The move to health-centric design
PREMIUM HVAC FILTRATION IS THE LATEST LUXURY AMENITY AMONG THE HIGHRISE SET
The 10-storey, single-tower development at 8188 Yonge Street, just off the 407 in Thornhill’s burgeoning Uplands neighbourhood, was well into the planning process when COVID-19 caused a return to the drawing board.
“We went back and looked at the project through the lens of what are people wanting now? How have priorities shifted?” says Freddy Mak, VP at Trulife Developments. That meant upping the amount of outdoor space to 30,000 square feet, about three times what is typical for a condo of that size, as well as making some changes to the indoor air and water experience.
The pre-pandemic plan was to have MERV-13 filters for individual units. “We upgraded to MERV-15,” says Mak. In total, the cost of the health- and safety-related updates to air and water systems climbed well into the hundreds of thousands. For buyers who want even more premium filtration, there is the option to upgrade to a Hepa-quality filter, between MERV 17 and 20 and the current gold standard. “These definitely weren’t things that people were talking about a year ago,” Mak says.
But that was then and this is COVID-19, where most of us are spending a lot more time contemplating, and talking about, the air we breathe. Acronyms once reserved for mechanical engineering nerds — MERV, HEPA, HVAC, IRV (that’s inverse ratio ventilation) — have entered the everyday lexicon, and all of this time under lockdown has pushed the connection between home environment and health: The Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board named “indoor air quality” as one of the top real estate trends to emerge over the past 10 months. For condo dwellers in particular, concerns around indoor aerosol spread hit close to home and have led some developers to contemplate whether high-end air is the new luxury amenity.
WE STILL HAVE A CLIMATE CRISIS TO DEAL WITH, SO IF YOU’RE DOING A RENO TO MAKE A BUILDING MORE ENERGY EFFICIENT AND MORE RESILIENT, THAT’S A GOOD OPPORTUNITY TO APPROACH AIR QUALITY AS WELL. — JEFFREY SIEGEL, U OF T PROFESSOR AND AIR QUALITY EXPERT
Toronto designer Andrea Kantelberg has spent the past two decades trying to sell her industry on wellness in the design realm. Her latest passion project — a 2,500-square-foot condo prototype called The Wellington — features an energy recovery ventilator (erv) with medical-grade carbon filters to improve ventilation, along with uv germicidal lamps meant to deactivate mould and bacteria or viruses. The project was supposed to debut last March. Initially disappointed by the delay, Kantelberg now sees it as a stroke of luck: “It is bananas how much people finally want to talk about these things now.” She believes the move toward health-centric design will be similar to the shift toward sustainable design over the last decade, and that COVID has provided a sense of momentum. “This is the way of the future,” she says. but does that mean the vast majority of existing condo buildings are stuck in the past?
Doing retrofits is no small undertaking, says Andy Kostopoulos, president of extreme Air Systems, a Scarborough company that specializes in multi-tenant HVAC systems. Last spring Kostopoulos saw demand for his services spike as condo property managers scrambled to get their ducts in a row. A lot of the requests were about how to bring in more fresh air and crank up the Merv rating on their filter. “Which is great when it’s possible,” Kostopoulos says, “but you have all of these properties wanting to switch out a Merv-8 for a Merv-13. Often the thicker filter isn’t compatible.”
It’s not like new builds, where you’re starting from scratch and can follow updated guidelines from the outset. (In April, ASHRAE — the American Society of Heating, refrigerating and Air-conditioning engineers — recommended Merv 13 or higher). For existing structures, Kostopoulos says, we need innovative solutions. To that end, he recently became the exclusive Canadian distributor of patented AEROBIOTIX UVC Light technology, which in peer-reviewed clinical studies using live strains was shown to eliminate the COVID-19 virus.
Initially developed for use in emergency rooms, the ILLUVIA is a portable unit capable of decontaminating 2,500-square-foot spaces. That could be classrooms, gyms, condo units or communal lobbies and elevators. “I’ve been meeting with a lot of condo managers,” says Kostopoulos. “They’re saying that condo owners and renters are scared and desperate. They want to know what the plan is.”
Of course the plan for responding to a global health pandemic remains a work in progress, with most real estate stakeholders currently in wait-and-see mode. Air quality is a big conversation right now, but what happens when (knock wood) these pandemic days are behind us?
Unlike marble countertops and state-of-the-art gym equipment, antimicrobial HVAC is an invisible luxury — not the kind of thing your friends are likely to swoon over when they start coming back over for dinner. “People value these things up until the economic trade-off becomes too much,” says dr. Jeffrey Siegel, a U of T professor in the department of civil and mineral engineering and an expert in indoor air quality, who believes the solution could be coupling air-quality renovations with other related goals. “We still have a climate crisis to deal with, so if you’re doing a reno to make a building more energy efficient and more resilient, that’s a good opportunity to approach air quality as well,” he says.
Kantelberg agrees that these conversations are meaningless without consideration around affordability and accessibility. The Wellington prototype is her money-is-no-option show pony, but now she is working on a 500-squarefoot version with greater attention to cost of materials.
Meanwhile, Freddy Mak reports that more than 50 per cent of buyers at 8188 yonge have shown an interest in the HEPA upgrade, which will be in the neighbourhood of $1,500. “We’re not yet at the stage where they make amenity selection, but I have definitely gotten a lot of indications that it will be popular,” he says. “People used to want the best gym or a party room. Now air is the priority.”