There’s an old expression that says the shoemaker's children always go barefoot, which comes from a tale about a shoemaker who’s so busy making shoes for his customers, that he has no time to make shoes for his own family. Well we don’t spend our days making shoes, but we do spend them building vibrant, award-winning, complete communities, places that encourage growth and help people thrive. Now, we’ve done it for ourselves - the shoemaker’s children are getting a brand-new pair of shoes, more specifically, we’re saying goodbye to our current home at Yonge and Eglinton, and moving into a spectacular new Collecdev head office at 365 Bloor Street East!

Our Pillars Come to Life

Social sustainability. Experiential design. Environmental stewardship. Day in and day out we live and breathe these three pillars, using them as our guideposts for every community we build. Recently, we put this ethos to work a little closer to home, using these values to build our new headquarters on Bloor.

Working with Figure3, one of Canada’s leading interior design studios, we’ve created a 14,000 square foot home base full of welcoming, neuro diverse spaces; industrial-inspired décor; and places to meet, collaborate and innovate, all wired to power tomorrow’s workplace, today.

Social Sustainability

Thriving communities require spaces that stimulate conversation and provoke new ideas for healthy, balanced environments. The same is true for a thriving workplace. That’s why our new office features a variety of spaces designed to encourage interaction, including a spacious reception area and a fully-equipped lunchroom where people can gather in one of the intimate booths, or take a seat at the community table for an unexpected exchange.

More formal discussions, presentations or brainstorming sessions can take place in one of the three large boardrooms, the Collaboration Rooms, the Innovation Room where ideas step out of the box, or in the dedicated Construction Meeting Room where our in-house construction team works to ensure that every Collecdev community is built with quality workmanship that results in residences of exceptional value that will last for generations.

Experiential Design

Multi-layered and human-centric, our new office space balances form and function to deliver features that help our team perform their best, no matter where they are or how they prefer to work. There are Zoom Rooms and individual Touchdown Pods that enable virtual collaboration and provide both flexible and permanent desk space, reflecting today’s new professional landscape. There’s a Wellness Room, where team members can reflect and recharge. And a Décor Zone where we mix and match the pieces that make up the ultimate living experience. The result is a sliding scale of spaces that provide choices for where team members want to work, maximizing creativity and wellbeing in the process.

Environmental Stewardship

Of course, when building our new home, we knew it had to incorporate some of the same advanced building technologies and alternative energy sources we use in our communities. Figure3 worked diligently to ensure that our new offices enjoy abundant natural light, encouraging the same sense of wellbeing found in our residences, and reducing the need for artificial lighting (where lights are necessary, LED lighting reduces our electricity use by about 50% compared to traditional options). Heeding the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), we’ve opted to bring nearly all our existing office furniture to the new space, and additional features are locally-sourced and Canadian-made for a smaller carbon footprint. Finally, recognizing the detrimental long-term effects of plastic consumption, we’ve installed filtered cold-water faucets and provided every staff member with a Collecdev for Miir water bottle, a premium stainless-steel bottle that aims to minimize environmental impact and maximize product lifespan - a philosophy that aligns perfectly with our own.

A New Home

From the beginning, Collecdev has always stood for collaboration, innovation and progress, and over the last 18 months we’ve witnessed as those tenets have become more important than ever. The working landscape has changed drastically, but thanks to our commitment to future-proofed communities – for work, life, play and every moment in between – we’re ready for it.

We’re making the move this fall. Drop by any time, we’d love to show you around.