Colborne cool: Condo titan moves east

By Olivia Stren

I think safe is a pejorative word,” chef Claudio Aprile declares over a toothsome starter of devilled eggs, spiked with smoked bacon and souffletine. We’re having lunch at his King East restaurant, Origin, along with real estate developer Peter Freed, architect Peter Clewes and designer Johnson Chou (the latter two are behind Mr. Freed’s latest condo project, 60 Colborne, across the street). Mr. Aprile is relating his contempt for safety — and its posse of bland wing-men (predictability, banality, mediocrity) — to food and architecture. “I’m not saying that everything needs to be polarizing, but you don’t want to be everything to everyone,” he says. “I like to take ingredients that aren’t always celebrated and turn them into something special.”

With that pronouncement, a waitress places exhibit A before us as if on cue: A large beet, provocatively served whole with knife and fork, is adorned with walnuts and pickled red onions, and landscaped with mini snow drifts of creamy chevre. The chef-owner and celebrated culinary provocateur has long been fond of bucking convention, re-imagining ingredients and flavour profiles. His distaste for the road well travelled, and the pleasure he takes in not pleasing all and sundry asserted itself early in his career. Mr. Aprile was fired from his first job at a doughnut shop in Brampton, which found him stuffing each pastry with 10 pumps of jelly (he was supposed to use one pump). He was fired from his next job, the Keg, because he spent his time carving animals out of carrots at the salad bar. And he also once quit a job at a Toronto restaurant when the owner, who popped in for dinner with his young son, requested ketchup. (He proposed using his mother’s tomato jam. When the owner insisted on ketchup, Mr. Aprile quit.)

Mr. Aprile finds a kindred carrot carver in Mr. Freed: “Peter likes to push the envelope, too. His philosophy is compatible with mine. I want to be a leader. I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already done.” Mr. Freed is also hardly in play-repeat mode. He’s moved his Monopoly playing piece — with 60 Colborne, the king of King West has headed east. Mr. Freed was drawn to this neighbourhood for the same reasons he was initially attracted to King West. I love neighbourhoods that mix the new with the historic,” he says. It’s a design-driven approach that has proven inordinately successful. King West is a Freedian universe of design-centric condos and their young and stylish dwellers, while construction cranes plastered with his name decorate every block.

When I ask Mr. Freed how many condos he’s developed, he looks at me bashfully as though I’d asked the most vulgar of questions. “It’s not like I wake up and count my units,” he says. (Then, he reveals his number: 3,000 units.) I’ve met and interviewed Mr. Freed several times, and every time I am newly struck by his preternatural calm. For a 3,000-unit man, Mr. Freed has a remarkable talent for appearing eternally tranquil. In a culture that loves to confuse being busy with being successful, Mr. Freed (who is quite obviously both) has a refreshing knack for always appearing at leisure. As if he had nothing more pressing to do than chat idly over a root-veg salad.

Mr. Freed becomes animated when he starts discussing what enticed him eastward. “We wanted to expand into other great neighbourhoods and this opportunity came up to buy this site [a former parking lot] to build and complete the north side of Colborne street,” he says. “Designing and creating a property is creating the ultimate product. And it’s a real privilege to create a physical structure that could be here for the next 200 years.”