One Dartmouth developer ticked a box on Wednesday, while another will have to wait.
The municipality’s Design Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations to city planners on the design elements of proposals under the Centre Plan, met virtually with two proposals on the agenda: one for Wyse Road and one for Pleasant Street.
Both proposals are following the same process, coming to the committee for input before public consultation in the form of an information meeting, posters, and a website to solicit feedback. Ultimately, it will be up to the development officer, municipal planner Sean Audas, whether either proposal goes ahead.
The first, from Abdulrazaq Zaminpeyma and Seraj Bagheri’s Zagros Nova Developments Inc., is an eight-storey, 113-unit residential building proposed for the corner of Wyse Road and Pelzant Street, which also has frontage on George Street. The building would house commercial space in the front on Wyse Road, and a few townhouse-style units in the back on George Street.
The former home of a country bar, then a controversial strip club, and then a vet clinic, the corner lot has been vacant since 2017. There was a development agreement for six storeys approved for the site under old planning rules and different ownership before the property was sold to Zagros last year.
The Design Advisory Committee was tasked with evaluating the qualitative elements of the proposed building, but it couldn’t get past the renderings.
Those drawings, meant to help viewers visualize the finished product, didn’t match up with the more precise elevation drawings. Specifically, there was less detail in the colours and materials used on the upper floors in the renderings.
The municipality’s planners said it doesn’t matter to them, but it didn’t sit well with the committee, which voted to defer a vote recommending one way or the other until the developer came back with more accurate renderings.
Saeed Sarkhoshi, engineer and designer with Parsco, the consulting firm on the project, said he would fix those renderings before the committee’s meeting next month.
The second proposal brought the committee’s attention to south Dartmouth — the corner of Pleasant and Chadwick streets.
The documents before the committee on Wednesday didn’t list the owner of the property, but a company called M&K Golden Developments submitted a similar proposal for the lot under old planning rules in 2019.
The owner of M&K Golden Inc., according to the registry of joint stocks, is Joseph Sadek, a doctor specializing in ADHD working out of the Dartmouth South Professional Centre next door, at 245 Pleasant St. The consultant on the file, WM Fares Architects, made numerous references to the developer owning the property next door.
Using four lots, 247 Pleasant St. and 3-7 Chadwick St., Sadek is proposing to build a nine-storey, 61-unit building.
Committee members generally praised the design, with the height coming down as the building moves up the hill to transition to the neighbourhood behind.
But the committee also made several recommendations, including using sedum instead of sod for the green roof; adding more permanent outdoor seating and weather protection; simplifying the colour scheme on the top three floors at the corner; adding lighting on the Chadwick Street side; and removing some balconies close to the property line with 245 Pleasant St.
The amended motion, with those recommendations, passed unanimously.
My first reaction to the Wyse Road one was that it was something that wouldn’t add to the idea of a gateway off the bridge. The wall against the side street seems to just produce a bland solid wall at the pedestrian level.
The Pleasant St one cedes some of its footprint to making a better approach to the street. Now the landscaping could wither and not be kept up but it isn’t claiming the whole contact area for itself. I also thought the Wyse Road one looked like a building from the endless expanse of urban Toronto. It seems lacking in design imagination.