Cubes in Courtenay was finished and fully occupied December 1, 2020. Students, young professionals, families, and Healthcare workers moved into the newly completed suites. In the ground level commercial space Milano Coffee is opened, a Dental Clinic is under construction.
This project has two mixed use buildings consisting of 60 purpose built rental apartment units with ground level commercial located adjacent to the campus of the new Comox Valley Hospital and North Island College campus. The unit mix in the project consists of: 45 – 580/620SF 1bedroom units and 15 – 800 SF 2bedroom units. The residential construction was built off site with an innovative hybrid framing system utilizing mass timber floors and elevator shafts and manufactured framed wall assemblies that shortened the construction schedule by 3 months. Technical solutions were found that addressed all acoustic, fire rating and building envelope requirements of the building code for the use of the mass timber flooring system and elevator shafts without encapsulation allowing for the wood to be exposed as ceilings in the rental residential units and as walls by the elevator lobby on the residential floor. Being able to use raw mass timber floors and elevator shafts as the final finishes in the building proved highly economical in their own right. Eliminating insulation, paint, drywall and drywall as the finishes created a healthy environment both physically and psychologically which is not usually found in a basic rental apartment buildings. Since occupancy the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive both from an aesthetic point of view but also from a livability perspective. Many tenants commenting that “….it’s been the quietest building we have ever lived in.”
