Grangetown Lofts, McCaul St: Street-Level Lofts With Hydro in the Fee

Grangetown Lofts is not a building you can point to on a skyline. It is a ring of 84 street-level lofts set into the base of the 1980 Village by the Grange complex, with front doors on McCaul and St. Patrick streets, a block from the Art Gallery of Ontario. For the right buyer it is one of the few ways downtown to get a front door, a terrace and a loft ceiling without paying for a house. I’m Jatin Dua, RE/MAX Quantum Realty.

A loft condominium inside a 1980 complex

Village by the Grange went up on the east side of McCaul Street, south of Dundas, and was finished around 1980. At the time it was an unusual project for downtown Toronto: a low-rise mix of apartments, shops and offices built after decades in which almost everything new in the core was a tower.

Grangetown Lofts came later. A City of Toronto planning report from 1998 notes that the Village by the Grange site had recently been through a rezoning to convert part of its ground floor into 77 live/work units. The condominium that was registered in 2000 has 84 suites, so the final count differs from that early figure, which is normal as plans change between approval and registration.

That history explains the building’s odd profile on listing sites, where it shows as a one-storey condo with dozens of addresses. You are buying into the street level of a larger complex, not a standalone tower. The other condominium corporations in Village by the Grange sit above and beside you, and that relationship matters for shared spaces and costs, which I come back to below.

Front doors, high ceilings and terraces

Because these suites began life as ground-floor space, the format is different from a typical condo. Recent listing descriptions talk about direct street entrances on McCaul, high ceilings with exposed ductwork, open-concept layouts and private terraces where barbecues are permitted. Condos.ca also lists BBQs as permitted.

Sizes are modest by loft standards. Current listings sit in the 700 to 999 square foot bands, which means one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms rather than sprawling hard lofts. What you gain is volume and a door to the street; what you give up is the view and the separation from the sidewalk that an upper floor gives you.

Street level cuts both ways. Some buyers love walking straight out to a coffee shop and never waiting for an elevator. Others find foot traffic, noise from a busy art-school street and window privacy harder than they expected. Visit at different times of day, including a weekday afternoon when OCAD University is in session and a Friday night.

Hydro in the fee, and what that does to the number

The headline number that scares people is the fee. The two active listings I looked at worked out to about $1.22 per square foot a month, which is well above what you see in most downtown condos.

Read the inclusions before you judge it. Condos.ca lists common elements, heat, hydro, air conditioning, building insurance and water as covered. Hydro in the fee is rare, and with heating and cooling also bundled, an owner here may have almost no separate utility bills besides internet and their own contents insurance. In a newer building at a lower fee, you would add your own hydro and often a separate heating and cooling charge.

The other side is that owners share the energy bill. In a ground-level suite with tall ceilings and street-facing glass, heating and cooling the volume is not cheap, and when rates rise the fee rises for everyone. Ask for the last three budgets to see how much of the fee goes to utilities and how fast it has climbed.

The Grange Park pocket, day to day

The address puts you between the Art Gallery of Ontario, OCAD University and Queen Street West, with Grange Park itself a short walk east. Baldwin Village’s restaurants are just north of Dundas, and Chinatown and Kensington Market are a few blocks west on foot.

This is a student-heavy and gallery-heavy part of downtown, which keeps the streets busy and the cafés full. It is also close enough to the Financial District and the hospitals on University Avenue that many owners walk to work. Transit options are summarised in the panel on this page.

What Grangetown Lofts costs

At the time of writing there were two suites for sale, asking between about $549,000 and $620,000. That works out to roughly $620 to $780 per square foot on asking, well below the downtown average for newer towers.

Monthly fees on those two listings ranged from about $850 to $1,250. Treat that as an all-in housing cost rather than a straight condo fee, and compare it against a newer building’s fee plus hydro, heating and cooling before you decide which is cheaper.

Condos.ca does not publish a building average per square foot for Grangetown, and sales are infrequent, so comparables are thin. The aggregate sales figures in the panel above are the better guide. If you want a closer read on a particular suite, I can pull the full sales history through my building sold report.

Building specifications

Amenities at Grangetown Lofts

Condos.ca lists a gym, party room, meeting room, parking garage and security guard, which is more than an 84-suite ground-floor condominium would normally carry on its own. Ask whether these are owned by Grangetown or shared with the other Village by the Grange corporations, and how the costs are split.

Jatin’s honest take on Grangetown Lofts

Grangetown Lofts — frequently asked questions

Looking at Queen West, Trinity-Bellwoods, Kensington and Little Italy more broadly? Start with my Toronto community guide — the neighbourhoods, what each pocket is like, and how they compare.