Living at Chocolate, Calgary

The Atlas

The ceiling is the first thing anyone notices. Concrete, unpainted, carrying the marks of the forms that poured it, and a barn door on a track where a house would hang a swing door. In summer the second-floor deck does the work a backyard does. In February the glass does it, because the wall runs glass from the floor up and the weather becomes a thing you watch rather than a thing you enter. Seventeenth Avenue is two blocks south, near enough that you stop planning around it and start walking out into it.

Grounds

Chocolate stands at 188 15 Avenue SW, on the corner where 1 Street SW crosses 15 Avenue, in the middle of the Beltline. Four commercial tenants hold the ground floor, so the base of the tower is a working frontage with doors in it. One of the four is Battistella Developments itself, which put the building up and kept its head office in it. This was the first of the towers the developer grouped along the street under the name First Street Village, and Colours followed a block and a half north three years afterward.

Each direction off the corner is a different errand. Seventeenth Avenue SW runs two blocks south and carries the retail and restaurant line for this half of the city. Central Memorial Park sits four blocks west along 13 Avenue, holding the sandstone library that opened in 1912 as the first public library in Alberta. North, the avenues climb toward the office grid and the 7 Avenue CTrain platforms sit seven blocks up. Southeast, the Victoria Park and Stampede station on the Red Line is a similar distance the other way. We have walked all four and the district is smaller on foot than it looks on a map.

Homes

Nineteen storeys carrying 165 homes, finished in 2006. Battistella works almost entirely inside the inner city, and the interior programme here is the one the company became known for. Polished concrete floors, exposed concrete ceilings, glass walls run floor to ceiling, and barn doors slide where a swing door would take a wall. The finishes are industrial where a Calgary condominium of that year was usually domestic, and the position that read as unusual in 2006 reads as ordinary now.

That is the part of this building that outlived it. The same programme carried into Colours three years later, then into INK in East Village and Lido in Kensington, so the vocabulary set on this corner turns up across the inner city in buildings a decade apart. Plans run open and the concrete is the finish, with nothing over it. Stand inside one before deciding, because a poured ceiling sounds different under a room full of people than a drywall one does.

Everyday

The daily list is a matter of direction. South two blocks puts you on 17 Avenue for dinner, a pint, a haircut, and the sidewalk audit of who took a patio permit this year. West along 13 Avenue puts you in Central Memorial Park, where the library holds its corner and the elms hold the rest. North is work for a large number of people who live here, and the walk to the office towers is short enough that the second car stops earning its stall. The CTrain covers what the walk does not, from the platforms along 7 Avenue at the top of the district.

Winter shortens the list to its indoor half and the building answers that better than a house does. Parking is heated, the elevators run to a warm lobby, and the grocery run is a walk in a coat rather than a scrape and a drive. Summer stretches it back out. The barbecue outlets get used from May and the strip two blocks south moves its dinner outside.

Amenities

A party room is available to owners and tenants alike, which is a wider rule than several buildings in this district run. The rooftop deck sits on the second floor rather than the top, so it reads as a courtyard in the air with the tower above it. Bike storage is provided and two elevators serve the nineteen floors.

Two things here are less common. An in-house car sharing programme runs out of the building, so a household can reach a vehicle it does not own. And the balconies carry gas barbecue outlets, which takes the tank out of the equation and is the reason those balconies get used.

Parking is titled and underground, and the stalls are heated. We have found no published pet policy and no published position on short-term rentals here, and both come off the condominium documents rather than off a page like this one.

Edges

The district holds this building on four sides and none of the four is abstract. Seventeenth Avenue closes the south with commerce and the office towers close the north with work. Central Memorial Park anchors the west and the Stampede grounds anchor the southeast, so the two ends of the district run different weekends. Beltline is one community carrying two halves that do not feel alike, Connaught west and Victoria Park east, and this corner sits near the line between them. The wider read sits on the Beltline community page.

The Chocolate Edit

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

Central Memorial Park
Four blocks west along 13 Avenue. The sandstone library on its north edge opened in 1912 and was the first public library in Alberta.

Ship & Anchor
534 17 Avenue SW. The pub the strip organises itself around, open late every day of the week.

Native Tongues Taqueria
235 12 Avenue SW. Tacos off a charcoal grill, three blocks north.

Proof
1302 1 Street SW. Three blocks up the building's own street, and the door opens at four.

We keep the listings on the building page, updated as the market moves. Start with Chocolate condos for sale.