apartment building

By Trevor Greenway

After years of sitting empty and slowly deteriorating in the heart of Wakefield village, the former Alpengruss Restaurant is finally coming down – and a new apartment building with ground-floor commercial space will take its place. 

It’s been nearly a decade since the locally-famous German breakfast spot closed in 2016, and co-owner Chris Harris said he’s excited to finally turn that page over. 

“We’d like to do one building…with possibly commercial space on the bottom floor and 10 or 12 units upstairs – three stories high,” Harris recently told the Low Down, adding that the building would feature one and two-bedroom rental apartments. “So a pretty, fairly substantial building, and we’re thinking of doing a timber-frame kind of style – a rustic-style building, sort of like our building that we did in Ottawa.”

Harris, a longtime resident of La Pêche and former municipal councillor for the Edelweiss ward, built the iconic timber-frame Trailhead building in Westboro, Ottawa (which has since been torn down), which he and his son, Jason, plan to model the new Wakefield design after. 

According to Harris, the zoning of the current lot where the former building sits needed to be changed to allow two separate uses: commercial and residential. 

That zoning change was completed earlier this year, according to La Pêche Mayor Guillaume Lamoureux, as the municipality passed its new urban plan. However, Lamoureux told the Low Down that the Harris family will now have to decide whether or not to subdivide the property in order to have one building per lot, or if they will instead go for an “integrated mixed-use project.” If it’s the latter, Lamoureux said the development would be subject to the municipality’s conditional uses by-law. 

“This area is located in a zone in which certain commercial uses and residential uses are permitted up to a maximum of 12 dwellings,” explained Lamoureux. 

Despite having experience as a La Pêche municipal councillor, Harris told the Low Down that he forgets just how delayed things can get when dealing with zoning changes and other minor variance items when planning a development. 

Harris said he knows just how anxious the public has been over the derelict building facing Riverside Drive in the village, and said his family has been doing everything they can to get the ball rolling. 

“We’ve been working on this for a while. It’s a long process,” he said. “Right now, the biggest project you can have there is a four-unit house. That was another obstacle, which we finally figured out, but that delayed tearing down the old restaurant. If you tear it down, you lose your rights to rebuild if you don’t do it right away.”

What’s more, the development also tackles one of the Hills’ biggest barriers for young families, professionals and couples when moving to the village: a lack of rental properties. 

According to the region’s housing roundtable, La Table de développement social des Collines-de-l’Outaouais (TDSCO), there is a major divide between homeowners and those who rent in the region. According to the TDSCO’s 2021 report, 31.6 per cent of renters in the MRC des Collines spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, while just 13 per cent of those who own their homes spend as much on housing. The 30 per cent income-to-housing ratio is the threshold used by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to consider a home as “affordable.” 

Of the 835 residents surveyed by TDSCO’s, a majority identified a lack of housing diversity, a lack of affordable housing and housing conditions as the top three issues facing the region. 

Bed & Breakfast Phase 2

Harris told the Low Down that his family purchased the entirety of the property – the multiple buildings that formed the old Alpengruss hotel, the open field that faces Riverside Drive and the parking lot that spans the entire front of the property. The plan, according to Harris, is to operate the hotel as a new bed and breakfast. 

“For now, we are leaving the parking lot open to the public,” said Harris. “No immediate plans to change anything there, but it does open up possibilities for future projects.”