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EMPIRE MAVERICK IS CENTRAL TO EVERYTHING AND WILL HAVE ITS OWN SOCIAL CLUB LISA VAN DE VEN
Take a central location, add a new condo and a social club and you’ve got Empire Maverick. Not only will the new Empire Communities site complement the King Street West area with its own amenities, it promises buyers an engaging community experience that will include a social club especially for residents. It’s being targeted to “young, urban, hip” downtowners, according to Sue MacKay, Empire’s vice-president of marketing.
“They’re looking for a look and feel in their home that’s in close keeping with their own personal brand,” MacKay explains. “They really feel that where they live is a reflection of who they are.”
While Empire has been developing condominium and low-rise projects in communities across Southwestern Ontario and the Southern United States for 25 years, at Maverick, MacKay says, they set out to create something different, to fit the specific neighbourhood and target market there. The King and John Street location — across from TIFF Bell Lightbox and close to restaurants and popular nightspots — gave them the starting point they needed to do so.
“These are the type of people that want their life to happen around a fiveblock radius,” MacKay says. "They’re probably not really going north of Bloor, not even north of College.”
And Empire plans on giving their future residents fewer reasons to even leave the building itself. To achieve that, they dialed up the site’s social elements, to offer a new kind of experience. There’s a shared workspace, lounges, a beauty bar and an open-concept event space — but the pinnacle of the site is the Maverick Social. The indoor-outdoor social club and bar promises to offer residents a curated experience, overseen by an onsite “social architect” who will organize events that run the gamut from wine tastings and cocktail parties to speaker series, late-night DJs and fashion shows.
While the building itself is still in pre-construction, with registration underway, the Maverick Social is already being piloted for site purchasers and select members, operating out of a space designed specifically for that purpose. “We have a unique situation with our sales centre — on the ground floor is our traditional sales centre, but then the second floor is the social club,” MacKay says. “We have about 150 to 200 members right now.”
Other amenities at the site will include a theatre, fitness centre, guest suite, dining room and a 24-hour concierge in the lobby — all designed by Toronto firm U31. Once construction is completed on the building, those amenities will allow residents to have all of “their entertainment and recreational activities under one roof,” says interior designer Kelly Cray, partner and creative principal with U31, a firm well-versed in the local condominium market, with projects that include Graywood’s Peter & Adelaide, Tridel’s SQ at Alexandra Park, and Lamb Development Corp.’s Hamilton site Television City.
“The hotel-style amenities are fashioned after a private club experience,” Cray adds. “The residents also have access to an expansive outdoor amenity, which is seamlessly connected to the interiors by a floor-to-ceiling window system. This design direction promotes an integrated indoor/outdoor social scene, which is very appealing and sought after by the urban professional.”
When completed, Maverick will rise 49 storeys, with 317 units in total, starting in price from the $500,000s. With one- to three-bedroom layouts available — including a limited number of two-storey penthouses — the suites themselves will range from 452- to 1,071-square feet. They’ll include such features as laminate flooring, individually controlled heating and cooling, stainless steel and integrated appliances, and stone kitchen countertops and backsplashes.
The building’s interiors “express an overall contemporary casual boutique style, with an emphasis on raw and sleek materials,” Cray says. The exterior, meanwhile — designed by IBI Group — features a contemporary tower that rises from a more traditional streetscape, where a row of existing two-storey heritage buildings will be incorporated along the base and street-oriented retail will be featured. “From street level it won’t look much different than what it is today,” MacKay says. “But then obviously the tower will rise above it.“
To get the word out on the building, MacKay adds, Empire has upped its social media game, reporting on Maverick Social events through their Instagram handle @themavsocial and using the hashtag #LiveTheMav. In fact, prospective buyers for Empire Maverick are already reaching out to them through social media in greater numbers than at any other site they’ve brought to market before it.
It’s just another unique aspect to the project, and for MacKay it’s another way Empire is meeting the needs of the building’s buyers — a group she says has “their finger on the pulse” in terms of what’s hot and what’s not in Toronto. “They’re the type of person that’s always on the guest list, never waits in line, and doesn’t have to book months in advance for the city’s hottest events,” she says.
Now, with those events right in their building, they won’t even have to go outside.
Construction is expected to begin on Empire Maverick in 2019, with occupancy slated for 2022. To register for the project, visit empiremaverick.com.