Chocolate Company Lofts
955 Queen Street West (West Queen West)
Chocolate Company Lofts - 955 Queen Street West
The Chocolate Company Lofts at 955 Queen Street West are a great example of how a exisisting old building can be coverted into authentic lofts. It incorporated the past and the present, seeming to be ageless. Right beside the Candy Factory Lofts, these two grand buildings are an important part of the Queen Street West streetscape.
Located on the southwest corner of Queen Street West and Massey Street, the Chocolate Co. Lofts is a 6-storey building with 146 unique hard lofts across the street from Trinity Bellwoods Park. The conversion was only completed in 2004, but it seems like it has been there forever. The Chocolate Factory Lofts are located at 955 Queen Street West, a traditional looking addition along Queen and Crawford Streets which both links and complements two existing historic loft buildings.
The Chocolate Company Lofts offer a mix of original loft architecture and brand new industrial lofts, in the heart of the eclectic Queen Street West neighbourhood. The old part of the building includes wood or corrugated steel ceilings, wooden posts, steel beams, exposed brick, huge windows and high ceilings. New construction offers barn style doors, concrete ceilings, steel beams and floor to ceiling windows.
The experience of building the Chocolate Factory Lofts on Queen Street West was not exactly sweet. It was a daunting design task and an incredible engineering feat. The design and construction teams took two early 20th-century buildings and added a third brand new building to link and extend them.
The problem was that the two older structures were built about 25 years apart, so there was no correlation between them in terms of ceiling heights or anything. The result is a mixture of old and new. There are units with wooden beams and exposed brick, some with exposed concrete walls and ceilings, and others with large windows and Juliet balconies. The project has 146 units spread over six floors.
The Chocolate Factory Lofts are spectacular spaces - unique, airy lofts with giant windows, many with french balconies, private gated courtyard entrances, penthouses with terraces, two- storey designs, many one-of-a-kind lofts and much more you must experience for yourself.
The raw material for this project consisted of a couple of two-toned brick industrial buildings once owned by the Patterson Chocolate Company. Though obsolete for commercial use, these mid-rise structures made a good visual fit with the three-storey Victorian storefronts across the street, the big Candy Factory (now lofts) next door, and other elements of the old streetscape.
Instead of ripping them down and starting from scratch, the developer decided to salvage the two structures, then directed the designers (Gabriel Bodor and Quadrangle Architects) to knit them together with new brick fabric designed to match the old.
The result is a single, large six storey loft conversion building that sits quietly on its site, doesn’t quarrel with the neighbours, and looks, more or less, as though it has always been there.
Which raises interesting questions. When does it make sense for a building to slip discreetly into the streetscape (as the Chocolate Company Lofts does), and when is it appropriate for a new structure to break with local tradition and go big and noisy?
In the case of the Chocolate Company Lofts, I believe the developer and architects made a good decision. Unlike districts closer to the downtown towers, this western stretch of Queen was neither intensively torn apart nor simply allowed to go to the dogs since its creation in the 19th century. It was never just so many unloved, unimportant warehouses and workplaces, or so much weedy, derelict industrial land.
People lived vividly along Queen, and many traces and echoes of that vivid life remain in the buildings themselves - in elaborate, multicolored brickwork, for example, and in the extravagant story-book carvings that decorate the Gladstone Hotel, and in the short sweeps of glassy storefronts under tall, dignified brick facades. Queen Street West has surely been damaged and neglected, but much of its stolid Victorian character remains intact.
What it needs is not heroic architectural therapy, but more time to heal, and more of the old-fashioned medicine used successfully to revive the Patterson Chocolate Company buildings.
Email or phone 416-388-1960 today if this building interests you.
