Domicile marks 40 years of quality
Boutique builder known for quality condos and freehold towns in emerging urban areas of the city
If you plan to be a boutique builder with staying power, you’d better be ready for opening night jitters.
Domicile Developments, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, knows all about nerves. Because it eschews cookie-cutter projects in favour of one-off condo and townhome infills, “every (development) is like opening night on Broadway,” says founder and president John Doran. “You wonder, ‘Is it going to sell?’ ‘Is it going to leak?’ “
The payoff comes, of course, when it does sell, when all the design elements work together like a well-oiled stage show, when buyers resoundingly applaud your efforts. And you know those agonizing opening nights were worth it when, like Doran, you can look back and say, “We’ve gotten good at what we do.”
With more than 3,200 homes to its credit and a current staff of 46, trendsetting Domicile has worked a niche area of the market over the course of its building history: quality condo apartments and freehold towns that are often built in smouldering urban areas — New Edinburgh and Little Italy among them — before those areas ignite in popularity.
It has lately ventured into the suburbs with condo bungalows, towns and other new products at its Crème and Bergeron Terrace projects in Orléans, but urban and lower-volume remain Domicile’s trademark. Its new low-rise project, The Corners on Main — part of the massive, Main Street development in Old Ottawa East — exemplifies the company’s taste for the urban, which Doran says sprang from his fondness for the architecture unique to downtown areas and from the fact that when he started building condos back in the 1980s “very few people were playing in that sandbox.”
“Smaller projects were fine for us because they didn’t require a lot of money,” adds Jose (Joe) Dinis, who joined the firm in 1977, currently runs the construction end of things and, with Doran, is one of Domicile’s six partners. Dinis’s reserved presence stands in sharp contrast to Doran’s exuberant style when they and other partners meet me around a table in Domicile’s second-floor office space in Westboro.
Not that Domicile was building condos and towns in the urban area or anywhere else when Doran launched the company.
He had grown up in the construction business and in those early days of Domicile specialized in renovations, initially of row houses in Sandy Hill and then of urban single-family homes.
By the mid-1980s, the company was starting on infill projects such as Governor’s Gate, an award-winning luxury condo/townhome development in New Edinburgh. The project was also Domicile’s introduction to community ire.
“It’s the most controversial project we’ve ever done,” says Doran. “It was a neighbourhood with no taste for infill. It was brutal. One thousand people signed a petition against us, and there was a twoweek OMB (Ontario Municipal Board) hearing. It was a real eyeopener.”
The furor eventually settled down, of course, and Doran now realizes that a lot can be learned about integrating an infill project by listening to a community association made up of people who know the area better than anyone else.
Through the 1980s, Domicile also operated an award-winning kitchen retail business.
“I remember our first kitchen installation. It was robin egg’s blue,” says Doran who, though at 67 still not inclined to look backward a lot, does remember Domicile’s high points “and all the crises.”
As well, Domicile built some 1,500 affordable housing units in concert with Centretown Citizens’ Non-Profit Housing Corp. Funding for affordable housing eventually dried up, but Doran still speaks proudly of building those homes.
As the company moved through the sometimes grim housing market of the 1990s, it completed projects like Schoolhouse Square, an award-winning conversion of an old school property in New Edinburgh into condo lofts and towns, Arts and Crafts towns at Holland Station, and a student residence on Clarence Street.
Since then, Domicile has been beavering away, with more than 30 new projects opening since 2000, among them Merrion Square near Dow’s Lake, One3One in trendy Wellington West and The Kavanaugh in Beechwood Village.
In 2010, it also took the unprecedented step, at least in Ottawa, of banning smoking anywhere on its properties. It appears not to have hurt sales at all.
Domicile also has a commercial wing that specializes in the purchase and renovation of older buildings in gentrifying neighbourhoods.
There have been headaches. Nuovo, an 18-storey condo in Little Italy that launched in 2013, quietly disappeared from the market when condo sales in Ottawa tanked because of overbuilding. The project is now slated to be rental apartments.
There have been dramatic changes in the industry over the years, says Dinis.
“There used to be very little customization (of condos). Now our clients want more.” He says building technology has also advanced, but trades people haven’t always kept up.
“The challenge is to keep it affordable and with good quality,” he says.
David Chick, senior vice-president and, after 10 years still the newest of the partners, says marketing has also changed radically.
Back in the day “we’d have a sketch of the building and maybe a site plan” to show buyers, he says. “Then there was the explosion in social media, digital technology, sales centres.”
What used to be an easy jigsaw puzzle has, like building technology, become what Chick calls a puzzle “as big as this table.”
Doran says he wants to travel and fly fish more, but is still very much hands-on at Domicile even after four decades. Asked what he’s proudest of, he jokes, “That we’re still solvent.”
He amends that with the serious observation that the company continues to offer buyers consistency even as it evolves alongside a changing marketplace.
Looking to the future, he says, “We’re going to continue having an appetite for building urban products. We’re creeping into the suburbs, but I don’t see us doing a big volume (there).”
As to condos, “there will be a demand,” says Doran. “But there’s only so deep a market in Ottawa for any product. This is not Montreal or Toronto.”