Renderings of Tridel's Ready micro condo units at its Queen Church Condos project, 60 Queen St. East in Toronto.Tridel
Amid a generational slow-down in sales and a boom in financial incentives for buyers, one Toronto-based real estate developer, Tridel, is offering something exceedingly rare in the new condominium market: fully furnished units.
But this is more than just a free sofa with a unit (in fact you will pay extra for any included furniture): it’s a fully designed apartment that has several built-in furniture units that fold up and away depending on a resident’s needs.
“This is just a way for us to demonstrate flexibility and versatility,” said Samson Fung, Tridel’s vice-president of marketing, who said builder customizations and upgrades are always part of the conversation with new-build homes and condos. But with the concept it’s calling “Ready”, Tridel and development partner Bazis are trying to address a specific issue with small studio apartments; how to make a 408-square-foot space with a base price of $699,000 feel livable.
“It was getting hard for some people to visualize for this space. ‘I flop a bed in the middle and what else can I do with it?,’” Mr. Fung said. “The market has shifted. There has to be a little bit more time spent on what is the value.”
Enter Studio Houman, the eponymous company of Houman Rahimzadeh, who was brought in to offer some design ideas to make size a virtue, not a challenge.
“I have a long relationship with the Tridel team,” Mr. Rahimzadeh said. “I’ve worked with them for many years working for other firms.” Those companies include Studio Munge, Cecconi Simone and II by IV, which is doing the interiors on the rest of the building. Mr. Rahimzadeh said he’s been involved in the interior design of somewhere between 55 and 60 condominium buildings in Canada and the U.S. over the past 15 years.
“We discussed a bunch of ideas, and the final idea we came up with was a transformable space,” he said, where all the elements of living come with the apartment to wring maximum function out of the space. “We’re trying to change the definition, to prove that the size is not by dimension but about the experience.”
The space begins with a custom shoe storage and display cabinet at the front door: “I’m very much inspired by urban city culture, everyone loves to have storage for sneakers and shoes,” Mr. Rahimzadeh said. In some ways it’s a typical studio: it’s a single room unit where one wall has floor-to-ceiling windows, opposite that is a wall of custom millwork with the kitchen elements and in-between is where you do the rest of your living. “There’s no bedroom, so this space is going to be used for literally everything,” said Mr. Rahimzadeh.
Directly opposite the door is custom cabinetry that contains closet storage and the stacked laundry, which transitions into built-in shelving and a floating desk that bridges a single window to a central support column (which is also clad in millwork). The support column is mirrored, but that mirror folds down into a custom-built dining table that could fit three or four people around it. Mr. Rahimzadeh is particularly pleased with hooks on the side of the column to store the folding chairs that come with the table.
The couch is actually an all-in-one Murphy bed wall unit that folds back and blends with the light oak millwork of the kitchen storage. There’s even slide-out shelves that can serve as either end-tables or night-stand in bed mode.
Tridel
The couch is actually an all-in-one Murphy bed wall unit that folds back and blends with the light oak millwork of the kitchen storage.Tridel
“The Murphy bed is a stock item [from Resource Furniture], but the rest are custom pieces,” said Mr. Rahimzadeh.
The end result is designed to create zones of function that can be used all at once, or one at a time, depending on your needs.
Fully furnished is not a completely unknown concept according to Pauline Lierman, vice-president of market research with real estate analysts Zonda Urban, but you’re more likely to find it in investor-rental targeted projects in student-dominated rental markets such as Waterloo and London. There are also some builders in Vancouver who include integrated furnishing elements.
“Bosa is known for having functional ideas such as tables that extend out of islands and/or murphy beds in their smaller units in projects like Lougheed Heights or Alumni Tower-University District,” said Joseph Lee, Zonda’s senior market analyst in British Columbia.
Directly opposite the door is custom cabinetry that contains closet storage and the stacked laundry.Tridel
The last time fully furnished condo apartments were marketed at scale in Toronto was the 2010 Urban Capital project called Smart House on Queen West, known for its micro-sized units. Not coincidentally, Mr. Rahimzadeh worked on that building and recalls some of the lessons it taught (Tridel will be using the same Murphy bed provider).
About 50 per cent of the 57-storey building’s 445 units have been sold, including a number of studios, but none so far with the Ready option. Mr. Fung said the Ready furnishings have only been available for a few weeks, and he expects that elements of the design could also be added as upgrades in larger one-plus-den and two-bedroom apartments as the project gets closer to completion.
However, it may be that current market realities have spoiled sales. Data collected by condo analysts Urbanation Inc. showed that the second half of 2022 saw the fewest pre-construction condo sales in 20 years, barring 2008 (which coincided with an unprecedented banking and financial system crisis).
Rising interest rates and uncertainty about a potential recession don’t help, but Urbanation’s data suggests a key driver is the growing gap between the price of an existing condo apartment on the market today and a new-construction contract that will be finished at some point in the future.
In 2016 the average price per square foot was $638 for a resale condo versus $657 for a pre-construction project: about a 3-per-cent premium. In 2022, the average per square foot price for resale condos is $1,020, but new construction has rocketed to $1,427, making for a 39 per cent gap.
Those are some figures you can’t fold up into a wall and hide away.