Brad J. Lamb found inspiration for his latest Toronto condo project, James—a slender 18-storey tower proposed for Richmond Street just west of Spadina Avenue—during a recent trip to New York.
“I was staying at the Viceroy Hotel, and in New York you never really know how a building looks from the outside because everything there is so high,” he tells Epoch Times in an interview at Lamb Development Corp.’s King West headquarters. “At one point I walked across the street, looked up and thought, ‘Holy (smokes), this is a really cool building’” (the new hotel on West 57th Street exudes a strong air of masculinity, with black steel framing its facade and industrial-style framed windows).
Lamb liked it so much he snapped a photo and sent it to one of his go-to architects, Peter Clewes, principal of architectsAlliance. “I told him, I want to do a building just like this in Toronto.”
The result is James, a 135-unit condo that'll be “tall, dark, and handsome,” according to its marketing materials. Lamb notes he wanted the name to sound decidedly “manly, not feminine… inside I want it to feel like a private gentlemen’s club.”
He christened another of his new projects The Harlowe, after his daughter. Lamb’s wife was pregnant with her when they drove by the site—on Richmond just east of Bathurst—and she spotted the ‘for sale’ sign. “She was accustomed to bird-dogging for me,” he says.
The building, now under construction, is also New York-inspired. Lamb and his wife used to have a condo in Chelsea, and spent weekends strolling around the Meatpacking District. “I really like the historic low-rise red brick feel of a lot of that part of New York,” he says. “So I wanted to do something here with a similar warehouse-style of architecture.”
Which Core Architects has delivered with The Harlowe. Boasting 220 units and 200 feet of frontage along Bathurst, the building will look “monolithic and monotonous,” says Lamb, “and there’s beauty to that.”
His company is gearing up to launch Wellington House, a 23-storey condo between Portland and Spadina that‘ll incorporate the last surviving grand mansion on Wellington Street West. Sales will also soon begin for Camden House, a mid-rise project at Brant and Camden Streets next door to the soon-to-be-built Ace Hotel. “It’ll be good for the neighbourhood,” Lamb says of the super-hip hotel’s arrival. “It'll up the fun quotient.”
