The St. Clair Centre in Toronto’s midtown was an elegant design when it was built 50 years ago, but it had become cluttered and drafty as scores of different tenants made alterations to the building over the years.

“Inside, only 50 per cent of the building could be leased to tenants. The rest of it had become corridors, storage and unusable space,” says Steven Paynter, principal at Gensler, a global architecture and design firm, which did a total rethink of the building at Yonge and St. Clair inside and reclad the exterior to eliminate air leakage.

Multiple corridors were replaced with one large central corridor that goes east to west, with stores arranged around a central glass-roofed atrium. “It makes it more navigable and user-friendly because it’s a lot easier to understand why you’re in there,” he says.

The renovation managed to raise the leasable space in the Slate Asset Management-owned building to 85 per cent, he adds. “That’s a huge win for the landlord because even if the rent remains the same, it resulted in 35 per cent more leasable area.”

t’s the kind of re-evaluation that will be important for older buildings in the post-lockdown economy, says Roelof van Dijk, senior director of national research and analytics for commercial real estate company Colliers International. “For landlords of older buildings who have found themselves with some vacancies due to the pandemic, now might be a good time to think about repositioning.”

Toronto in particular went through a huge economic boom in the late sixties and early seventies, and many of the retail buildings that were built around that time are reaching the end of their lives in terms of their sustainability, he notes.

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