Drake
Drake stands at 1500 7 Street SW, in the Connaught half of the Beltline, on the corner where 15 Avenue meets 7 Street. Grosvenor started construction late in 2011 and the building was finished in 2013.
The building
Seventeen storeys carrying 135 homes. Seven of those are two-storey townhouses at grade with their own front doors, and the remaining 128 are apartments on the floors above. That arrangement puts residential doors directly onto the sidewalk, which is a different relationship to the street than a lobby and a blank wall. Rafii Architects drew it in consultation with BKDI. The building is LEED certified, and the sourcing does not state which level, so take the certification as covering design and construction rather than any individual home.
Parking is titled and underground, with heated stalls, and visitor parking sits alongside it. Storage lockers are titled and separate from the parking stalls.
The LEED work runs 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.
Grosvenor also built Avenue in the West End, in partnership with Cressey Development Group, which gives the company two Calgary residential projects rather than one. It is a British property business working on an institutional horizon, and that tends to show in how a site is held and phased.
What is around it
The 17 Avenue SW retail strip is two blocks south, and 7 Street runs straight into it. Central Memorial Park is three blocks northeast. The 4 Street SW commercial blocks and the walk down into Mission are east across the district. The 7 Avenue CTrain platforms sit seven blocks north, with the closest at 8 Street SW carrying both lines. The corner sits between the 17 Avenue retail run and the residential blocks north of it, which is the reason a townhouse frontage works on this site.
Connaught and Victoria Park are two halves of one community that do not feel alike, and we separate them in Living in Beltline.
