‘Going to be spectacular’
81-STOREY CONDO COMING TO MISSISSAUGA LISA VAN DE VEN
Things are looking up in Mississauga. The city next to Toronto is growing skyward with the release of M3, an 81-storey condo that will soon become the tallest in the local skyline. The recently released project, by developers Urban Capital Property Group and Rogers Real Estate Development, is part of their M City masterplanned community.
“We knew we had to do something special to capture people’s imaginations,” says Mark Reeve, partner at Urban Capital. “We think it’s going to be spectacular.”
Long owned by Ted Rogers and the Rogers family, the Burnhamthorpe Road and Confederation Parkway property once housed transmission towers for Rogers Media’s CHFI radio station. Now it’s home to the Rogers family’s first foray into condo development: the eight-tower, 15-acre mixed-use M City community.
“It was a legacy site. Ted had purchased a bunch of land — over 30 hectares — in Mississauga over 50 years ago, and sold a lot of that off to residential builders, but kept this piece of property because it was right in the downtown core,” says John Anderton, vice-president, treasurer of Rogers’ private companies. “The land sat vacant for a number of years, but he always had desires for doing something in downtown.”
Now under construction, the first two phases of M City — the Core Architects-designed M1 and M2 — will add a combined 1,570 suites to Mississauga’s growing core.
But M3, currently in preconstruction, promises to be the crowning glory of the site, with approximately 900 residential units, as well as office and retail space. All of which add to the City of Mississauga’s own plans to intensify its city centre.
“We are undergoing all of these transformational changes,” says Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie. “We are about to transform our landscape, as we work toward building a well-planned city with a vibrant downtown core.”
And M City is just one part of that.
There are about 25 new towers planned for the downtown area over the next five to 10 years, Crombie says. Plus, the new Hurontario LRT line, scheduled to be completed in 2022, will loop around the city centre.
All of these additions will complement the existing Living Arts Centre, Celebration Square and Square One Shopping Centre to create an animated urban area, she says.
“Really the objective was to make Mississauga, and particularly our downtown core, livable and walkable,” Crombie says. “A place where people can not only work but shop, experience a café, go to an art gallery, and have a place to live.”
Developers like Rogers and Urban Capital are contributing to that, not only by adding new residential units that will help the city meet the needs of a population expected to reach up to 967,000 by 2051, but also by introducing architecture that will help make the Mississauga skyline sing.
With that in mind, the developers held a design competition for the site, choosing from five unique options. They ultimately selected one by IBI Group, a global firm headquartered in Toronto. It was IBI that originally put forth the idea of an 81-storey tower, which will make M3 not only the tallest building in Mississauga, but also one of the top five in the GTA.
“If you’re going to go that tall, you may as well be the tallest,” says lead architect Mansoor Kazerouni, global director of buildings for IBI Group.
But tall wasn’t enough. A building of that height would naturally stand out in the city skyline. Kazerouni and his team wanted to make sure the architecture earned that distinction.
For inspiration, they looked at the M City masterplan, by New York firm Cooper Robertson, as well as M1 and M2. They also considered another condominium project that’s become iconic to local residents: the two curved “Marilyn Monroe” towers, part of Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Developments’ Absolute Condos site.
For M3, the architect took on some of those buildings’ curved looks, but in a distinct way. To create what he calls a “sculptural profile in the skyline,” the team rotated the bottom of the tower, adding another twist at the top in the opposite direction. They then punctuated the glass façade with sawtooth balconies in a stepped profile, emphasized by white and black metal accenting to create another dynamic element that leads to a stepped crown at the top.
“It felt like a natural progression from what the Marilyn Monroe towers and M1 and M2 set out to do, in terms of exciting, prominent, visible architecture,” Kazerouni says.
Suites at the site range from 480 to 1,000 square feet, with one- to threebedroom layouts available. Amenities will include a gym and indoor pool, as well as kids’ play areas, lounges, and multiple party rooms, while the community itself will centre around a two-acre park. Interiors are being designed by Cecconi Simone Interior Design, for what Reeve calls “a very distinct style” that’s “more like a boutique hotel.”
And with occupancy slated for Spring 2023, Reeve is already expecting M3 will be a future Mississauga landmark.
“I think people will want to say: ‘This is my home, I live in the tallest building in Mississauga,’” the developer says. “It’ll become an iconic centrepiece to the whole community.”
Prices at M3 start in the mid $300,000s, with the sales office scheduled to open Oct. 19. For registration, call 905-232-0552 or visit mcitycondos.com.