Habour Village at the Narrows
Harbour Village At The Narrows is a Traditional Neighbourhood Development on the east shore of Lake Couchiching in Ramara Township, Ontario. It consists of a compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-based resort development, built on an armature of varied pedestrian and auto thoroughfares that lead to a range of public amenities and spaces that front onto the lake, harbor, canals, basins, and parkland.
The value created in Harbour Village At The Narrows is based on place-making characterized by its proximity to the water, and not just about the value in the adjacency to water. The Global Project uses alternative architecture and development methods to create a holistic development rooted in economically sound, environmentally proactive, and culturally diverse principles to add value to new urban developments.
Harbour Village at The Narrows has been designed according to Traditional Neighbourhood Development (TND) principles.
A TND project includes a range of housing types, a network of well-connected streets and blocks, and humane public spaces, and provides cultural, social, and recreational amenities such as stores, schools, and places of worship within walking distance of residences.
A TND’s main innovation is to use higher density, generally considered an “inferior” attribute economically, to create a “superior” asset: attractive, walkable mixed-use neighborhoods.
It has become a design movement, that has been extremely successful in its first 35 years, especially in providing an alternative to suburban sprawl.
It has led to the building of numerous projects, large and small, which have firmly established pedestrian-friendly, compact, mixed-use development as the “new” paradigm for habitation patterns in North America.
Suburban residential developments, big box malls, and strip shopping centers are a dying breed.
This in itself is one of the biggest transformations ongoing in North American society, influenced by a philosophy about the way we design and build our communities.
Harbour Village At The Narrows shall address both a proven existing market, as well as an immense unaddressed latent market that exists for this product type by capitalizing on visitors, vacationers, and purchasers from the greater Toronto area and Golden Horseshoe, the strongest Canadian markets in today’s economy, who are seeking community-based destinations and places to live, with a strong and authentic connection to waterfront living.
Four thousand five hundred feet of frontage on Lake Couchiching, the surrounding woods and parkland, and paths connecting to Orillia and other local destinations provide multiple recreational opportunities. The City of Orillia and Casino Rama provide local existing cultural and social amenities.