The Deer Park Church Condo (Blue Diamond Condominium) and town homes (The Foxbar Town Homes) consist of a 28-storey condominium and six three-storey townhouses within the Imperial Village master-planned community at Avenue Road and St. Clair in Forest Hill, Toronto.

The project incorporates the adaptive re-use of the former Deer Park United Church. Built in 1913, the church’s heritage façade was carefully restored, its roof removed to create an open-air public courtyard. The church’s parking lot was converted into a forecourt garden with public art installations.

Maintaining the legacy of the century-old church’s limestone walls, our landscape design of the courtyard features an elegant and refined planting palette, clean granite paving, honey locust trees, and benches. Boxwoods, aromatic sumac, and masses of hardy, low maintenance native grasses surround granite pillars and contemporary sculptures by artists Angela Bulloch, Erin Shirreff, Iris Häussler, Joi T. Arcand, and Julia Dault. The public courtyard is connected to the streetscape by a corridor of eight honey locust trees. An ambient lightning strategy and textured paving pattern weave throughout, connecting the site to the larger Imperial Village aesthetic.

Seamlessly blending the Foxbar Town Homes within the existing fabric of the South Hill/Forest Hill neighbourhood, the landscape design around the townhouses includes low maintenance plants, yew hedging, masses of purple wintercreeper, boxwoods, and native Eastern redbud, pin oak, and red maple trees. To address grade issues, retaining walls were built around the town homes. A swathe of switch grass delineates the transition to the tower behind the town homes.

The landscape scope of work also includes streetscapes on St. Clair Ave West and Foxbar Road, condominium amenity terraces, and town home green roofs.