Mass timber buildings are on the rise in Toronto, and the city’s former chief planner is looking to join the wave, proposing an eight-storey tower on the site of a disused car wash. That is according to a development application filed by Collecdev Markee, the firm led by Jennifer Keesmaat, the city’s chief planner from 2012 to 2017.
Designed by Batay-Csorba Architects and backed by CMHC, the tower at 1280 to 1286 College Street would replace the Classic Coin Car Wash with a modular mass timber and red brick structure delivering 77 one- and two-bedroom units alongside 86 bicycle parking spaces. Significantly, the proposal does not include any car parks, a decision Collecdev Markee has baked into all five of its developments.
The College Street site sits within two Protected Major Transit Station Areas, with two streetcar lines at the door and Dundas West station a short bus ride away. The Bloor GO station, already on the UP Express corridor, is earmarked for expanded Barrie line service by 2027, adding further commuter weight to a location that already clears the transit bar on its own merits.
Collecdev Markee built the missing-middle portfolio around city hall’s Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods initiative, which unlocked gentle densification on infill sites across Toronto from 2023, corridors long bottled up by single-family zoning and ageing post-industrial stock. All five projects are prefabricated, all carry an affordable housing component, and not one breaks ground on a basement car park.
Limberlost Place, Canada’s first institutional mass timber tower completed in 2024 at George Brown College’s waterfront campus, set the most recent benchmark for exposed timber construction in the city, as Wood Central reported. The Classic Coin Car Wash will not be mourned; in its place, Collecdev Markee is making the case that prefabricated mass timber now pencils out at the affordable rental tier without a concrete podium in sight.
The Dufferin Grove proposal also arrives at a pivotal moment for Ontario’s timber building code, with the province’s updated regulations lifting the allowable height for encapsulated mass timber construction from 12 to 18 storeys — a 50 per cent increase that opens the door for taller timber rental towers right across the province, as Wood Central reported. “The use of mass timber can help keep the cost of construction down and boost our northern economy,” said Paul Calandra, Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.
