Kingly Condos, 501 Adelaide St W: Brick Mid-Rise in an Office Campus

Kingly Condos at 501 Adelaide Street West is one of the few new buildings in King West that feels like it belongs on the street. It is small, it is brick, it was designed by Hariri Pontarini, and it shares a site with a major office building rather than a second condo tower. That last point shapes almost everything about living here. I’m Jatin Dua, RE/MAX Quantum Realty.

A condo that is really one half of an office project

Kingly was built as the residential piece of King Portland Centre, a mixed-use development by Allied Properties and RioCan that pairs this 15-storey condo with a 13-storey office building fronting King Street. When the office space was leased in 2018, UrbanToronto reported that Shopify was taking most of it and that Indigo was moving its head office into four floors. The development went on to win a 2020 REX award for mixed-use development of the year.

For an owner, this matters in two ways. First, the neighbour is an office building, not another 40-storey tower, so the immediate views and the evening noise profile are different from a typical King West condo block. Second, the ground floor is shared with commercial tenants. A restaurant was planned to open onto King Street, and the podium holds roughly 13,000 square feet of retail. Weekday lunch crowds come with the territory.

Allied is primarily an owner of office and urban workspace, not a high-volume condo builder. That is not a criticism, but it does mean there is less of a track record of Allied condos to compare against. Look at how the corporation has handled its first years on its own, which I cover below.

Brick, black steel and a building that keeps its scale

Hariri Pontarini set out to make the building read like the Victorian and Edwardian warehouses around it. During construction, UrbanToronto documented precast panels with real brick embedded in them between the windows, columns near the base clad in actual brick, and a black-painted steel I-beam carrying windows along the King Street side. It is a warehouse vocabulary built with modern methods, and it looks more convincing in person than most attempts.

The residential building was certified LEED Gold, according to Smith + Andersen, which engineered the mechanical systems for the whole development. Energy performance does not show up on the listing sheet, but in a building where heat and hydro are not in the fee, it shows up on your bills.

At 15 storeys on an irregular mid-block lot, this is a mid-rise. Fewer suites usually means fewer people in the elevators and a quieter lobby, but it also means each owner carries a larger share of every repair. Both are true here.

Suite sizes and what the range tells you

Suites run from about 424 to 1,779 square feet, which is a wider range than most King West buildings of this size. The active listings I reviewed were one-bedrooms and one-plus-dens in the 600 to 699 square foot band and a two-bedroom in the 900s, so the building is not dominated by investor-sized studios.

The larger suites near the top are the ones I would look at first if you want a long-term home. On a small floor plate, a corner or upper-floor suite can feel closer to a loft than a condo. Ask for the floor plan and the exposure; on a mid-block site, some suites look across at office windows at close range, and that is something you need to see before you fall for the finishes.

Daily life at King and Portland

The address is on Adelaide, and that is a quieter front door than King. Adelaide runs one way and carries commuter traffic, but it does not have the restaurant-patio crowd that King Street gets on summer weekends. You get the King West strip on one side of the block and a calmer residential entrance on the other.

The trade-off is that this is now one of the busiest office pockets in the west end of downtown. Weekdays bring office workers, deliveries and lunch lines; weekends are noticeably calmer around the building itself. If you work in tech or in one of the nearby offices, that is a feature. If you want a sleepy street, look further west toward Bathurst.

Before you buy, walk the block on a weekday at noon and again on a Friday night. Ten minutes on the sidewalk tells you more about whether you will like living here than any brochure will.

Kingly pricing, and why the fee needs a second look

The building average sits around $911 per square foot, which is in line with newer brick mid-rises in King West. You are not paying a large premium for the Hariri Pontarini name, and you are not getting a discount for being small.

When I reviewed it there were three suites for sale. Asking prices ranged from roughly $500,000 to $830,000, with the one-bedroom and one-plus-den listings at about $500,000 to $549,000. Fees on those listings ran from about $561 to about $903 a month, roughly $0.95 per square foot.

That fee level deserves attention, because condos.ca lists only common elements and building insurance as included. Until the status certificate tells you otherwise, assume heat, cooling, water and hydro are on your own account. A $0.95 fee with almost nothing included costs more to carry than a $0.95 fee that includes utilities. For sold figures in this building, use the aggregate data on this page or ask me for a building sold report.

Building specifications

Amenities at Kingly Condos

There is no pool or large gym listed here; the package leans toward a rooftop deck, a party room and work-from-home rooms, with Beanfield Fibre available. That suits people who work remotely and use King West’s gyms and restaurants instead of paying for big in-house facilities.

Jatin’s honest take on Kingly Condos

Kingly Condos — frequently asked questions

Looking at King West, Liberty Village and CityPlace more broadly? Start with my Toronto community guide — the neighbourhoods, what each pocket is like, and how they compare.