The new Beer Store on Somerset. Photo: Robert Smythe
by Robert Smythe
Love it or hate it, the new Brewers Retail Beer Store on Somerset Street West makes a sincere effort at fitting into its neighbourhood. And history has actually repeated itself—with some significant improvements.
When it announced plans for a new beer store across from Dundonald Park (at the time it was their ninth outlet in the Ottawa area), Brewers Retail needed to demolish five houses and a six-door row of 19th-century homes.
But, as reported in the Ottawa Citizen of December 30, 1959, “In accordance with the wish of the city’s Building Appearance Committee the store will be built of red brick instead of the usual buff construction. This will conform with the coloring of the old houses in the area. And to screen its large asphalt lot the store will have lighted parking spaces for 35 cars shielded from the view of the MacDonald [they got the name wrong] Park across the street by a brick wall.”
Flash forward to late 2013, when the Starbank Group of Companies, on behalf of Brewers Retail, filed an application with the City of Ottawa to replace their old red brick Beer Store with a much larger one. They seemed to have lost the will to blend into their surroundings.
Option one was for a 9,500 square foot warehouse outlet set against the east side of the property, with an essentially blank wall along Somerset Street and an inward-facing storefront oriented toward the parking lot.
The Beer Store is located within the boundaries of Centretown’s Heritage-Overlay District. A greater affront to the neighbourhood’s architectural character was a large parking lot with trailer truck loading bays providing more spaces than the zoning bylaw required, needing two separate access points over wide curb cuts in the sidewalk. The landscape buffer was to be somewhere between minimal and nonexistent.
Brewers Retail then produced option two: basically the same building now having doors on Somerset Street. The Dalhousie Community Association commented to the City, “We are horrified that this project remains so inappropriately developed for a Traditional Mainstreet.”
The variances to the zoning bylaw necessary to approve the Beer Store’s new big box were unanimously rejected by the Committee of Adjustment, and the plans sent back to the Brewers Retail architects (SMV of Toronto) for revision. The two access lanes and curb cuts were reduced to one, and the landscaped buffer along the street edge widened. Trees were added, and the number of parking spaces limited to 19, with more bike parking added.
After another application to the Committee of Adjustment for reduced building setbacks, and an appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board, the final design emerged. The building was split in two and moved to both ends of the lot. This created more prominent building facades on Somerset and a less prominent gap along the street frontage.
Although some commentators believed that it was still an underdevelopment of this site—perhaps a mid-rise residential building with at-grade commercial would have been better—the City’s position has been that the new structures comply with the minimum height limits and, as yet, there is no minimum density requirement in the zoning bylaw.
Perhaps the inspiration for the massing of the Beer Store and Tim Hortons is best seen from the east. It’s a perfect foil to the “Igor Gouzenko” apartment building next door. Very contextual indeed.
Meanwhile, at Deacon Brodie’s…
For those who missed its brief period of full Tudor-ness, here’s the pub in all its half-timbered glory. Photo: Robert Smythe
After months of renovations to the former Mayflower Restaurant at Elgin and Cooper, many of us were disappointed when the results were unveiled. The faux-Tudor frontage, ornamented by fake bricks and beams, had very small, heavily tinted bi-fold windows that were dark, impenetrable and uninviting.
The zoning bylaw states that a building facade facing a commercial street like Elgin must have no less than 50 percent glazing. Upon inspection after the renovations were completed, it was determined that the window area was only 31 percent.
Although there was some dispute as to whether this had been disclosed in the original plans filed with the City of Ottawa, and the means by which they were measured, the pub’s owners proceeded to the Committee of Adjustment for a minor variance to retroactively approve the undersized windows “as built.”
Surprisingly, the committee dismissed the request, holding that the reduction was not truly minor in nature. This was further disputed at a hearing before the Ontario Municipal Board, which upheld the City’s refusal to accept the 31 percent window solution. Deacon Brodie’s threw in the towel and remodelled the Elgin Street frontage with full-sized sliding doors, and now the glazing stands at close to 100 percent of the building facade.
In case you didn’t know, Wikipedia informs us that Deacon Brodie (a cabinet maker) built the first gallows in Edinburgh and was also its first victim—hanged for burglary.