Mike Gjura and Michelle Yee and their Pomsky, Cato, at their townhome by Alliston in Wolf Willow. PHOTO BY DON MOLYNEAUX /Postmedia
Cindy Stephen • for the Calgary Herald
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“They bent over backwards to make this happen for us,” Gjura says.
“Madison Avenue is a high end street in New York City. That’s not who we are. We build homes for families. It didn’t set the tone of what or who we are. We want to move away from a transactional to a more community-based approach,” he says.
With such impressive credentials, Bourassa is interested in much more than a mere name change. He has so far rewritten the company’s value proposition to align its core values with his own and those of his employees.
That work carved a new path for a new company with a vision to integrate health and wellness into the built environment. That translates to things like better air quality in the home, low VOC paint and materials to make homes safer to live in. Bourassa says it was imperative that everyone at Alliston be aligned with what the final product should look like and how it should be lived in.
Building Madison Avenue’s short three-year legacy of single and multi-family construction, Alliston is refining and in some instances, redrawing plans in six Calgary and area communities. That includes single family and townhomes in Belvedere Rise in the southeast community of Belvedere by Tristar Communities and Hudson West townhomes in Greenwich by Melcor in the northwest; single family laned homes in Cornerbrook in the northeast and townhomes in Wolf Willow, both WestCreek communities, plus single family luxury homes in Cimarron by Tristar in Okotoks.
Construction has begun on new duplex models and town homes in South Shore, a new community in Chestermere managed by General Development Services.
With a diverse portfolio of housing types already established by a builder that was by no means floundering, Bourassa sees plenty of opportunity for even more growth under the Alliston banner.
“Part of the reason why the board chose me was because my background wasn’t particularly single family homes. It was multi-family, office, industrial, commercial — they saw a lot of cross fertilizing between different industries. We’d like to, over time, grow into different product types. For the time being, our focus is single family, multi-family townhouse and duplex homes,” he says.