Formal lease offers are rolling in for significant portions of space in the Roundhouse buildings at Bayview Place as restoration plans for the historic buildings head to city hall.
“We have received an offer on this entire building as of today,” Anne Tanner of Cushman and Wakefield said Friday during a tour of the 7,944-square-foot car shop. The brick building was once part of a busy railyard from the late 1800s to the 1960s. The Roundhouse property, made up of a collection of buildings at Songhees in Vic West, is designated as a national historic site.
Tanner is keeping the potential tenant’s name confidential, but said the car shop offer was local. Offers are also arriving on other locations in the project, where a marketplace featuring a boutique-style grocery store, restaurants, breweries and coffee shops are planned for the 56,661 square feet of space. Outdoor areas at the Roundhouse will feature historical displays, an amphitheater and public art.
Lease rates are between $30 and $40 per square foot, with a “substantial” renovation allowance to be determined in negotiations, Tanner said.
A development permit application will be submitted to Victoria city hall in the next couple of months, said Bayview developer Ken Mariash. Development staff have been working with city hall on the permit, he said.
Mariash and wife Patricia are the principles of Focus Equities, owners of the 20-acre mixed-use Bayview site. One condominium tower has been built and the 21-storey, 177-unit Promontory condo building is under construction.
The Roundhouse building permit application, with working drawings, will likely be submitted a year from now, Mariash said. It could take 24 to 30 months before tenants are open for business, he said. Construction will take about 12 months. Buildings need to be restored and seismically upgraded.
Total costs will be close to $25 million, Mariash said. “It’s a very delicate process. It would be 50 per cent cheaper just to build new buildings. We’re talking here $500 a foot and you can build a very, very nice building for $250.”
A lively, family-oriented marketplace has been central to the Bayview development plan.
“It’s now time, subject to the final development permit because you can’t really have a binding lease, to start accepting a lot of the offers,” said Mariash, noting that interest has been greater than anticipated. “We are inviting tenants that will establish a local character and flavour.”
A grocery store modelled on the current popularity of offerings such as Whole Foods, specializing in organic and locally grown products, will be a key tenant in the project, he said.
Mariash anticipates the overall project will have a museum kind of quality “with all the railway ambience that you possibly want” incorporated into the food and retail environment. “People will be repeatedly coming back where with a museum they would come maybe once every five years.”
Norman Hotson, design architect for Granville Island and who has worked on two other Canadian roundhouses, said the Vic West property is “absolutely unique in Canada. There’s no other place where there’s an assemblage of the original railway buildings and the yard in which they are all arranged in one piece like this, so the ability to recycle this into a new purpose is just a phenomenal opportunity.”
The car shop is in good shape, he said. “What you see is very, very solid. All we have to do is seismically brace it.”
The Roundhouse building itself needs more work. It has had a “lot of water penetration over the years so its roof structure is in fairly bad shape,” Hotson said.
