Frances McInnis | torontolife.com

The new Four Seasons in Yorkville, set to open this summer (Image: screen grab from Yorkville Residences website)

Luxury-loving Torontonians should brace themselves for a spring of deprivation: for the next four months, the city will be without a Four Seasons Hotel (horrors!). The iconic old Four Seasons, which has stood at the corner of Yorkville Avenue and Avenue Road since 1978, officially closed yesterday when its last guest checked out. Comrost-Felcorp Inc. has bought the building, with plans to gut it, add a glass base with restaurants and shops and turn the 380 former hotel rooms into 490 condos (which makes it sound like the condos will be rather small). Meanwhile, the hotel’s successor, a 55-storey tower nearby with a $28-million penthouse, isn’t slated to open until August. No word on where Colin Farrell and the Jonas Brothers will hang out until then. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »

Justine Lewkowicz | newstalk1010.com

The Four Seasons hotel will be closing its doors on Wednesday.

The Yorkville hotel isn’t going away, though. It will reopen in the summer at its new location at the corner of Yorkville Ave and Bay St.

The old building at the corner of Yorkville Ave and Avenue Rd will be turned into a condo residence with retail businesses on the ground floor.

The new hotel will have a 5-star designation with a 30,000-square-foot luxury spa.

Erin Criger | CityNews.ca

The Four Seasons hotel in Yorkville will close its doors Wednesday, moving to a new home at the corner of Yorkville and Bay.

The old hotel will be turned into the New Residence of Yorkville Plaza, featuring upscale residences and shops, developer Camrost-Felcorp said Tuesday. The base will be a two-storey glass pod that CEO David Feldman hopes will attract new stores to the area.

“A building that once was the catalyst in transforming Yorkville from a ‘village’ of coffee houses to a luxury destination will once again usher in a new era for this world-class location,” Feldman said in a statement.
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Sean O’Shea | globaltoronto.com

News Hour – Four Seasons hotel closes

The iconic Yorkville Inn, the Four Seasons Toronto, will close Wednesday, but a new Four Seasons will open this summer. Sean O’Shea reports.

Susan Pigg | thestar.com

There are very few things that take legendary hotelier Isadore Sharp by surprise.

He’s built a business — a world-renowned luxury brand, in fact — anticipating every problem, every want, every need of the well-heeled guests who count the Four Seasons’ hotels as one of their homes away from home.

But as he stood outside the chain’s new flagship property this week, staring up at the sleek tower buzzing with construction workers and employees moving into new offices, Sharp was taken aback.
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After the Four Seasons vacates, the Avenue Road building will be transformed into a new condominium project called Yorkville Plaza.

They’re bold, beautiful and nothing like Toronto has seen before. The city’s new breed of ultra-luxury condominiums is transforming the Toronto skyline with strong architectural statements – a far cry from the boring boxes that were once typical of condo projects.

"Luxury buyers today are looking for something out of the ordinary," says Christene DeGasperis, marketing director at Aspen Ridge Homes. "When it comes to architecture, they want a building that makes a strong design statement."
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David Feldman, CEO of Camrost-Felcorp, is photographed in front of Marina Del Rey Condos on the Humber Bay waterfront. Feldman was a driving force behind the development of the old motel strip in…

Has David Feldman run out of ideas?

The man has made many impressive contributions to Toronto’s skyline while building about 50 condominium projects over the past 35 years.

“One of the things I am most proud of is that none of our buildings look the same. We’ve built 50 condo projects and they each have their own distinctive look,” Feldman says.
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Here’s a little behind-the-scenes for you today as a way of introduction to this article. You may have noticed that yesterday we picked The New Residences of Yorkville Plaza, the redevelopment of the current Four Seasons Hotel after it decamps down the block to Bay Street in 2012, as our dataBase project of the day. It’s still the project of the day now in fact, until our next one is revealed later this afternoon. Today though, we find we need to be playing up the project again, as developer Camrost-Felcorp just got in touch with us to tell us ‘we’ve got a new plan for the retail at the base of the building, here’s a new rendering to update you’. The new plan, we have to say, is a huge improvement on the original, and it turns what was an awkward, tacked-on updating of a 1971 brutalist local landmark… into a bold and energized – yet respectful – reimagining of the building’s existing expression. We are getting something good here!

New retail podium plan for The New Residences of Yorkville Plaza, by WZMH Architects for Camrost-Felcorp

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