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Publication:20 August 2026The former École du Sacré-Cœur (now the School House Lofts), built in 1912 sits in Ottawa’s Hintonburg neighbourhood; it stands as an example of one of the earliest purpose-built Catholic schools in west Ottawa. The building was repurposed several times. First as an English Catholic school in the 1970s, then as a support centre for young mothers in the late 1980s. By the early 2000s, however, the structure had become vacant. After its designation as a protected heritage property by the City of Ottawa in 2006, Uniform Urban Developments transformed the building into 18 loft-style condominiums in 2009.
| Location | Canada|Ontario|Ottawa |
| Typologies | Residential architecture|Collective housing and condominiums |
| Project type | Transformation |
| End Date | 1 January 2009 |
Réutilisation adaptive des School House Lofts_Carleton_#28As Canada continues to face different challenges within and around its built environment such as climate change, cultural heritage erosion, and socio-economic crises, highlighting the potential for adaptive reuse of our existing infrastructure and buildings to alleviate these issues becomes increasingly important. Carleton Architecture’s Adaptive Reuse Research Team, in collaboration with ARCH 5201 students, selected a group of case studies to better understand the challenges and solutions adaptive reuse can provide. This document outlines one of the selected case studies, the School House Lofts in Ottawa, ON. It provides a concise overview of the building’s context, distinctive features and existing conditions, as well as the process undertaken to facilitate its adaptive reuse.