The Blue Diamond condominium at the corner of St. Clair Avenue West and Foxbar Road, sits atop a high escarpment yielding some of the best southern views of Toronto. This layered adaptive-reuse project maintains the community focused spirit of the site by transforming a vacant public amenity, the former Deer Park United Church, into an open-air public courtyard and converts a parking lot into a forecourt garden featuring several public art installations. Diamond Schmitt Architects, in consultation with Heritage Toronto, has maintained the legacy of the church’s limestone walls while removing the roof to create a park-like setting for the greater community to enjoy south of St. Clair Avenue West.

Behind this re-embodied public square, and rising 28 storeys from where the church’s parish building once stood, is the crowning Blue Diamond tower and townhouses. The tower’s lobby entrance faces Foxbar Road to the west and leads to a two-storey glass-enclosed great hall. The hall is designed as an interior extension of the public courtyard, the former nave’s nineteenth century stone walls giving way to transparency and the tower’s modern interior.

All of Blue Diamond’s 253 suites and its six three-storey townhouses facing the residential street, Foxbar Road have high ceilings and luxurious amenities to further extend the exterior and interior gathering spaces: a party room and catering kitchen, guest suites and a media room. Blue Diamond’s timely arrival to the Avenue Road and St. Clair Avenue West neighbourhood stands out among other Toronto condominiums for its residential design innovations, and Diamond Schmitt’s thoughtful integration of exterior and interior space.

The architect’s respectful attention to the site’s context and reinvention of a more than a century old church will serve both private and public gatherings for many years to come.