Exhibition Place’s First Hotel Will be an Urban Resort
What does Canada's largest urban resort look like? You can wait till it opens next spring, or scroll down for a preview of Library Hotel Collection’s Hotel X Toronto, Exhibition Place's first and only hotel.
Occupying nine acres of city-owned land just inside the Princes’ Gates—opposite Enercare Centre and Allstream Centre—Hotel X Toronto will have 406 rooms and a four-floor podium housing a bar and two restaurants. There will be a rooftop lounge, two pools, cinemas, and an adjoining 70k SF sports centre, a private club with four tennis courts, 10 squash courts, two golf simulators, and member clubhouse. The complex will also offer spa facilities, and 55k SF of meeting and events space, including two ballrooms. “If you build the right hotel with the right amenities, it should be busy not only for convention periods, but a year-round destination,” Library Hotel Collection founder and president Henry Kallan tells us.
Henry’s New York-based firm successfully bid on an RFP issued in 2008 by the city, which wants to grow convention business at Exhibition Place. “They were limited by not having a hotel on the grounds.” Library Hotel Collection has a 99-year lease on its nine acres; the initial term is 49 years, and after that the developer has the option to renew for two 25-year terms. For the first 15 years Henry and co have complete exclusivity to the entire Exhibition Place grounds. “No one else can build a hotel there,” he says. For the balance of the first 49-year term, no others can build on Hotel X’s half of the Ex property.
Project cost is $220M. Billionaire real estate investor Alexander Rovt is contributing $50M; New York investor Josh Durst is also a partner. The hotel is being built on historic terrain, site of New Fort York (aka Stanley Barracks). But the area is also land-filled, which necessitated several archeological excavations. “That increased the project cost by millions,” Henry says. On top of the nine-acre lease, his team negotiated an additional 3.3 acres for a second phase, also sports and entertainment related. (The city gets base rent for the land plus a percentage of hotel room revenues.)
Most of the Hotel X property will be taken up by gardens and parks, with eight-foot hedges. In addition to the restaurants, the hotel, which Henry says he's envisioned as a “self-contained urban resort lifestyle property,” will have an on-site beer garden and a Starbucks with bakery. The complex will also boast rooftop bars on the top three levels, and an indoor-outdoor pool on the 28th floor. “It’s heated all year round, but you’re able to enter from the inside and swim outside,” says Henry. “They call it the Canadian pool.”
