Minto Yorkville Park, 88 Cumberland St: Small Suites at Bellair

Minto Yorkville Park puts you at Cumberland and Bellair, about as central to Yorkville as a condo address gets. It is a glass tower on a limestone and black granite base, built in 2020, and the suites are compact: nothing on record is much over 950 sq ft. You are paying Yorkville prices per square foot for a small home, and that is the trade to think about. I’m Jatin Dua, RE/MAX Quantum Realty.

It replaced an office building on Yorkville’s busiest corner

Before this tower, the northeast corner of Cumberland and Bellair held a nine-storey office building. Redevelopment plans were underway by 2011, Minto announced the project in 2014 as its third residential building in Yorkville, and the tower was more than halfway up by early 2019.

Bellair is the short street that links Cumberland and Yorkville Avenue, and it is lined with restaurants, patios and boutiques. That puts you in the middle of Yorkville’s daily life rather than on its edge. The two towers of U Condominiums frame the street to the south, so you are living among other tall buildings, not looking over low-rise rooftops.

Minto’s other Yorkville work includes Minto Yorkville at 61 Yorkville Avenue and the Prince Arthur Residences, so this is a developer that knows the neighbourhood. Minto also markets itself on its LEED record, and this tower was designed to target LEED Silver. Ask the seller or the corporation whether certification was actually achieved.

Glass over stone, and art deco inside

IBI Group designed the tower as a glass curtain over a podium clad in limestone and polished black granite. The idea was to match the scale and textures of Yorkville’s older storefronts at street level while the glass rises above. About 5,700 sq ft of retail sits at grade.

Inside, the common areas were designed in a modernised art deco style, with geometric detailing, curves, textured stone and antiqued gold accents. Suites were marketed with floor-to-ceiling windows, kitchen islands with quartz counters, stone bathrooms with soaker tubs and balconies. Finishes vary by what each original buyer chose, so walk the actual suite rather than relying on the brochure.

Small suites by design

Condos.ca puts the suite range at about 441 to 950 sq ft. That makes this a building of one-bedrooms, one-bedroom-plus-dens and compact two-bedrooms. If you need a true family-sized suite, it is not here, and you should be looking at the larger, older Yorkville buildings instead.

The marketing promised external bedrooms, meaning bedrooms with a window to the outside rather than an interior sliding-door room. That is worth checking on every plan you consider, because in suites this size a windowless den is common and it affects both livability and resale. Ask for the registered floor plan and measure the balcony separately from the interior area.

Compact suites also put more weight on storage. Ask whether a locker comes with the suite you are viewing, and if it does not, whether the corporation has any to sell or lease. In a 600 sq ft home, a locker changes how you live.

The daily reality of living on Bellair

The upside of this corner is obvious: restaurants, cafés, boutiques and the Yorkville galleries are at the door, and Bloor Street’s shopping is a short walk south. Most errands here never need a car. Transit, schools, parks and Walk Score are shown in the data panel on this page.

The downside is that this is Yorkville’s evening and weekend crowd. Bellair’s patios are busy in summer, delivery and valet traffic runs through the corner, and lower suites facing the street will hear it. If you are a light sleeper, look at higher floors and suites that do not face the patios.

Views are the other thing to check. With U Condominiums and other towers close by, many suites look at neighbouring glass rather than open sky. Stand in the suite in daylight, and check the City of Toronto development applications map for anything proposed on the sides you face.

Yorkville pricing per square foot, on small suites

Condos.ca reports a building average of about $1,152 per square foot. That is at the top end of what resale buildings in this part of midtown trade at, and well above older, larger-suite buildings a few blocks north such as 1331 Bay Street. Some of that gap is location and age, and some of it is simple arithmetic: small suites always trade higher per square foot.

The active listings I saw had fees from about $861 to $1,148 a month, or roughly $1.35 per square foot. The fee covers common elements, building insurance and air conditioning. Hydro and, in most suites, heat are separate, so add those before you compare this building with an older one where heat is included.

When I checked there were three suites for sale and three for rent. Asking prices ran from about $549,000 to about $1,029,000 to $1,199,000 for two-bedrooms. With close to 200 suites there is enough history to price most layouts properly, so ask me for the building sold report and compare only like-for-like floor plans.

Building specifications

Amenities at Minto Yorkville Park

The amenity package was designed for people living in small suites: a business lounge that works as a home office, an entertainment lounge with a catering kitchen for hosting, and an outdoor terrace by Ferris + Associates built around a full-height fireplace. The fitness centre is about 2,000 sq ft, which is a proper gym rather than a token room. Guest suites are a real help when your own suite has no spare bedroom.

Jatin’s honest take on Minto Yorkville Park

Minto Yorkville Park — frequently asked questions

Looking at Yorkville, the Annex and Midtown more broadly? Start with my Toronto community guide — the neighbourhoods, what each pocket is like, and how they compare.