Imperial Lofts

History of Imperial Lofts

J.M. Lowes was a coffee and spice trader that moved from Whitby to Toronto. In 1907 Charles Lowes bought three houses on industrial land between two coal yards on Sherbourne, and the architect S.B. Coon designed a three-storey warehouse behind them, finished in 1910. Business was good, and in 1913 Coon designed the six-storey warehouse at 90 Sherbourne, the north half of the lofts today; the older building stood until 1968 in what is now the back parking lot. Coon went on to design the Dominion Building on Bay Street and several of the city's best-known apartment houses.

The south building, at 80 Sherbourne, was designed in 1945 and 1946 by Benjamin Brown, who had come to Toronto as a child refugee from Lithuania in 1896, graduated in architecture from the University of Toronto in 1913, and became one of Toronto's first Jewish architects. Both buildings became home to Imperial Optical, founded in 1900 by Percy Hermant, which grew into the largest optical company in the British Commonwealth; its lens factory on Dundas East is now Century Lofts.

Plazacorp converted the pair in 1997, one of the first loft conversions downtown. The 1913 building has 100-year-old brick walls, timber beams, mullioned windows and the original factory floors, and a vintage elevator cab still runs at 90 Sherbourne; the Art Deco building has 10½-foot concrete ceilings and columns. The 65 lofts run from about 780 to 2,500 square feet, and there is a shared roof terrace. Richmond Mews shares the parking lot, and Liberty Lofts is across the intersection.

Stories you'll hear

“Built in 1905.” The company came to Toronto around 1905; the buildings followed in 1910 and 1913.