TORONTO – Four Seasons, the worldwide hotel chain that started in 1960 with a motor inn on Jarvis Street, opens its doors Friday afternoon to its new flagship property, the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto.
It adds 259 rooms and suites to a city that has experienced a high-end hotel boom in the last two years. The Trump International Hotel and Tower opened earlier this year at the corner of Adelaide Street West and Bay Street, followed by the Shangri-La Hotel at University Avenue and Adelaide Street West. Last year, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel opened on Wellington Street west of Simcoe Street.
Other recent entrants on Toronto’s hotel scene include a second Le Germain (at Maple Leaf Square) and the Thompson Hotel on Wellington Street West at Bathurst Street.
“It’s a very special moment,” General Manager Dimitrios Zarikos said on Global Toronto’s The Morning Show on Friday. “This is very much the new generation of Four Seasons hotels.”
The new Four Seasons replaces one that stood at Avenue Road and Yorkville Avenue in a building that was originally a Hyatt Regency and is currently being converted into condos. The hotel is owned by Prince Al Waleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Company and was designed by architectsAlliance with interior design by Yabu Pushelberg.
Get daily National news
The Four Seasons features more than 1,700 works commissioned by the hotel from Canadian artists. Rooms are equipped with iPads, which guests can use to order room service or to book treatments in the hotel’s luxury spa — the first Four Seasons spa in Canada and the biggest in the chain. The hotel is home to Cafe Boulud and dbar from Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud as well as two ballrooms that are already
booked well into next year (including the hotel’s first wedding on Saturday).
Rooms on the Oct. 12 to 14 weekend at the Four Seasons are going for between $435 and $665 a night.
Despite being home to the country’s largest hotel (the Delta Chelsea on Gerrard Street), Toronto suffered a dearth of luxury hotels until the Hazelton opened on Yorkville Avenue in 2007. Even now, the city has fewer than 1,000 luxury rooms and suites available to high-end travelers, celebrities and other VIPs.
Toronto’s downtown hotel scene is dominated by the Mormon-owned Marriott company, whose branded properties include the Ritz-Carlton, Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre on Bay Street, Marriott Bloor-Yorkville on Bloor Street, the Courtyard by Marriott on Yonge Street, Residence Inn on Wellington Street West and the Renaissance at the Rogers Centre.
According to Tourism Toronto figures, 1,118 new rooms were added to the city’s inventory in 2011, placing Toronto third in growth in North America behind New York City and Nashville. There are currently more than 37,000 rooms available in the Greater Toronto Area.
Tourism Toronto reports there were 10 million overnight visitors to the city last year.
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.