Heritage committee OK’s plan to wrap housing around historic Sandy Hill church

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The City of Ottawa’s built heritage committee has approved an application to build a nine-storey, 113-unit residential building that “wraps around” part of a historic church.

The former All Saints Anglican Church at 315 Chapel St. in Sandy Hill was transformed into a multi-use community space known as allsaints in 2016 after it was purchased in 2015 for $1.52 million by a group of investors.

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The next step is to add housing to the site. The residential portion, clad in brick and aluminum panel, will be built around the stone apse of the former church.

According to the submission from Linebox Studio, this will introduce a new layer of architectural detail: a glass wall allowing passersby to see the apse as they go past, “blurring the thresholds” between the interior and the exterior.

“I think this is really great example of what can be done with an old church,” said Lesley Collins, the city’s heritage planning program manager.

An apse is a semicircular protuberance, usually covered with a vault or half-dome, that is a design feature of many old churches. In the case of All Saints, the apse is polygonal.

Essentially, the new building will encapsulate the apse, Collins said.

“This is a former church now used as event space and restaurant space. Now we’re seeing housing being incorporated into the whole scheme while still preserving what is important about this church. I think this very creative way of incorporating the apse into the full development with a glazed glass section is really interesting,” she said.

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“It will still allow people to go down the street and be able to read the building and see the whole church. And it will allow people who are inside the building to appreciate the stonework and the monumental nature of the building.”

Heritage Ottawa, which advocates for conserving heritage buildings, also supported the application.

The proposal is an excellent example of finding a vibrant new use for a heritage  structure and shows an imaginative approach to linking the church and the new building, said David Flemming, chair of Heritage Ottawa’s advocacy committee.

“We wish that it was seven storeys instead of nine, but it was a good trade-off,” he said.

The church property is located on the south side of Laurier Avenue East between Chapel Street and Blackburn Avenue.

All Saints was designated under the Ontario Heritage act in 1998. It’s a Gothic Revival-style building built between 1899 and 1900. An addition known as Bate Memorial Hall was later built on the site. It will be torn down to make way for the housing.

Ottawa is facing the redevelopment or sale of a number of old churches. Some churches will also be getting heritage designation this year as the city is looking to designate about 25 priority buildings before the end of the year — about five times the number designated in a typical year.

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One of these is Église évangélique baptiste on King Edward Avenue, Ottawa’s first francophone Baptist church. It was approved for heritage designation in March despite the objection of church leaders, who want to sell the building and buy another larger church in the Carlingwood area to accommodate a growing congregation. They fear the heritage designation may make it difficult to sell.

That matter will be returning to the built heritage committee in November.

The congregation of another church objected to the heritage committee on Tuesday.

For any property owner, particularly in an expensive and developing neighbourhood such as Centretown or downtown, a change in the zoning or heritage status raises concerns about what will happen to the monetary value of the property, said George Sinclair, rector of the Anglican Church of the Messiah, which owns Bible House, a 1922 building at 315 Lisgar St.

The congregation learned only last October that Bible House would be designated, Sinclair said.

“This is unfortunate particularly for a charity organization whose primary monetary asset is the property in question.”

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More churches will be up for heritage designation fore the end of the year, but Collins could not give an exact number.

What to do with churches that are no longer in use has been an issue in heritage conservation for more than 15 years as congregations shrink, she said.

“As these buildings get older, they become more expensive to maintain and churches just don’t have the resources to do it,” Collins said. “Sometimes they are sold, sometimes they are sold to another denomination, and other times we have looked at adaptive reuse, like we did with All Saints.”

Quebec set up a fund for adaptive reuse of churches about 20 years ago, Flemming said. The Ontario Heritage Trust did a study on the matter more than a decade ago, but nothing came of it, he said.

“There’s no one fund that churches can go to to try to get some remediation. The only thing to do is take each piece on an individual basis,” Flemming said.

The All Saints application will be before the planning and housing committee on April 24. City staff have recommended that, before a building permit is issues, samples of final exterior materials be provided for approval and that materials from Bate Memorial Hall be salvaged for re-use in the development.

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