Four Seasons Private Residences, West Tower - Toronto, Canada - Skyscrapers on Waymarking.com

The design team reads like an industry Who’s Who, with architectsAlliance creating the stunning exterior, Gluckstein Design Planning Inc. responsible for the suite layouts and finishes, Yabu Pushelberg the hotel common areas and amenity spaces, and Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes designing the visionary landscape plan. With such an amazing pedigree and the overwhelming sales response to date, Four Seasons Private Residences Toronto is a legendary success story in the city’s luxury condominium market.

Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences Toronto will be a landmark mixed-use development featuring a five-star hotel and luxury condominiums. The 52-storey West Residence building encompass a new 253-room Four Seasons Hotel on the first 20 floors, with 100 Private Residences above ranging in size from 2,000 to 9,000 square feet. It will be joined by a companion 26-storey East Residence tower that will include 100 Private Residences running between 1,000 and 3,000 square feet. Prices start at $1.9 million.

From thestar.com

For Isadore Sharp, the beauty of Toronto’s new Four Seasons Hoteland Residences lies in the simplicity of its design.

The 55-storey west tower is sleek, slender and subtle enough to blend into the sky, “but to the surprise of everybody you can see it from almost anywhere,” says the Four Seasons founder and chairman.

The new Four Seasons, designed by Peter Clewes of architectsAlliance, has become a “signature” on the city’s skyline, Sharp notes. “You look at New York and you can always tell the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building,” he says. “Well I think this building stands as an iconic tower in Toronto. Everybody is going to say, ‘That’s the Four Seasons.’ ”

The Toronto-based luxury hotel company’s new flagship at 60 Yorkville Ave. opened Oct. 5. The complex consists of the 55-storey hotel-condo tower and a 30-storey condo-only tower. The project also includes park space and an eight-storey public function block that houses ballrooms, meeting rooms and restaurants.

The new Four Seasons is a significant step up from its Avenue Rd. predecessor. Built in 1972, the time-worn brutalist-style tower simply couldn’t compete, aesthetically speaking, with the other high-end hotels in the Four Seasons global portfolio. “It wasn’t at the standard we’re building now, what I call the next generation of five-star hotels,” Sharp says. “If a person came from New York, Paris or London to Toronto, they were expecting the same quality of product.”

Customer service never suffered at the old Toronto Four Seasons, Sharp stresses, but he admits he started thinking about the need to upgrade the local offerings “well over 15 years ago.”

LITTLE BIRDIE

Developer Mel Pearl heard rumours that Four Seasons was in the market for a change of place.

It was around 2002 and Pearl, sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, set out to source the perfect location for a new Four Seasons flagship.

After some searching, the principal of Lifetime Developments found it: a forlorn block on the southeast corner of Bay St. and Yorkville Ave. that was home to a parking lot and a Mr. Sub. “This side of Yorkville was pretty abandoned; there was some crime, homelessness,” says Pearl, sipping tea at Café Boulud in the Four Seasons lobby.

“But I always thought that if anything substantial could be built on this site, it would become the bookend of Yorkville.”

Pearl says he had some difficulty ascertaining who the property owner was, but was eventually able to get a hold of contact information. Problem was the land owner lived in Germany, didn’t speak English and didn’t have a fax machine. “So I wrote a letter,” Pearl recalls. “This very flowery, very old-world conservative letter. I had it translated into German. And we started this dialogue.”

Half a year went by before the owner finally sent word that he was interested in selling — and his asking price was steep. “It was a pretty expensive property,” says Pearl, noting that Lifetime paid around $36 million for it.

He admits the high-stakes deal made him a bit nervous; after all, while his company had reached out to Four Seasons to gauge its initial interest in the property, the two parties hadn’t had formal discussions about doing a deal.

But Pearl says his business partner, Sam Herzog, had enough confidence for the both of them. “Sam said this location is centre ice, if it’s not (developed) today, it’s tomorrow. This is the kind of place that separates the boys from the men. So we said let’s take the shot.”

JOINT EFFORT

If the project was going to become a reality, though, Lifetime realized it would need a joint-venture development partner that had expertise in mixed-use projects and could manage the many complexities of constructing a five-star hotel-condo. “At that time, we just didn’t have confidence in our ability to build this,” Pearl says, noting that Lifetime had just started to transition from lowrise home construction to highrise development.

Enter Menkes Developments. Four Seasons had enlisted the veteran mixed-use builder to find a new location for its flagship, and the property Pearl had secured was a seen as a great fit. “We knew that site was going to be one that Four Seasons would accept,” says Alan Menkes, president of the company’s highrise residential division. “So we forged a deal with Lifetime to purchase the property from the existing owner.”

BLENDING IN

Four Seasons architect Peter Clewes says his aim was to design a tower that would be “quiet” within the neighbourhood’s existing architectural context and blend with the sky.

To achieve this, he opened up the corners of the taller west tower on the levels above the hotel. “It lightens the appearance,” he explains.

His team also spent “an incredible amount of time examining different kinds of glass and what would be appropriate to support that notion of blending with the sky,” Clewes says.

“We created full-scale mock-ups of sections of the building at the curtain wall manufacturer’s yard and hoisted them up on a crane to see how they would look on the sixth floor, where you start to catch the sky reflecting in the glass.”

TOO TALL

In spite of Clewes’ efforts to blend the tower with its surroundings, local ratepayers nonetheless objected to the proposed height of the building, 58 storeys. “That was seven or eight years ago,” Menkes notes. “People in Toronto were a bit more reluctant in accepting height.

“But we explained to the city that the only way a new Four Seasons could be built would be for it to be paired with a residential development,” he adds, “because the economics did not make sense for a hotel on its own.”

Sharp himself took part in the consultation process, leveraging his credibility to garner support for the project at city hall. “I did so because there was no doubt in my mind that this would be not just a good thing for the hotel, but a good thing for the city,” he says.

Ultimately the height of the two towers was reduced to 55 storeys from 58, and to 30 storeys from 33. But the Four Seasons site plan received approval by the end of 2006 and sales for the project launched the following year.

A NEW HIGH

At the time the Four Seasons launched, Toronto hadn’t yet experienced the influx of luxury hotel-condo projects that would arrive in subsequent years.

Entering somewhat unknown waters, Menkes spent nine months consulting focus groups, potential buyers and area residents to determine what they wanted in a five-star hotel-condo — direct elevator access, high ceilings, contemporary kitchens and bathrooms and top-flight appliances were among the suggestions — and how much the market would be willing to pay for it.

When sales for the new Four Seasons launched in 2007, prices for the residential suites were 50 per cent higher than any similar offerings in the Yorkville area, Menkes notes. East tower suites were priced at $1,350 per square foot, and suites in the taller west tower were priced at $1,500 per square foot. In 2011, the 9,000-square-foot penthouse sold for $28 million, the highest price ever paid for a condo in Canada.

“We set the new benchmark in terms of pricing in the area,” says Menkes. “We demonstrated that Toronto had a much deeper amount of super-luxury buyers.”

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE

Getting the Four Seasons project built was a logistical nightmare, Clewes says. “The shear complexity of designing a five-star hotel, coupled with putting residential on top, then trying to reconcile the internal arrangement of those two components in a building that still feels quiet and calm and well resolved on the exterior — it was an extraordinary challenge.”

But when he views the slender, west tower standing proudly on the skyline, he’s satisfied he achieved what he set out to with the Four Seasons flagship. “I think it’s very calm, elegant and kind of self confident,” says Clewes. “It’s not trying to assert itself in any kind of overt way.”

“It’s like Issy (Sharp) says: the building doesn’t need a sign. People will know it’s the Four Seasons.”

Building Name: Four Seasons Private Residences, West Tower Structure Height: 669 Number of Stories: 55 Year Built: 2012 Architect/Design Firm: architectsAlliance Use: Residential Building Publicly accessible areas: Lobby and lounge. Address: 60 Yorkville Avenue The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) link: [Web Link] Style: Not listed Hours: Not listed Cost: Not listed Building Website: Not listed

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