Five West
Five West is two towers on 5 Avenue SW, at numbers 910 and 920, on the western edge of the downtown grid where the office blocks give way to the residential ones. The pair went up under La Caille, a Calgary developer, and they read from the street as one project rather than two.
The two towers
One tower runs 26 storeys and was finished in 2006. The other runs 28 and was finished in 2008. One of the two holds 130 homes. The taller carries a lit spire that shows up in skyline photographs taken from the north bank of the Bow, and both sit above ground-level frontage on 5 Avenue, which is a one-way eastbound street here and moves fast in the afternoon.
An on-site manager works the building alongside a lobby concierge, and security runs full time. The owners’ lounge holds a party room, an equipped kitchen, a pool table, and a terrace off it.
Parking is titled and heated below grade, with visitor stalls underground and a car wash bay on the same level. High-speed elevators serve both towers. Storage lockers and bicycle lockers are secured separately. Balconies carry gas line connections, and laundry is in-suite.
What is around it
The Bow River pathway is a few blocks north, past 4 Avenue and the Eau Claire blocks, and it runs uninterrupted east toward Prince's Island Park and west toward the Peace Bridge crossing into Sunnyside. Eau Claire Plaza and the market blocks sit east at the foot of 3 Street SW. Two blocks south is the 7 Avenue transit corridor, where the Red Line and the Blue Line share street-level platforms at 8 Street SW and at 7 Street SW. A block beyond that, 8 Avenue closes to traffic and becomes Stephen Avenue.
The towers sit on the line between two very different halves of downtown, so the district reading changes with the direction a unit faces. We cover it in Living in Downtown Commercial Core.
