Toronto's famous cube house destined to be put on ice

Jeff Brown wakes up early summer mornings, grabs his paddle board and heads off into the waves in front of his waterfront home in Collingwood, Ont. It is a cherished ritual, and among the perks of being semi-retired at age 64 and residing in a community of like-minded go-getters whose working days tend to be mostly behind them, so they don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about what they once did to earn a living.

The accountant-turned-entrepreneur is no exception. But catch Brown in a reflective mood and he might just dig out a cardboard box full of keepsakes from a “previous life,” showcasing his greatest commercial failure as a businessperson.

“The cubes were a unique play,” he said. The cubes, depending upon one’s perspective, are a Toronto housing icon, or, if you please, ugly, elevated, box-shaped hunks of junk. What is beyond aesthetic debate is the famous structure at 1 Sumach St. is in mortal peril of being demolished to make way for a 30-plus storey, mixed-use condominium.

Brown and Ben Kutner, a senior marketing executive-turned-cube-visionary who the accountant met while both worked at Cineplex Inc., built the cubes in 1996 on a shoestring budget. They were underwritten by a conviction that the Dutch-inspired live-work concept, set on a peculiarly shaped patch of land in an unloved corner of the city, would spark a housing revolution and, in a perfect world, make the partners, and their firm Unitri Technologies Inc., a pile of money.

Instead, the cubes flopped following an initial rush of media attention, and are now regarded as a must-see oddity among architecture nerds, a landmark to passing motorists, a home to their sole, decades-long tenant, a heritage-listed address by the city and, fatefully, an