Grand Harbour is located on the shore of Lake Ontario just west of Humber Bay Park and Mimico Creek.

Beginning in the 1960s, Highway 401 rose to become the primary east-west route and the motel strip lost business, eventually becoming best known for its somewhat seedy side.

In 1988, at the height of a property boom, the prime waterfront real estate was purchased by Rylar Development Ltd for $15.5 million.

Larry Boland and Richard Weldon, principals of Rylar, opted to build a set of luxury condominiums designed by Matsui Baer Vanstone.

Christopher Hume, architecture critic for the Toronto Star, described it as "a hybrid of classical, neo-gothic, and Georgian...mixed together and applied - incongruously but felicitously - to 20th-century-sized structures.