Living at Drake, Calgary

The Atlas

Seven of the homes here have front doors. Actual doors on the sidewalk, with a step up and a number on them, which changes how the corner reads from the street. Two blocks north sits an 1891 sandstone mansion with terraced gardens around it. Two blocks south is 17 Avenue, where the coffee opens at seven and the pub closes at two. You can do a whole day inside four blocks and the walk between them is flat.

Grounds

Drake stands at 1500 7 Street SW, on the corner where 15 Avenue meets 7 Street, in the Connaught half of the Beltline. Grosvenor started construction late in 2011 and the building was finished in 2013. Seventh Street runs straight south into the 17 Avenue retail strip two blocks down, and straight north into the residential blocks and then the office grid.

The corner sits on a boundary and that is the reason the townhouses work. South of 15 Avenue the district turns commercial and stays that way to 17 Avenue. North of it, the blocks are apartments and older walk-ups on a flat numbered grid. Central Memorial Park is three blocks northeast. Lougheed House and Beaulieu Gardens sit two blocks due north on 13 Avenue. The 4 Street SW commercial run and the walk down into Mission are east across the district, and the 7 Avenue CTrain platforms are seven blocks north, with the closest at 8 Street SW carrying both lines.

Homes

Seventeen storeys carrying 135 homes. Seven of those are two-storey townhouses at grade, each with its own front door onto the sidewalk, and the remaining 128 are apartments on the floors above. That arrangement puts residential doors on the street where a tower would usually put a lobby and a blank wall, and it is the reason this corner has people on it at seven in the morning.

Rafii Architects drew it in consultation with BKDI. The building is LEED certified, and the sourcing we have does not name the level, so read the certification as covering design and construction rather than any individual home. Grosvenor is a British property business working on an institutional horizon, and it also built Avenue in the West End with Cressey Development Group. A company that plans in decades holds and phases a site differently from one that plans in quarters, and that shows up in the finishing long after the sales centre closes.

Everyday

Seventh Street is the whole commute for a good number of the people here. Two blocks south for dinner and coffee, and seven blocks north for the train. Groceries and a bank sit inside that radius. Central Memorial Park handles the reading-outside half of a summer, and Tomkins Park handles the fifteen minutes between an errand and a reservation.

Seventeenth Avenue is close enough to use and far enough not to hear, which is the specific thing this corner sells. On a Friday the noise stays two blocks south. In the townhouses the street is the front yard, so a resident learns the sidewalk in a way an eleventh-floor resident does not. Winter takes the system indoors, and the parking is heated, which settles the January question before it is asked.

Amenities

This building answers the amenity question differently from its neighbours, and the answer is in the fabric rather than in a room.

Parking is titled and underground, with heated stalls, and visitor parking sits alongside it, which is the piece owners in this district complain about the loudest when it is missing. Storage lockers are titled and separate from the parking stalls, so a locker and a stall can be bought or sold apart from each other.

The LEED work runs down into the fittings. Water-smart plumbing fixtures are installed through the building. The paints used in the homes are low-VOC. The washers carry an Energy Star rating, and the laminate flooring in the living areas sits on an acoustical underlay, which is the detail that decides whether you hear the person above you crossing a room. None of that photographs. All of it is what a person notices in the second year.

We could find no published gym, guest suite, party room, or concierge for Drake. A short amenity list is a lower monthly fee and fewer shared rooms to maintain, and whether that reads as a saving or a loss depends entirely on which of those rooms you would actually have used.

Edges

Connaught is the western half of the Beltline and it does not behave like the eastern half. Seventeenth Avenue closes the south with the retail and entertainment district. North, the apartment blocks run up to 10 Avenue and then the office towers take over. West, 14 Street carries traffic out toward the Bow. East, the district crosses 4 Street SW toward Victoria Park and the Stampede grounds, and the two halves keep different weekends. Every edge here is either commerce or housing, and the corner Drake sits on is where the two meet. The wider read sits on the Beltline community page.

The Drake Edit

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

Lougheed House and Beaulieu Gardens
707 13 Avenue SW, two blocks north. An 1891 sandstone house with terraced formal gardens, open Thursday to Sunday, roughly 2,300 plants going in each spring.

Tomkins Park
17 Avenue between 7 and 8 Street SW. A long thin park under big trees, established in 1915 on land the Tomkins family gave the city.

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

Analog Coffee
740 17 Avenue SW. Two blocks south on 7 Street, then look left. Open at seven.

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