Living at Arris, Calgary

The Atlas

You take an elevator down to buy milk. That is the sentence people reach for first about Arris, and it undersells the building, because the more telling fact is the clubhouse. It is a separate building on the grounds. The pool and the gym are somewhere you walk to across a landscaped terrace, and the elevator has nothing to do with getting there.

Grounds

Arris stands at 530 3 Street SE in East Village, on the flats where the Bow and the Elbow meet, the district Calgary Municipal Land Corporation has been rebuilding for fifteen years. It is the tallest thing in the neighbourhood and among the taller residential towers in the city. The height register puts it at 39 storeys and 142.1 metres, and the first residents moved in during May 2024.

The tower sits on a podium it shares, and that podium is the reason the address behaves the way it does. Underneath the residences runs the 5th and THIRD retail centre, over 170,000 square feet of it, with indoor access from the homes above. A Real Canadian Superstore opened in that podium on May 14 2020, at about 80,000 square feet, the first urban-format store the chain opened. Be exact about the geography here. The grocery store sits in the podium beneath the towers. The tower above holds homes.

Homes

Hossein Amanat drew it. Bosa Development built it as a two-tower project, a for-sale tower and a rental tower over one podium of commercial space, which is why the address carries two populations and one loading bay.

Thirty-nine storeys puts the upper floors above every roofline between here and the river, so a north-facing home looks over RiverWalk to the Bow and a south-facing one looks across the rail corridor toward the Stampede grounds. The floor plates are large enough to carry the two-bedroom plans the district was short of before this building opened. What a buyer weighs here is a new tower in a district still under construction against an older one in a district that finished decades ago, and East Village has been answering that question in its favour for about ten years now.

Everyday

The Jack and Jean Leslie RiverWalk runs a block north along the Bow, two kilometres of promenade built by CMLC with its first phase completed in 2012, and it carries you east to the George C. King Bridge and across onto St Patrick's Island. The Central Library opened on November 1 2018 at the west edge of the district where East Village meets the office core, and more than fifty-two thousand people went through it in its first four days. Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre, opened on July 1 2016 three blocks south. The Simmons Building sits two blocks northeast, holding a bakery, a roastery, a head office and a steakhouse inside a 1912 warehouse. City Hall station is on the west side of the district and carries both CTrain lines.

Amenities

The residents' clubhouse is a standalone building on the grounds. It holds a fitness facility with a yoga room and a spin studio, an indoor pool with a lap pool and a hot tub alongside it, a sauna and a steam room, change rooms with showers, and video conference and study rooms. A kitchen with private dining for twenty is available to book.

Outside, a landscaped terrace carries walking paths, open lawn, barbecue nooks and benches, with a pet park on the grounds. The lobby is attended around the clock and a concierge works it. Package lockers and storage lockers are both secured, and the underground parking is heated and carries EV charging stations. This is the longest amenity list of any building on our condo pages, and the reason it can exist is the podium underneath paying part of the freight.

Edges

North is the Bow, with RiverWalk along it and the island past that. West the district runs into the downtown office core at the library. East, the Elbow comes in and Inglewood picks up the older main street on the far side. South is the rail corridor, and past it Victoria Park and Stampede Park.

East Village is younger than every neighbourhood around it and reads differently for it, which we go into in Living in East Village. The tower is one decision and the district is another, and here they were made at the same time.

The Arris Edit

Where to start. Hours move, so check before you go.

St Patrick's Island Park
Thirty-one acres over the George C. King Bridge, reopened July 31 2015. The Rise is a nine-metre grassy knoll and the park opens at five in the morning.

Central Library
800 3 Street SE, three blocks south. Opened November 1 2018, and open seven days.

Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre
850 4 Street SE, three blocks south. Open daily, ten to five, in its tenth year at this address.

Sidewalk Citizen Bakery
618 Confluence Way SE, in the Simmons Building. Sourdough, seven days, from half past seven.

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