The Monashee | Architectural Photography Case Study — Victoria, BC

A 42-Unit Purpose-Built Rental with Sculptural Curved Balconies | Fairfield, Victoria

Developer: Empresa Properties (commissioning client)
Architect: Cascadia Architects
Builder: Story Construction
Location: 1120 Burdett Avenue, Fairfield, Victoria, BC
Recognition: Award of Excellence, Outstanding Purpose Built Rental, 2025 Vancouver Island Building Industry Awards (VICA / UDI-CR / CHBA-VI) | 2024 Capital Region Commercial Building Awards, Purpose-Built Rental

The Project

Nestled between Victoria’s Upper Fort Street and Cook Street Village, The Monashee is a five-storey, 42-unit purpose-built rental that reimagines the mid-century courtyard apartment for a contemporary streetscape. Designed by Cascadia Architects for developer Empresa Properties, the building’s defining gesture is a series of undulating curved balconies that ripple across the facade, expressed differently on each elevation to respond to the neighbouring context. The massing steps back at the upper levels, creating a respectful transition to the single-family homes nearby while allowing light and air to reach every unit.

The material palette – brick at grade, wood-tone fibre cement panels in a vertical batten rhythm, and smooth white balcony soffits – balances durability with warmth. At street level, ground-floor units and generous landscaped planters activate the sidewalk, fostering street-level engagement.

The building’s U-shaped plan opens to a south-facing courtyard with built-in seating, a chess table, and planted beds – further connecting the building to the community.

The Facade

The undulating balconies are what make this building unmistakable from any angle – sculpted forms that shift in character, depending on the time of day and the angle of the light.

From above, the drone reveals what the street cannot: the full courtyard plan, highlighting the way the balcony curves trace the building’s perimeter, and how the landscaping and hardscape come together at ground level.

At dusk, the building takes on a different character as interior lights fill the units, the white balcony soffits catch the last ambient light, and the vertical batten cladding darkens to silhouette.

The Photography

This project was photographed across multiple sessions over the course of a month.

A preliminary site visit with the developer allowed for a complete scout, including a detailed sun-tracking across the building’s U-shaped plan, indicating that the curved balconies caught direct light at different hours. As such, some compositions were only available in narrow windows. The initial shoot day opened with hazy skies that hindered the close-up vignette work, so the broader exterior coverage and twilight session were prioritized first, with a return visit scheduled for the detail shots under clearer conditions.

That return visit was delayed by a month, as the building’s custom-designed heavy wooden entry doors had not yet been installed on the initial shoot day. Rather than deliver a set with a visibly incomplete entrance, the decision was made to wait and then to photograph the doors from multiple angles on the return visit. Those separate images were inserted into various frames, using perspective-correcting editing techniquesin post-production, to integrate them seamlessly into the facade compositions captured weeks earlier.

The entry doors were not the only post-production challenge. A utility pole with power lines cut directly across the primary one-point perspective of the front facade – the photograph intended as the hero image of the set. Removing it required painstaking reconstruction of the building’s complex curved geometry in the areas the pole and wires had concealed. On the building’s southeast corner, a large pad-mounted transformer box presented a similar problem, in that it had to be photographed from behind during the shoot to capture the angles needed for digitally removing it and rebuilding the facade detail it was blocking.

The Outcome

The images from this project have been adopted by both the developer and the architecture firm. Empresa Properties features the photography prominently on its website and in marketing for The Monashee.

Cascadia Architects licensed the full set of 13 images and subsequently used them as the basis for their own published case study of the project, toward communicating design intent.

The project received the Award of Excellence for Outstanding Purpose Built Rental at the 2025 Vancouver Island Building Industry Awards, presented jointly by VICA, UDI-CR, and CHBA-VI, as well as a 2024 Capital Region Commercial Building Award for Purpose-Built Rental.

TC Photography is an architectural and interior photographer serving architects, custom home builders, and interior designers across Victoria, Vancouver Island, and the Vancouver and Lower Mainland markets. To discuss photographing your next project, get in touch.

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