The
Rockport Group has taken over an assembled property near Sheppard and Bayview and will be building a 7-storey, 128-unit mid-range condo called 21 Clairtrell.
The original assemblers, who bought five adjoining single family dwellings, ran into financial difficulty during the recession. Rockport bought the property from the mortgage company earlier this year.
"They had applied for a 14-storey building," says Rockport's president and CEO Jack Winberg, speaking of the former aspirant developers, "the city went mad. Then they made it an 8-storey building" before they went under. Rockport kept the architects, Kirkor, but the project is going to be substantially different, with a largely brick facade and interiors done by
Mike Niven.
"This is one of those great examples of re-use and intensification," Winberg says. "Now there's a subway at Bayview and Sheppard, the world's land has become more expensive, living styles are changing, and you're taking five units and you're going to put 128 on the same piece of land."
Though he says land is scarce up there, Winberg is happy to be providing an alternative to the high-rise projects by the likes of
Daniels and
Shane Baghai. "Across the street, you've got townhomes," he says of 21 Clairtrell, "not a 30-storey building, and across the other way is a school. It's a quiet residential street."
Rockport, under Winberg's father, Burton, built Toronto's first five condominium projects, beginning with a still-extant townhouse project on Albion Road, known as York Condominium No. 1, in 1968, one year after the legislation allowing for condominium development was signed.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source; Jack Winberg
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