Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 205

Home, as I've always said, is not an actual building typology. A home can be anything. For some people, a comfortable home might be a suburban single-family house in a bucolic community. And for others, a home might be two converted office spaces in Le Marais that also double as a highly coveted event space for art and design. That's the thing about homes, they're very personal.

This latter scenario describes the home of Jérémy Rocher and Kym Ellery -- a space that seems to be making the rounds in Paris and getting people in the art and design community excited. It was featured in HTSI magazine over the weekend and looks like the below. (In case you were wondering, the answer is yes, that is a piece by James Turrell.)

The design brief given to architect Simon Pesin was to create "a home and a meeting place for art." This is a fascinating use case to me. Because it's cool and interesting and, in my view, a positive thing for the city. Brands like Danish furniture company Frama are some of the groups that have programmed it, which suggests there's maybe a need for more unique spaces like this.

But at the same time, as a real estate developer, it's mostly impossible to underwrite spaces like this. If you were developing this building and thinking about the various buyers/tenants who may want to one day occupy it, this segment would never be on your list. In fact, it is yet another example of Jane Jacobs' famous mantra that "new ideas require old buildings." This is an old building. Here's an excerpt from HTSI:

Rocher bought the property six years ago, though he and Ellery only moved in last year. “It’s funny, the property was on the market for six months because people didn’t see the potential behind it,” he says of what was formerly two office spaces fitted with partition walls, false ceilings and carpeting. “Even the windows and skylights were hidden,” he adds, pointing skyward.

Thankfully, all you need is one person to see the potential. That is one of the magical things about cities.

Photos: Depasquale + Maffini

Monaco is the second smallest sovereign state in the world by land area, after Vatican City. It is around 2 square kilometers. Wikipedia has it as 2.08 km2 and the Financial Times article I have on my desk right now has it as 1.98 km2. Whatever the number, the place is small. And when you combine this small land area (a supply-constrained market) with nice Mediterranean weather, no income taxes (except for French nationals), and generally low taxes all around, you tend to get expensive real estate.

According to FT, prices today can reach as high as €120,000 per m2, which makes cities like Hong Kong seem almost affordable. To put this into perspective, it would mean that, on the absolute highest end, a 600 square foot one-bedroom apartment (which may be too small for this market's taste) could cost around €6,688,800, or over C$9.7 million.

These kind of numbers will do wonders for a development pro forma. Take, for instance, Monaco's new Mareterra development . This is a 6-hectare land-reclamation project that extends into the sea and increases Monaco's total land area by something like 3%. When it opens next month, it will house new public spaces, a 500m waterfront promenade, a long list of impressive sustainability initiatives, 110 apartments, 4 townhouses, and 10 "mystery-shrouded villas" (FT's words).

I don't know off hand the cost of reclaiming land, but surely it isn't cheap. So it's remarkable to me that so few homes were able to carry the feasibility of such an ambitious project. On top of this, they've retained some of the most noteworthy architects in the world: Renzo Piano, Tadao Ando, and Norman Foster.

Renzo's project, called Le Renzo and pictured above, sits at the southern end of the development and houses 47 apartments. None are reportedly smaller than 400 square meters. And that's because the developers wanted to make sure that the housing would be suitable and big enough for families. Clearly it would be a lot of fun to scrutinize their development pro forma. Because many things are possible when you're underwriting what is probably the most expensive residential real estate in the world.

Images: Mareterra

This weekend marks the opening of many of the resorts in Utah, and so I've got snowboarding on the mind right now. The social media algorithms have officially switched me over from cycling videos to ski and snowboard videos. I'm ready to go. The snowboard I have been using for the last few years is from a German company called KORUA . Their story is that the company grew out of a trip to Japan. A group of friends, who were all snowboard nerds in their 30's, fell in love with the snowboarding culture over there, specifically the focus on "deep powder boards", and so they decided to return to the Alps and create their own brand.

The result:

To date, this has been my favorite board. The shape of it fits my riding style and I love the absolute simplicity of it. None of their boards have any designs or graphics -- they're just different shapes (optimized for different kinds of riding) with an all white top and an all red bottom. I joke that it's the Christian Louboutin of snowboards. But it's not really. The KORUA brand is all about performance, the aesthetic beauty of being in the mountains, and the simple pleasure of turning a board on snow. If you've ever watched any of their videos or if you follow them on the socials, you'll know that they have a very unique aesthetic. Black and white. Super simple.

To this end, they've just released a new photo book called Ten Years of Turning . The book tells KORUA's brand story through the lens of Aaron Schwartz , who is their in-house photographer. He's been with them since the founding of the company in 2014. And even though I've only seen a few of the pages online, I follow Aaron and I already know that this is a book we're going to need to have hanging around at Parkview Mountain House . If you're into snow and beautiful things, you may want to check it out as well.