Tridel and Hines officially launched construction last Friday on the first of eight buildings at Bayside, a 2M SF master-planned community in East Bayfront that is Waterfront Toronto’s largest private-sector development to date.

We snapped Hines' Avi Tesciuba and Tridel’s Jim Ritchie at the launch for Aqualina, the first residential project at Bayside, a $910M development that’ll ultimately include 1,800 units in six residential buildings and two office buildings (with 400k SF)—all LEED-certified and powered by a waterfront-wide ultra high speed broadband network. Jim, Tridel’s sales and marketing SVP, tells us that with a 13-acre site and a master plan endorsed by Waterfront Toronto and the city, “there are things you can do here that you can’t do with a single phase where everything is developed around you.”

Bayside is the second development in East Bayfront. Last month Great Gulf Homes launched construction on Monde, just across the road. Hines, selected by Waterfront Toronto as the master developer of Bayside in 2010, has made Tridel its exclusive residential development partner. “We had a lot of interested condo developers,” Avi, Hines Canada’s managing director, said Friday. But Tridel shares his firm’s values. It’s a family business like Hines, “and the importance they place above all else is on quality, integrity and reputation.”

All Bayside’s buildings will have retail at the base lining a cobblestone high street, including a 30k SF grocery store Jim says will be part of the second residential project, Aquavista (seen below), starting construction this fall. Bayside’s two nine-storey office buildings, Queens Quay Place, will share a landscaped plaza. They’ll have column-free floor plates and nine-foot ceilings, and be LEED Gold-certified. A neighbourhood park, Aitken Place Park, will augment adjacent Sherbourne Common, plus the already-constructed new Water’s Edge Promenade. This isn’t “just a set of buildings,” Avi noted. “What makes a neighbourhood is the fabric between the buildings.”

Aquavista at Bayside just won BILD’s 2015 Places to Grow Community of Year award, cited for best reflecting the goals of Ontario’s growth plan. The project is really “two buildings in one,” Jim points out, a true mixed-use development that'll have market condos and 80 units of affordable rental housing, to be managed by Artscape. As for the condos, Tridel's designed larger units to take full advantage of the singular lakeside setting, and they appear to have read the market correctly. Jim says more than 50 homes over $1M have been sold to date between both Aqualina and Aquavista.