Description of Historic Place

The Warwick Apartments, erected in 1908-09, occupies a corner site on the southern edge of Central Park in a busy mixed-use neighbourhood of downtown Winnipeg. The City of Winnipeg designation applies to the building on its footprint and interior courtyard.

Heritage Value

The elegant Warwick Apartments, with its innovative interior courtyard and vertical runs of bay windows, is one of a handful of surviving luxury blocks that represent the apex of early twentieth-century apartment block design in Winnipeg. Executed in a simplified classical style by architect William Wallace Blair, the large structure incorporates features that permit a great deal of natural light and air circulation, including the courtyard, numerous windows on all elevations and open balconies that face a public park and give a lightness to one of the building's primary facades. Amenities such as these were intended to attract prosperous tenants by combining the advantages of single-family dwellings with the convenience of apartment living. Rehabilitated as co-operative housing, the Warwick remains a vibrant, architecturally significant block, one that is an integral component of the Central Park area of downtown Winnipeg because of its physical prominence and its community role as affordable multiple-family housing.

Source: City of Winnipeg Council Meeting Minutes, August 22, 1983

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the site character of the prominent Warwick Apartments include:
- the building's placement, flush to the sidewalks at southwest Qu'Appelle Avenue and Carlton Street, with its front elevation and entrance facing north to Central Park

Key elements that define the building's elegant and functionally advanced design include:
- the substantial rectangular form organized around an interior courtyard, five storeys in height on a raised limestone basement, with brick and limestone walls and a flat roof
- the symmetrical composition of the main components and details
- the linearized grid pattern established by the rhythmic placement of openings, including mostly tall rectangular windows on all elevations, vertical runs of bay windows on the primary (north and east) sides and wide rectangular balcony openings at the front (north)
- the balconies outlined by squared brick columns with stone caps and brick balustrades
- the centred entrance bay, projected slightly outward, demarcated vertically by wide columns, and further highlighted by a columned portico, a second-floor balustrade and metal railings on the third to fifth floors
- the south wall's shallow squared and angled light wells
- classically inspired details such as the primary facades' high base of rusticated and ashlar limestone, large dentilled cornice and parapet; the north elevation's prominent band-courses; the arcaded bases below the main-floor balconies; the recessed, double-door front entrance topped by a large transom; the side entrances framed by stone architraves with stylized metal pseudo-balconies on the floors above; the stone sills; etc.
- the brick penthouse with a hip and gable roof, tall rectangular windows and a north-side eyebrow dormer

Key internal elements that define the apartment's heritage character and innovative plan include:
- the expansive layout, with suites organized around U-shaped halls and the rectangular courtyard, which is centred in the south half of the building beneath a large skylight and lined on three sides by balconies
- the front vestibule with richly finished marble stairs and wall wainscotting