Commercial & Retail

The Broadview Hotel is a landmark building at the northwest corner of Queen and Broadview in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourghood. It functioned as a community hub for businesses, clubs, and athletics, as well as a site for public meetings. The building was completed in 1891-92 for oilman and soap maker Archibald Dingman in the Romanesque Revival...

Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village have been fixtures of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood for more than 60 years. The famed discount retailer, and public realm created by Markham Street’s adaptive reuse as a cultural and commercial enclave in the 1960s, evolved through the influence of the Mirvish Family and neighbourhood communities, including the Afro-Caribbean...

The St. Lawrence Market North Building is the sixth establishment in what has been a series of market buildings; their construction spans nearly two hundred years, making this site is one of Toronto’s more historically significant. It is both the first official market and seat of civic government. ERA Architects is engaged as heritage architect...

Toronto’s King Edward Hotel (“The King Eddy”) opened in May 1903 as the city’s first “palace hotel” to rival hotels in New York and London and boasted “absolutely fireproof” construction. Two notable architects, American Henry Ives Cobb and Toronto’s E.J. Lennox, were responsible for the design of the original 8-storey hotel building, which features a...

A landmark in Toronto’s industrial Junction Triangle neighbourhood, the Tower Automotive Building was designed by architect John W. Woodman in collaboration with C.A.P Turner. Completed in 1920, the Sterling Road building is an early example of flat slab construction in Toronto, with ‘mushroom’ columns, whose distinct appearance are integral to both the design of the...

The Drake Devonshire Inn is located in the pastoral Prince Edward County town of Wellington, Ontario. ERA was engaged as architect of record, collaborating with the Drake Hotel and interior designer John Tong of +tongtong inc. to refurbish the century-old Devonshire Inn, integrate it into the landscape, and take advantage of the striking views to Lake...

The Downtown Built Heritage Inventory (DBHI) is a pilot project that proposes a new, Hamilton-specific methodology to understand, characterize, and map Hamilton’s downtown heritage resources. Inspired by emerging international best practices in heritage planning, this methodology aligns with the Ontario Heritage Act and Planning Act, but also utilizes other strategies for evaluating historic resources, such...

The Hermant Building at 19 Dundas Square, designed by Bond & Smith Architects in 1913, is an early and excellent surviving example of terracotta cladding in Toronto. When it was completed, this 10-storey building was the tallest in the city, and a significant landmark. The Hermant Building originally housed the headquarters of Imperial Optical which at...

The Hermant Building at 21 Dundas Square was designed by Benjamin Brown in 1929. Benjamin Brown is historically significant as the first practicing Jewish architect in Toronto. The 15-storey art-deco-inspired building is a significant landmark at Dundas Square. As part of a 40-storey mixed-use redevelopment designed by Diamond Schmidt, ERA has been working as heritage...

ERA worked with WZMH Architects to rejuvenate 111 Richmond St. West, one of Toronto’s few intact examples of high-quality 1950s office building design, making this an important example of post-war modernist restoration. The 15-storey building was designed by the legendary British emigré modernist architect Peter Dickinson and engineer Morden Yolles. ERA’s restoration work brought back...

In the 1840s, a row of buildings known as the Elgin Block was constructed along Yonge Street. The block’s tenants over the next century included tailors, tanners, and tobacconists. Holt Renfrew and Company extensively renovated one of the buildings and operated in this location from 1910 until the 1950s. While much of the Elgin Block...

Unlike many small Ontario towns, Picton maintains a compact townscape with discreet edges surrounded by countryside. Historically, settlement was centred around Picton Harbour, with waterways serving as a connection point to industry, agriculture, and transportation routes between Kingston and Toronto. While development has naturally been shaped by the local topography of hills, valleys, and shorelines,...