Chelsea’s Quartier Meredith: New homes at the foot of Gatineau Park, yet just a short drive from Ottawa
If you’re in the market for a new home in the Ottawa area, there’s one neighbourhood that you might not have thought about, just a short drive from downtown yet nestled in the heart of nature. That neighbourhood is across the Ottawa River in Chelsea, Que.
“For the same price that you would pay for an existing home in Ottawa, you can buy a new and bigger house in Chelsea that has nicer finishing and is built to the specifications you want, yet you’re still just a 12-minute drive from Ottawa,” said Guillaume Lepage, a housing consultant with Exo Construction, which is building Quartier Meredith, a 114-property development in Chelsea.
Michel Roy, who is responsible for after-sales services at Exo, is a longtime Chelsea resident himself and can easily list the advantages of living in the community that is just minutes away from Gatineau Park.
“Chelsea is a way of life,” said Roy. “It’s a small community where everybody knows each other. It’s a place that is close to nature and where people can really embrace the outdoors, but, at the same time, be just a short drive to Ottawa.”
Anyone currently shopping for a home in Ottawa quickly discovers how difficult it is to find a house without getting into a bidding war, noted Lepage. He said that buyers are not only getting more for their money when they purchase a new house in Quartier Meredith, but are buying a home with great resale value because Chelsea is very strict about limiting future development in order to maintain the community’s natural character.
In 2018 Chelsea adopted a sustainable action development plan, designed to be integrated into its urban plan, in order to preserve the municipality’s rural character, history and exceptional natural landscapes.
“Sometimes people are apprehensive about buying houses in a new development because they think there will be more development for the next 10 to 15 years, it will become crowded and the traffic will get worse, but it won’t be like that in Chelsea,” observed Lepage.
Quartier Meredith is mostly attracting young families, added Lepage, and Chelsea has many of the services that they seek like English and French elementary schools, a recreation centre with a hockey rink and, eventually a swimming pool, along with plenty of local shops and service providers. French and English high schools and Cégeps are just a short drive away in Gatineau.
“Chelsea is very bilingual,” said Guillaume. “I would say that for the Quartier Meredith area, it’s maybe 50/50 francophone and anglophone, so like in Gatineau, it’s very easy to get access to services in English.”
Lepage added that Exo is also developing commercial real estate in the area near Quartier Meredith. While he couldn’t say exactly what sort of businesses would finally occupy the commercial space, he said it’s more evidence of how Chelsea is becoming an attractive destination for new residents and entrepreneurs.
Roy, who first moved to Chelsea in 1999, emphasized that one of the advantages of moving into a new development like Quartier
Meredith is that even if it’s a rural community, it is serviced with the sort of infrastructure that you would find in any Ottawa suburb like aqueducts, sewage, electricity, telecommunications and natural gas.
Roy, who has delivered many of the homes in Quartier Meredith to their new owners and is now responsible to take care of them after they move in, says he has received nothing but positive feedback from customers.
“People love that it’s close to downtown,” said Roy. “They definitely realize that the commute they would have had in Ontario, either from the west or east, would have been a lot longer than the commute they have now coming from Chelsea.”
Roy himself worked as a teacher in Westboro and commuted there for 20 years from Chelsea. He remembers colleagues from Orléans and Kanata being envious because their drives into work took so much longer.
But, in the end, Roy said the area’s biggest attraction is its natural setting with its proximity to outdoor pursuits like skiing, hiking and biking. Even the summer temperature is cooler because the leafy environs of Chelsea are far enough away from the heat sink that is Ottawa.
“I wouldn’t say that the people who live here are tree huggers, although some of them are,” said Roy, “But there are definitely a lot of families here that love to get outdoors. They love that they’re so close to Gatineau Park and to nature. And it’s a lot quieter here than in a core neighbourhood of Ottawa or even the suburbs.”
For more information on Quartier Meredith, visit