2025 marks an important milestone for fabric — 10 years of shaping places, building communities, and doing the work we love. To celebrate, we’re pulling back the curtain on fabric — the people, ideas, and purpose that drives our work.

In this special interview series, you’ll meet the people behind the brand: the pieces of the puzzle who help bring our projects to life. From day-to-day roles to big-picture vision, these conversations offer a glimpse into what makes fabric, well, fabric.

We’re excited to look back on where we’ve been, reflect on what we’ve learned over the past 10 years, and share the stories of the team that continues to shape where we’re going next.

To kick off this exciting interview series, we sat down with the man who started it all, Jordan MacDonald.

First off, can you start by sharing who you are and your role at fabric?

I’m Jordan MacDonald and I’m the Founder and CEO of fabric. What does my role entail? It started out with absolutely everything and over time I’ve been bringing on new team members, taking certain hats off and giving those hats to other people. I do feel like my fingers are still in a lot of the pies but most of my time now is focused on capital raising and on the strategy of the business and the overall vision for fabric moving forward as we dial in our niche.

You’ve been building fabric for 10 years now. From a small one-person development company to a growing, reputable brand that is known for doing cool urban projects, can you share a little bit about how you got here. Were you always interested in real estate?

It’s funny, I get asked that question from time to time and it always makes me think… did I play Lego as a kid, did I build forts..? Where did it really start? I thought that it happened by chance but as time goes on, I find that there’s a greater meaning to things when I look in the rearview mirror. A lot of it came from my mom, she was from a family of artists and creatives and she’s always been really into design. She was always redesigning the interior of our house; we would come home from school and the rec room would be painted or the furniture would be in different places, etc… She was always really into that, and it got me noticing design and how it could influence your experience of life from a young age.  

I also feel that being a skateboarder when I was younger has influenced me in a lot of ways. Driving along in a car as a kid, when somebody else might have been looking at people or cars, I was always paying attention to the landscape architecture.  Skateboarding also really connects you with culture whether it’s fashion, street art, music, food, architecture etc.  When you skate street you get to experience every nook and cranny of cities in a very intimate way.

How I actually got into the business of real estate was by happenstance, but I feel there were greater forces at play that gravitated the business to me.

What’s something that you are most proud of when it comes to what you are building at fabric?

I think at the end of it, anything that’s worth its salt is all about the people. You look at people that live the longest in life and it’s often the people that have the best community around them. And I think the thing that I’m most proud of is the team that we have here at fabric. I love coming into the office and am super proud of the team and culture that we’re building here.

I also love the NOTBORING purpose that we have at fabric and being able to wake up every morning passionate about the projects that we’re developing. There are opportunities every day to really create something exciting that will make people’s lives incredible. We’re not just manufacturing cat food where we only care about money. We care deeply about our projects and community and it’s that obsession that really drives us. Money is the outcome of our hard work, pragmatic thinking and rigorous pursuit of creating homes that give people the freedom to live life on their own terms.

Earlier this year fabric announced our new guiding principle, which is NOTBORING. Can you tell me a bit about the genesis of NOTBORING. How did that come to be and what does it mean to you?

We’ve been doing some deep soul searching at fabric. It’s super interesting how you can start a business and be really focused on something for some reason or purpose but don’t fully understand or know how to articulate why you are absolutely obsessed with doing something. I think people go through the same experience in their personal lives, where they’re living their lives and yet they don’t really know themselves on a deeper level and what that deep rooted purpose is that is woven into their DNA that makes them, them. People are just sort of reacting and going about their day to day, doing what they’re doing when deep down there is a deeper reason for their actions that they might not have fully discovered.  The soul searching is so important to dig deep and discover your purpose (your Why), because when you find it, it’s a superpower. It becomes your anchor and your mission in life becomes exponentially more clear with all decisions filtered through your Why..

At fabric we had a purpose statement before that just didn’t really make a ton of sense for us, it was a bit of nothing burger that didn’t clearly articulate what we were doing or why.  It said we were doing things with intent, but what were we doing with intent? It wasn’t clear.

So when we sat down as a team and read the book “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek, we started to peel away that last layer to really get to what it is that fabric is all about.  The debate kept circling around the idea that, you’ve got one f^cking shot at life and it should be incredibly exciting, an epic adventure. Life should not be boring. Somebody shouted out NOTBORING and it just sunk the nail so deep that everybody at the table basically stood up and was like that’s it. There was no debate. That was just it and we all knew it.

And so, NOTBORING is a guiding principle for us to stay true to ourselves and make sure that we’re delivering projects that we’re super passionate about, that are intentional about making people’s lives exciting and meaningful, allowing people to live a life that is filled with freedom to live life unconditionally on their own terms, whatever that means for them.

With a number of larger projects in the pipeline, what’s one design feature that you are really excited about in these upcoming projects?

We’ve been going through an evolution and optimization of our product niche, figuring out what we want to do more of, what we want to do less of and what we want to do that is new altogether.

I’m really excited about a component of our E16 project in Mount Pleasant that we’ve been calling ‘the bodega’ or ‘the barnacle’. Even though this space is only about 1600 square feet (1% of the area of the entire project), it’s at the human scale of our 21-story rental building and will define the identity of the entire 130,000 square foot project. I’m super excited about this space because it’s going to be a place where real community is built and fostered for generations. We’re going to be integrating public art in some form and it’s going to really feel like something special.

Outside of real estate, what is something that you are passionate about?

I’m of course passionate about my family. I’m married to my incredible wife, Dionne, and I’ve got two boys, Tyson and Lennox – I just love watching them grow up. It’s such an amazing thing to have family and I am doing my best to be a great role model for my kids.

Outside of my family, I’m also super passionate about the adventure of travel and experiencing new cultures. I love new experiences and finding these cool moments of discovery in different places around the world.  I love traveling to new cities, talking with people and learning about different cultures and trying to find ways to integrate real forward-thinking culture into our projects.

You appreciate art and we recently had some new pieces courtesy of Brandan Price’s collection installed in our office. Which is your favorite piece and why?

I love all the art in our office. I love the pops of color against the otherwise calm palette that we have in our space.

When it comes to design, I am more drawn to dark and moody but I also really like the juxtaposition of things.

The inspiration for our office lobby came from an AD magazine where I saw this amazing moody blue paint on a wall with a captivating painting of a woman that had a blue face against the colour drenched moody blue background. I really wanted to replicate that and the fact that we were able to achieve something very similar to the original inspiration image with the two Stephen Price pieces juxtaposed against that light bench with pink powder coating, which was one of a kind hand made piece by my brother-in-law, is really special. It’s my favourite space in the office.