Reina has come a long way since its buzzed-about beginnings half a decade ago. In 2019, it made headlines for being the first condominium in Canada designed and developed by an all-female team, and in 2020, its message was so striking that it was an easy pick for STOREYS’ Project Of The Year. Now, apart from finishing touches on the amenity spaces, the building is complete and already welcomed its first occupants in mid-February.
It’s been a really gratifying time, shares Executive Vice President of Urban Capital Taya Cook, who conceptualized Reina, along with Sherry Larjani, President of Spotlight Development.
“It’s just a very positive, happy project. The amenities will be finished next week, but we just put a bunch of stuff into the kids’ room and I saw kids go in to play, and honestly, I wanted to cry. It's just so nice to see something that a lot of hard work and a lot of thought went into materialized in such a nice way,” says Cook. “We're so happy with how it turned out and I think our entire female team has done an excellent job.”
Executive Vice President of Urban Capital Taya Cook and President of Spotlight Development Sherry Larjani/Reina Condos
For those who say all Toronto condos look the same, Reina will give you pause. The nine-storey project sits east of Royal York Road on The Queensway in South Etobicoke offering a sophisticated feel, faced with tidy white brick, stretches of floor-to-ceiling windows, and softly curving balconies that undulate across the building like waves.
Featuring upscale design by Quadrangle Architects' Heather Rolleston (designer) and BDP Quadrangle’s Lisa Spensieri (junior designer), and with just 197 units, Reina is a boutique building through and through. And it deviates from your cookie-cutter Toronto condo not just in design or size, but in the fact that it was made with families (not investors) in mind.
“One of the key things we were looking at with this project was that it be multigenerational. So we designed suites, of course, for singles, but really for families who might have one, two, three children. So most of our suites are two and three bedrooms,” says Cook. “We also have in law-suites on the ground floor, which are two units that are connected and have a shared living space. So those are ideal if somebody has, say, an elderly parent, or a child who's gone to university [and] wants their own space, but also wants to be part of the larger family.”
Many of the amenities included in Reina are the result of almost a year of community consultation engaging people of all ages, including tweens and university students/Reina Condos
The building also boasts more than 5,000 sq. ft of total interior amenity space, which is 25% higher than the City of Toronto's standard and has allowed for the inclusion of spaces that give the building a sense of being a “complete community” and “a place for long-term living,” according to Cook. She points to the 24-hour “snack shack,” the sound-proofed room for music lessons and karaoke, and what she and Larjani have dubbed “the bubble” — a yoga studio that has a direct view into the kids’ playroom — as a few standout features.
“A lot of our conversations in our meetings were talking about pinch-points in our own lives. Some of us are mothers, for example, so I know we shared frustrations about where we keep our stroller in our homes, so we have stroller parking on every floor,” says Cook. “I know I had frustrations getting to the gym for the first while after having my son, just because you can't take your eyes off them, so that's where the idea for the bubble from the kids’ room into the yoga studio came from.”
For Larjani, putting together the design and development team for Reina was eye-opening in terms of the abundance of female talent in the industry. “As we grew and as we hired more people, we realized that they are everywhere and they are doing the work and working on so many of the projects that are literally building our city. And unfortunately, they're going unnoticed,” she says. “We had an overwhelming amount of emails that from different parties and consultants that wanted to be involved in this project, which was absolutely amazing.”
From left to right: Jane Almey, Bluescape; Heather Rolleston, Quadrangle Architects; Emily Reisman, Urban Strategies; Nataliya Tkach, EXP; Sherry Larjani, Spotlight Developments; Taya Cook, Urban Capital; Stacy Meek, EXP; Fatima Shakil, Adjeleian Allen Rubeli; Tara Chisholm, WSP; Fung Lee, PMA; Lisa Spensieri, Quadrangle Architects; ManLing Lau, MarketVision/Reina Condos
As for the team they assembled, it’s a showcase of some of the best of the best in the industry. In addition to Cook, Larjani, Rolleston, and Spensieri, Reina has drawn in the likes of Jane Almey of Bluescape, Emily Reisman of Urban Strategies, Fatima Shakil of Adjeleian Allen Rubeli, Fung Lee of PMA Landscape Architects, Nataliya Tkach and Stacy Meek of EXP, Tara Chisholm of WSP, and ManLing Lau of Baker Real Estate.
“The room that we were sitting in, the boardroom that was filled with all these smart, talented women, did not have ego, it wasn't my way or the highway, which is what I was used to. [...] Everybody was heard,” says Larjani. “And it was such a breath of fresh air to see so many women sitting in a room representing their own industries, versus me being the only woman in the room most of the time.”
Five years later, with Reina days away from the finish line, Larjani says they did what they set out to; they’ve put a female-led development on the map in a big way, and set the stage for others to do the same. “We got our point across to many, many people, not only in Canada, but across the world. So I think we achieved the goal and the purpose of the project,” she adds. “Now we are aiming to do more in different ways to give back to the housing industry and to help with the crisis of affordable housing, and to make life better for the communities that we build in.”
