Chocolate
Chocolate stands at 188 15 Avenue SW, in the middle of the Beltline where 1 Street SW crosses 15 Avenue. It was the first of the buildings Battistella Developments put up on this stretch, which the developer named First Street Village, and Colours followed it three years later a block and a half north.
The building
Nineteen storeys carrying 165 homes, finished in 2006. Battistella is a Calgary developer working 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, floor-to-ceiling glass, and sliding barn doors in place of swing doors. The finishes are industrial rather than domestic, which was an unusual position for a Calgary condominium in 2006 and is a common one now. The same programme carried forward into Colours three years later, and later still into INK in East Village and Lido in Kensington, so the vocabulary set here shows up across the inner city.
The building carries a party room available to owners and tenants, a rooftop deck on the second floor, bike storage, and two elevators. An in-house car sharing programme runs from the building, and the balconies hold gas barbecue outlets.
Parking is titled and underground, and the stalls are heated. Four commercial tenants occupy the ground floor, and the developer’s own head office is one of them.
What is around it
The 17 Avenue SW retail strip is two blocks south. Central Memorial Park sits four blocks west along 13 Avenue, and the 4 Street SW commercial blocks run south from the park toward Mission. The Elbow River runs east along 13 Avenue, and the MNP Community & Sport Centre sits in Lindsay Park on Macleod Trail. The 7 Avenue CTrain platforms are seven blocks north, and the Victoria Park and Stampede station on the Red Line is a similar distance southeast.
One developer shaped several blocks of this district in a decade, and that story sits in Living in Beltline.
