[Halifax] Grafton Park (St. David's Hall) | 23 m | 7 fl | Completed
 

Proposal by St. David's Presbyterian Church to rezone a parcel of their lands along Brunwsick Street to allow for a 7-storey mixed-use building with upper storey residential and ground floor office/rental space for the church and commercial along Brunswick. Most units will be 1-bdr but there is some 2-bdr and 3-bdr units which depending on how this is marketed may attract some families.

Case 19516 Details

The renderings look pretty good and this is a great sight for infill residential. The heritage church wouldn't be impacted especially in the front where it matters. The commercial portion will connect the Upper Downtown area to the Spring Garden District. The underground parking entrance is well hidden along the rear of the building (along Market Street) which will create a full length streetwall on Brunswick.

It looks like they've already started on this with the ground being dug up on market street by the church

Interesting location. It's nice to see new developments filling in underused sites like this, and some smaller projects to complement the bigger ones.

This is great.

The rezoning for this proposal was approved tonight at Regional Council (14-2 vote). Next step is the Design Review Committee process.

Only the architect of the adjacent Centre Place spoke against the project. His claim about blocking natural light was shot down.

An architect said that with a straight face ?
Hilarious.

It'll be interesting to see what the DRC says. The renderings for this one are simpler and not as flattering as some of the others (that are dressed up with rainbows and unicorns and whatnot), but the more I look at it the more I see some nice little features. For example, there's no garage entrance on Brunswick. I also like the extra space between the cornice on top and the upper floor balconies, and the stone on the side of the building. Taller storefronts would be nicer but unfortunately the sunken lower floor seems to be the standard way of addressing hills in Halifax.

Hopefully we'll hear some news about the St. Mary's/Grafton development soon too. That empty lot is the biggest missing piece in this part of town now.

It should be noted that the architect for Centre Place next door only had two points against the rezoning;

1) Centre Place has south-facing windows over the St. David's site so natural light would be blocked. There is no right to natural light downtown and the rezoning made no changes to the setback requirements which in downtown is encouraged to be zero.

2) He also claimed the developer did not contact the owner of Centre Place. This was shot down by the trustee of the church who said not only were there discussions but there will be more as the design finalizes.

The rezoning basically only changed the land-uses permitted. With the exception of sidewalk setback, the allowable building envelope and height remain the same as before.

After looking at Google street view, I can see why Centre Plade would be concerned about that large bank of windows being blocked, but there's never any guarantees that somebody isn't going to build next to you. C'est la vie.

Looking at what is there now, it will be a great improvement, IMHO. Even the people sitting on the wall are excited (lol).

https://www.google.ca/maps/@44.64419...I2w4gqXmjA!2e0

This is such an excellent in-fill proposal.

It cleverly fits a brand new, nice, residence into a area downtown, with many small businesses, right in the heart of things; an infusion of residential is always helpful too.

I'm really keen on that one. Again, such a great proposal to inject some life into this area. Will be popular too, with the new library nearby, etc.

and I think that the City Centre Vertu development experience shows that people are willing to pay to live in this area with a well done modern development.

I'v never seen the one outside of the Schulich School of Law before didn't know it existed. North is Freedom is one of my favorites. The CBC left out a lot of things though that are pretty cool

Great info, as usual DM. Do you have anything on the other Market/Grafton development + Church lot?

This one goes to design review committee this week for a preliminary presentation on the building design.

http://www.halifax.ca/boardscom/drc/...ITEM711DRC.pdf

Approve this and get it built!

It's perfect for what we need there -- add some much needed additional density to that area. Liven the place up, and also help all the small business around there, like those on Argyle, Blowers, Brunswick. Do it!

This one will be discussed in the HAC meeting on September 23, along with the Benjamin Wier House addition: http://www.halifax.ca/boardscom/hac/...hac-agenda.php

Excellent.

It's a great modest-scale in-fill density development. Fills in some vacant, unused space, bringing density to an increasingly important area in the city -- near the new Library/SGR and will also support the Barrington revival.

It also makes that area more developed in a continuous and logical way. Another small project with big impact!

This one's been approved. Construction is expected to start in the spring.