About Freed Developments

The way we see it, our business isn’t about banging up another condo building. It’s about lifestyle. It’s about creating a way for people to enjoy living in a real community, near where they work and play, in a building that makes a design statement. It’s about living in a unique space designed to maximize natural light and urban views that also happens to face a city park.

Living in a building by Freed Developments might mean living in a reclaimed urban warehouse in the emerging downtown core, carefully restored and modernised to revitalise the cityscape. Or in a green, boxwood-wrapped eco-landmark, or a glass-walled, loft-inspired space with 10-foot ceilings above the new Thompson boutique hotel and lifestyle complex. Or a building with a playful, avant-garde lobby designed by the globally acclaimed Philippe Starck.

Living the Freed lifestyle means the hottest sushi restaurant or hippest hotel lobby bar in town is just downstairs from your Toronto condo. Or if you’re in Muskoka, one of the best golf courses in the world is right outside your front door. And that everything you want out of life--in town, or country-- is simply part of your day-to-day routine.

Our vision means living better, by design. We believe that good design isn’t just better-looking, it makes life better. Which is why Freed Developments doesn’t just build units, it builds architecture. Pure and simple, it’s building--elevated from the ordinary--to become an expression of the way we want to live now. What interests Peter Freed about development? The short answer is: everything.

Born and bred in Toronto--the city he is now re-imagining with his own brand of design-based development--Peter’s earliest childhood memories involve construction sites, which he would watch for hours, fascinated from the comfort of his push stroller. A self-made entrepreneur, one who is constantly inspired by what he calls an “obsession” with each and every detail of the design and building process, Peter started, literally, from the ground up: his first job out of school was cleaning up trash at a housing development in Whitby.

Fast-forward to 1995, when Peter founded his own construction company, Freed Development Corp., and started building custom homes. In 1997, with the help of an investor, Freed assembled a package of land in North York and began building town homes. In the process, Peter learned every aspect of development first-hand, an asset which he has only maximized with what one of his associates refers to as his “full-on entrepreneurial spirit.” A package, which in Peter’s case, involves restless curiosity, a penchant for innovation, and an insatiable interest in the next new thing.

Fascinated by architecture, contemporary art, fashion and music and inspired by his travels, Peter’s favourite pastime is to imagine the possibilities of a site and envision its potential.

In 2000, just as Toronto’s King Street West district began attracting creative agencies with its abandoned, brick-and-beam warehouses and the first signs of an entertainment district began to emerge, Peter immediately grasped its possibilities.

“Just like New York’s meatpacking district, it had all the elements that would attract the kind of people who are at one with everything the city has to offer,” says Peter. The ground was broken for 66 Portland, Peter’s first attempt at an “urban playground where people can live, work and play” in 2003. Since then, Peter has crafted a community of nine design-centric buildings, each with their own unique attitude, within nine city blocks of the district.

From a company of one, Peter now heads a vertically and horizontally integrated progressive lifestyle company with 650 employees over several divisions that is quickly approaching a billion dollars in development. He has won numerous design awards and received significant critical recognition. And Peter has emerged as Canada’s premier lifestyle developer—a pioneer who bridges the gap between design, architecture and the experience he wants his buyers to have in the environments he creates.

Explaining Freed Development’s success in the Toronto condo market, Peter says, “People are tired of the old commodity-type offering that’s prevailed for far too long.”

Whereas a traditional condo developer might consider his or her project a success, when, in Peter’s words, “the phone finally stopped ringing at the end of construction,” in the Freed vision, the relationship is turned on its head, so that his buyers become invested in a long-term relationship involving restaurants, retail and a concierge model, in which his buyers become the stakeholders.

Says Peter: “We want to overdeliver. We approach all our projects that way. At the end of the day, what is important is that we are creating something—one building at a time.”