Developer returns with taller tower
More attractive building planned for Preston
With the basics now in place for the city’s plan for new development at the south end of Preston Street, a builder that already has permission to construct a 30-storey building there is considering ask to build something taller.
Mastercraft Starwood’s “Soho Italia” project at 500 Preston St. was an early sign of the condo boom around Preston and Carling Avenue. Conceived as a 35-storey building with scalloped balconies, it emerged from the city’s planning department as a 30-storey building with smooth glassy sides. City council’s planning committee approved it last June, but reluctantly, with several councillors lamenting the new design.
“It’s not a bad-looking building, but it’s a regularbuilding. What we had before, I think it was an amazing-looking building,” Orléans’s Bob Monette said at the time.
A lot has changed since then — in particular, two things:
First, the planning department signed off on a plan that aims to channel developers’ desire to build condos in the area into 40-storey towers with high design standards close to Carling Avenue. The area is supposed to become a new outpost of downtown, a cluster of towers around the Carling O-Train station that will form a new skyline by Dow’s Lake.
And second, the planning committee approved a 45-storey building proposed by Claridge just across Preston Street from Mastercraft Starwood’s, one that obviously borrowed the curvy-balcony look that Mastercraft Starwood was forced to abandon.
In other words, the Soho Italia project got leapfrogged. So Mastercraft Starwood is back, pitching a 35-storey building with undulating balconies atop a “podium” of stores and restaurants and three floors of offices.
“I liked the previous design. I loved the original design,” said architect Rod Lahey. “I think we took the original design and we improved on it.”
The version city council approved was a compromise that Mastercraft Starwood liked — it was simpler and therefore cheaper, for one thing — but nobody loved. Lahey sure didn’t enjoy having the smooth design the city’s planners favoured slagged by the councillors before they voted.
“It wasn’t one of my greatest moments. But I have to get something approved. At that time, the idea of getting a 30-storey building approved at the Preston Street and Carling area was absolutely unheard of,” he said. And now circumstances have changed.
“It’s become a much more costly endeavour. Every floor is different. The forming is very complex and the railing is very complex. So we’ve asked for five more storeys than have been granted,” Lahey said. A taller building will offset the higher costs.
Mastercraft Starwood hasn’t filed a formal application for a re-rezoning but Lahey said that’s imminent. They’ve been making the rounds with planning committee members and the response has been very positive, he said.