Westmount 107 : Sparrow Capital

A Culinary and Entrepreneurial Hub in Westmount

Westmount 107 is a retail and office building located in Westmount’s 124th Street commercial district. The project has become a neighbourhood hub accommodating a multi-faceted landscape of culinary and entrepreneurial leadership.

This project has been an ongoing collaboration with Rge Rd Restaurant, who has become a close ally in the Sparrow network and has deployed a multi-faceted 7,400 ft² culinary landscape on the main floor, with a farm-to-table dinner restaurant, a retail deli space and local butchery, and several gathering spaces and dining rooms.

The second floor of Westmount 107 is home to a vibrant community of entrepreneurs who have taken over the 5,600 ft2 cowork landscape on the second floor.

Westmount 107 is also the world’s first Open Equity partnership. Rge Rd Restaurant and Sparrow Cowork are its first and second Open Equity Tenant Stakeholders, respectively.

Purchase	2014
Build Year	1969
Buildings	1
Levels	2
Floor Area	14,702 ft²
Neighbourhood	Westmount

12227 107 Ave NW

Tenants

Reimagining the Building

Sparrow Capital purchased the Westmount 107 building in the spring of 2014. The property was home to Rge Rd Restaurant, which was already one of the best restaurants in the city, but the building was just ugly. The facade was clad in a faded beige tin material. A large patch of bricks that had fallen off the outer wall of the restaurant into the parking lot. There was a desperate need for some love and attention.

Sparrow set about reimagining the building with Ty Ziola and Tyler Dixon of New Studio, a local architecture firm that was later acquired by Dialog. The brief to the design team was to create an aesthetic that would establish a landmark in the neighbourhood and draw pedestrians from 124 St. onto 107 Ave. The mandate was to get people referring to the building as “You know, the building with the…” The concept went through several iterations before settling on a design featuring water-cut stainless steel panels perforated with a wave-like pattern on a backdrop of subtle coloured LED lighting. The renovations involved other major interventions, including replacing the original boiler and insulating the building envelope.

The building was in desperate need of love and attention. Blair and Caitlin were particularly eager collaborators. Their entrepreneurial leadership helped us to establish a robust asset that all stakeholders could be proud of.
Antoine Palmer, Sparrow Capital Co-Founder

With designs underway, Sparrow engaged the existing tenants to learn more about their experiences in the building and their intentions for the coming years. Sparrow also discussed how rents would need to move at the end of the current lease terms. The rents at the time of purchase were quite low and would ultimately need to increase in order to afford the planned renovations.

As it turned out, most of the tenants expressed a strong enthusiasm at the prospect of someone finally paying attention to their building. Rge Rd’s founders, Blair and Caitlin, were particularly eager collaborators. They were happy to renew their lease at market rates and began imagining the possibility of expanding their restaurant into the neighbouring commercial unit. This marked the beginning of a collaborative alliance with RGE RD that would continue to deepen and evolve into the next decade.