Three words describe the ultimate Canadian office building novelty: rooftop outdoor rink.
The owners of the three-year-old Fabrik8 office building at 7240 Waverly St. in Montreal have raised the bar in the ever-escalating quest to add leisure attractions that appeal to returning-to-work office tenants with a fully maintained and refrigerated outdoor ice rink on the roof.
The amenity allows office tenants to deke, pass, back check and make Savardian-spinorama moves while enjoying a view of the city seven floors above street level.
The feature and other exercise options in the building have helped the landlord to fully rent the office space and set their sights on adding a similar building in an adjacent space. Phase two is expected to open in 2025. Current building tenants include Spiria Montreal, Guru Energy, Studio Dontnod, HGC Technologies, Traxxall Technologies and others.
“Our aim is to get clients to want to come to the office. In this market, you need to offer more to get clients to want to come and this is having an impact,” said Vanessa Brochu, director of the Fabrik8 building. The rink, she added, is “always full.”
The building sits north of the downtown core near Jarry Park, in part of what has been branded the Mile-Ex neighborhood, an area that has proven popular with tech firms, including Montreal’s sizable video gaming industry.
The rink hosts regular skating sessions for office tenants and an internal hockey league featuring players from various companies in the building. It also provides an added stream of revenue, as outsiders can rent the rink for about $250 per hour when staffers aren’t laced up in the lofty, icy aerial landscape.
The rink gets transformed into a basketball court in the summer and is only part of the overall fitness experience offered at the building, including a fully equipped gym, boxing, spinning, bodybuilding, yoga and others.
Regular outdoor rinks rely on cold weather to make ice and remain open from late December to early March, minus thaws and snowstorms. But on the Fabrik8 rooftop rink, cries of “pass me the puck,” “hey no lifters!” “use the boards!” can be heard from the skies from mid-November to mid-April as artificial refrigeration allows the ice to remain in form when temperatures go above freezing.
To deal with snow, staffers are equipped with a snowblower and toss the snow onto an adjacent rooftop melting surface. They resurface the ice with a small-sized Zamboni ice machine after each session. The rink measures 52 feet by 80 feet, about one-quarter of the standard-sized NHL rink, as it is formatted for the smaller and increasingly popular three-on-three style play. The rink is surrounded by fencing to prevent pucks from flying onto the streets below.
Brochu said that she isn’t sure whether any other office buildings have an outdoor rooftop rink. “It’s pretty unique,” she said.
If the concept catches on, it would not be the first Montreal commercial property to start a hockey rink trend, as the standard NHL rink size was long ago established by emulating the old Victoria Rink in downtown Montreal, which was dictated by the size of the land the rink was built on between Drummond and Stanley streets.