Older apartment buildings get periodic renovations. Maybe not so drastic as the rebuilds going on on Bell Street South.

New windows. New balcony railings. Some new pavers to the front door. Often these give a short term facelift, but quality is … well, cheap. They aren’t called replacement windows for nothing, because they’ll soon need replacing.

The building pictured above is in the back end of the Glebe, the “glebe annex”, I noticed this building with its new front door treatment, its new windows, its new green-glass balconies  complete with  cream-coloured modesty / privacy appliqués and contrasting green metal rails.

There’s other stuff too. Lights added to the lowest two floors by the balconies. Nice lights. And the 50’s cream stucco has been updated with a dark brown stone pattern. That stucco-stone is quite attractive (my view, of course, yours may differ). It has considerable detailing, including decorative metal grills, and with cove mouldings. Notice how the cove moulding at the top of the “stonework” is integrated into the balcony, which required a false bulkhead to be added to the balcony floor. The lintel over the windows is three-dimensional.

 

We can speculate on why this building got such a nice facelift. A kind landlord? A gentrifying market? A more competitive market? An exterior to match a remodelled interior?

Whatever the cause, it makes waking along Cambridge St South much nicer.

Here’s the building, courtesy of Google Streetview, as it was “before”, in 2007, and then in 2014 when the renovations were partly complete: