the sticks, though. Here, they make a neat intermezzo on a residential street of old houses, as rippled black metal hugs the containers’ boxy exterior, which flaunts a façade of glass panels.
Driving by, you might think the structure is a hip pop-up shop, but stopping to peek inside reveals a residential set-up — an airy space with exposed steel beams and midcentury modern furnishings.
Accessories are nostalgic and playful, including a fiddle-leaf fig tree (the trendiest plant in town) and a vintage TV and record player flipped open in its case. The vibe feels like the home of a successful indie musician or a young architect.
Or it could be a stylish retreat by a lake in Muskoka, says Ochshorn, who himself loves his own cottage so much he wanted to bring the theme to Queen West.
“There’s a big movement up north of a modern interpretation of a cottage, where people are cladding walls in wood but not in the knotty pine you’d see in a cottage in the ' 70s,” he says. “We wanted to bring that feeling to the city.”
To that end, the exterior of the mid-rise building will be finished with wood accents combined with metal and an abundance of glass for that “elevated Canadiana” feel the developers emphasize in their marketing literature.
“Another consideration is that we wanted to involve Canadian artists,” he says. “To really showcase our homegrown talent, we used as many local artisans as we could.”
Two of them are Mason Studio’s Ashley Rumsey and Stanley Sun. The Junction-based duo is perfectly suited to styling the site and to Queen West itself — they’re young, creative and have a killer portfolio that includes designing stints in the hospitality and residential sectors in the U. K., the Middle East and the U.S.
When the designers first saw the shipping containers, the space was a raw mix of corrugated metal walls and plywood. The cabin theme had already been established, so they set to work executing it. “We asked ourselves what a cabin in the woods would be like.” Rumsey says. “We took those cues, polishing and modernizing them for downtown.”
Wide- plank rustic floors, for example, that you’d see up north were tweaked for the suite. “These ones are nearly knot-less oak but they are wide-plank for that sense of luxury and authenticity in terms of a great wood product,” Rumsey says. “We carried them onto the walls for a warm, cocoon feeling.”
The kitchen has the same pale wood in the cabinetry; a portion of it is charcoal for contrast. What a nice surprise that it’s not white and the backsplash isn’t subway tile but a slab of inky- dark marble with white veining that recalls a galaxy. And subbed in for standard pulls in the drawers are ones made of tactile leather.
“The rest of the space is pretty muted, so we wanted something really crisp for the kitchen to make sure that it didn’t feel too wishy-washy,” Sun says. “It had to be sharp, edgy and contemporary.”
Since most condos are open concept, “kitchens become important backdrops; they should not be simply utilitarian,” he says. ( Translation: Sex it up, people.)
As far as Canadian designers go, there’s the Bensen coffee table; a curved occasional chair with ottoman by Laura Langford — an industrial designer in Ottawa — and the artwork over the sofa by Christina Ott at Crow. “It’s a 2016 lunar calendar made of birch bark from her property in Muskoka,” Rumsey says. The majority of lighting in the suite is from Montreal’s Lambert et Fils.
It all adds up to a warm, urban lodge with serious industrial swagger. It’s good to know it won’t end up in a landfill somewhere.