From the Botanical Garden to Mount Royal, Montreal has no shortage of green space. But winter, easily Quebec’s longest season, has a way of draining all that colour out of the city for months at a stretch.
Unless, it turns out, you live at Tropiques Nord.
Tucked along Avenue Pierre-Dupuy in the Cité du Havre, right next to Habitat 67, this 11-storey condo building looks fairly unremarkable from the street. Step out onto one of its terraces, though, and the view completely changes.
Every single unit in the building overlooks a 32,000-square-foot indoor atrium, home to palm trees, tropical plants, a waterfall, and exotic birds, all kept at a controlled temperature and humidity all year long.
A jungle that skips winter entirely
Residents here get the same lush, tropical view in the middle of February as they would in July, no matter what’s happening on the other side of the glass.
The building is also equipped with an indoor pool designed to look like a lagoon, plus a separate outdoor pool, a spa, a sauna, two gyms, and tennis and squash courts.
How it came to be
The concept dates back to 1989, when Tropiques Nord was developed by Montreal’s Jean de Brabant. Before this project, de Brabant had converted the old Dupuis Frères department store into an office building, adding two landscaped atriums along the way. He noticed something interesting: tenants consistently preferred the offices that looked out onto those garden courtyards over ones that didn’t.
For the garden itself, de Brabant hired Herbert Ramsaier, the former chief landscape architect behind Walt Disney Imagineering, who gave the atrium its distinctly Hawaiian look. The idea was unusual enough to catch international attention. The New York Times wrote about it in 1992, and La Presse revisited the building decades later.
What it actually costs to live there today
Two of the 118 units currently listed on the market give a good sense of what buying into Tropiques Nord looks like right now. And as you may have already guessed, it’s not cheap.
One, a 2,393-square-foot unit on the second floor, is listed at $1,595,000 through Centris. It comes with two bedrooms, two full bathrooms plus a powder room, a private garage space, a fully renovated kitchen, and floor-to-ceiling windows, along with both an interior terrace facing the atrium and a separate rooftop terrace. Its 2025 municipal evaluation puts the property’s combined land and building value at just over $1,033,999.
A second unit, on the seventh floor, is listed at $1,149,000 and offers 1,919 square feet split into two wings, one built around daytime living space, the other for the bedrooms. It comes with a private wine cellar and a free downtown shuttle, plus access to both pools, the tennis and squash courts, and its own terrace overlooking the atrium’s waterfalls. The unit’s 2026 tax bill runs $6,126 in municipal taxes, plus $738 in school taxes.
Whether that premium seems worth it probably depends on how much a Montreal winter gets to you. But for the right buyer, waking up to palm trees instead of snowbanks might be worth every extra penny.
