Season Premier
The Four Seasons gets ready to set the same standard in residences as it does in hotels
| Text : Elizabeth Kerr | Photo : Four Seasons |
Anyone who has seen the inside of the Four Seasons serviced apartments in Hong Kong knows that the five-star hotel chain puts as much stock in long-term stays as it does in short-term ones. The leaseonly units in Central have the same luxuries and details as the hotel, and the same careful design, layout and views. It’s one of the hotel’s premier properties, but it’s a little odd that it’s located in Hong Kong. There’s nothing wrong with Hong Kong, and it is a prime serviced apartment market, but can you imagine the Mandarin Oriental without a flagship property — hotel or residence — in the SAR? That’s precisely the case with the Four Seasons in Toronto. Until now.
The Four Seasons new hotel in its hometown is set to open in 2012, and along with it its residences. The property will ultimately comprise three towers: the 55-storey hotel with private homes on the upper floors (west tower), a second dedicated 25-storey residential tower with smaller units (east tower) and the connecting “public” building, where the restaurants, bars, the 28,000-square foot spa and other amenities will be located. Sitting at the east end of the city’s storied and tony Yorkville district, the new property is far enough away from the core financial district to feel like home, but close enough to walk to in about 20 minutes. The address is located around the corner from Toronto’s most upmarket shopping, and the closest major intersection — Yonge and Bloor — is the de facto centre of the city.
Not surprisingly, the Four Seasons Residences are selling well, and the development has quickly established itself as the most desirable address in Canada. Its downtown location — the hotel steadfastly refused to move too far from its original home — may seem odd in light of the popular belief that houses are the zenith of home ownership, but the renewed vitality of Toronto’s urban core is challenging that notion. As Director of Sales Janice Fox sees it, “There’s a big migration from the suburbs into the city. In American cities it’s all about rolling lawns and a big piece of land. Funnily enough we’re heading toward a more European standard where people are not only happy to live in a condo, they’re also willing to move up to something larger when the family grows.”
The towers, defined by their glass curtain wall, were designed by architectsAlliance (the North Point residential development in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the master plan of Toronto’s revitalising Distillery District), with common interiors designed by Yabu Pushelberg (W New York, Louis Vuitton Hong Kong). No Canadian property would be complete without some outdoor space, and the central courtyard park that connects the buildings comes courtesy of landscape architect Claude Cormier (projects in Sonoma, Lyon and Shanghai).
The suites range in size from a minimum of 1,000 square feet to the 9,000-square foot penthouse unit. Sales figures have been averaging between CA$1,400 and $2,500 (HK$11,000-20,000) per square foot and generally start at around $1.9 million. Every unit is on a corner, and so views of the lake come on three sides (the greenery of mid-town is on the north) and each is customised to buyer specification. “It’s like building 200 custom-designed units,” Fox quips. For the record, the penthouse was still available at press time for a cool CA$30 million.
Residents will be surrounded by 10- to 12-foot ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, hardwood, marble and limestone surfaces, state of the art — and invisible — communications infrastructure, Miele, Kohler and Sub-Zero appliances like food warmers and wine fridges, gas fireplaces and will naturally have access to all the hotel’s amenities. “This is living in the hotel without being in the hotel, anything you have as a hotel guest [is yours]. There will be a handset in your unit quite separate from your own telephone,” Fox notes. The units are unfurnished — unless you opt to have FS outfit and decorate for you — and are private homes that will never be part of the hotel stock.
Fox concedes the smaller investment-friendly units are moving slower than market research would have suggested. New branded residences in the financial district — Trump, the Ritz-Carlton and Shangri-La among them — have sold well. In a December 2010 press release, Newmark Knight Frank Devencore pointed out the spike in demand for office space in the core, and linked its continuing growth with the boom in condominium development. “Corporations that may once have targeted lower-cost suburban office parks now seriously considering office space in close proximity to the young professionals and families who have made Toronto their home,” said Allan Schaffer, President/Broker of Record of Devencore Realties Corporation Canada Limited, Brokerage in the statement.
Ultimately, there will always be investors for properties like it but the Four Season Residences are attracting people seeking a primary, second or even third home. Fox states there are “virtually no investors; I’m going to say 90-10. That’s the most interesting aspect form a sales point of view. When we looked at condo projects downtown … they had the opposite experience. They’re almost all investor-driven. Part of that is the strength of the [Four Seasons] brand in Canada; it’s iconic in Toronto, and I think because we’re in Yorkville. For most of the condos down there, branded or non-branded, the majority [of buyers] are investors. They’re all small units.”
The Residences are having an impact on the surrounding neighbourhood too. “We’ve seen the whole Yorkville area sort of go up. The other five-star residences that came on the market prior to us raised their prices accordingly,” says Fox. And it’s that surrounding neighbourhood that’s attracting end users; it’s not all banks and brokerages. It’s a little of this and a little of that — much in the way the diversity of buyers is impossible to nail down. Fox: “It’s a microcosm of what we think Canada is.”
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