Developer John Bernardo spent the last decade and $2.5M restoring the old Winchester Hotel building on Parliament Street. It’s been a long slog, and now it's on the block. (People haven't been this excited for a Victorian beauty since Mia Wasikowska played Jane Eyre.)
John (whom we snapped at the site with his broker, CBRE’s Barbara Bardos) bought the building in 2005. With help from Stanford Downey Architects, he painstakingly restored the front facade, original windows and doorways. John drew up plans to redevelop the residential space at the back of the building, where the hotel used to be, adding about 25 new units to the existing 17 rental apartments, but says he decided not to seek a permit in the end. “I figured I’ll give it to whoever buys the building as upside.”
The ground-floor retail was redeveloped, too, with a 3.1k SF space at the corner of Winchester and Parliament—previously a pub—becoming home to what John says is Canada’s first-ever heritage-style Tim Hortons, complete with replica tin ceilings: “We asked them to do heritage and it cost them an arm and a leg.”
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