Construction Hoarding Wrap for the Taggart Group, Preston Street, Little Italy, Ottawa

A construction hoarding is one of the highest-visibility surfaces a developer controls, and for most of the build cycle it sits at eye level on a public street doing nothing. This project treated it as what it actually is: a 200-foot billboard.

The Taggart Group of Companies is one of Ottawa's most active development families, with Doran Contractors handling general contracting, Taggart Realty Management overseeing leasing and property management, and Taggart Construction Limited handling civil and site work. All three brands needed presence on the Preston Street hoarding wrapping their mid-rise residential build in Little Italy.

The Brief

Three brands. One fence. One clear message to the neighbourhood: apartment rentals are coming, and someone credible is building them.

The headline doing the heaviest lifting was APARTMENT RENTALS COMING SOON - set in clean white sans-serif caps that read from across a four-lane street. That single line converts the hoarding from a construction announcement into a pre-leasing surface. Every car, cyclist, and pedestrian on Preston Street for the full duration of the build would see it.

Two practical constraints shaped the design:

Scale. The hoarding wraps the full Preston Street frontage and turns the corner. A single brand mark at the midpoint reads as decoration. The solution was a repeating layout pattern so the complete message - Doran identification, headline, and Taggart Realty contact information - appears at multiple points along the run. Nobody walks past without catching it all.

Removability. The hoarding comes down at substantial completion. That changes the economics and the spec: the wrap has to look like a permanent installation, cost like a temporary one, and leave the underlying construction fence undamaged.

What We Built

The system is three layers:

Matte-Black Backing

Matte-black aluminum composite panel (ACP) was mounted directly to each section of plywood hoarding. The black creates a consistent background across the full run, regardless of the condition of the underlying plywood, and gives every brand mark and every line of type maximum contrast and legibility. At the end of the build, the panels come off cleanly - vinyl applied directly to raw weathered plywood does not.

Large-Format Vinyl Panels

White vinyl panels carry the wordmarks, the APARTMENT RENTALS COMING SOON headline, and the taggart@taggart.ca leasing email. Each panel spans the full vertical height of the hoarding so the type reads at car-window height and pedestrian eye-level simultaneously.

Repeating Layout Pattern

The sequence along the Preston frontage: the Doran "D" corporate mark at the leading edge, then the headline block, then the Taggart Realty Management lock-up with the leasing email address. The pattern repeats at intervals so the full message is visible to passersby in both directions.

At the corner where the hoarding turns the property, the Taggart Construction Limited panel takes over - identifying the civil contractor on the face that's most visible to site traffic.

Embedded throughout: DANGER / Construction Zone / Do Not Enter notices at code-required intervals, sized to be clearly legible without dominating the brand work above them. The compliance signage and the marketing signage share the same surface without competing.

The Installation Sequence

The hoarding in its pre-wrap state: raw plywood, no branding, and doing nothing for the project or the neighbourhood.

Step 1 - ACP backing first. Each plywood section was sheeted with matte-black aluminum composite panel, fastened with a consistent pattern. The photo below shows the scale of the job as the black panels go on - half the wall is already covered, half is still raw plywood, and the height relative to a passing car gives a clear sense of what 200 feet of hoarding actually looks like from the street.

Step 2 - Layout and dry-fit. Each vinyl panel was positioned with painter's tape and levelled with a four-foot level before any permanent adhesive. The DORAN panel taped into position is exactly that step.

Skip the dry-fit on a 200-foot run and the headline ends up an inch off centre at the far end. Everyone who walks past notices.

Step 3 - Application. Vinyl was wet-applied panel by panel, squeegeed flat, application tape pulled. Two-person crew, two ladders, one work truck.

Step 4 - Walk-the-line check. Final QA was a full walk along both sides of the street in daylight, looking for bubbles, edge lift, and alignment drift between panels.

The whole job ran over the better part of a week. Vinyl application on an Ottawa spring means planning around cold mornings and rain - conditions that will both show up inside of three days.

Why the Hoarding Matters for Developers

A construction hoarding on a mid-rise build sits in front of the public for one to three years. That's longer than most billboard placements run. Treated as a marketing surface, it's one of the lowest-cost lead-generation tools a developer has.

Every email sent to taggart@taggart.ca from someone who saw the fence is a lead that didn't require a Google or Meta spend. The vinyl cost was already a sunk cost - a code-compliant hoarding has to go up regardless. The incremental cost of wrapping it properly is modest. The difference in what it produces is not.

For the Taggart Group specifically, the coordinated wrap makes the relationship between Doran Contractors, Taggart Realty Management, and Taggart Construction Limited visible to the public from construction day one. That's a brand story - the vertical integration of a family of companies that designs, builds, and manages the properties they develop - that normally only gets told at lease-up. On this project, it starts the moment the fence goes up.

There's also a neighbourhood-trust dimension. A neat, clearly branded hoarding signals to the residents and businesses on Preston Street that something considered is happening behind it. A bare plywood wall with stickers and flyposting signals the opposite. The cost difference is small. The reputational difference is not.

Planning a Hoarding Wrap?

A few things worth knowing before you go to a sign company:

Start before the fence goes up. The easiest time to spec panel heights and breaks is before the hoarding is built. We work directly with GCs on this when we can get in early.

Repeat the call-to-action. One brand mark in the middle of a 200-foot run is wasted real estate. Two or three repeating pattern sets, each carrying the full message, is the right density for a busy street.

Design the compliance signage in, not on. DANGER notices at code-required intervals are not optional. Design them into the layout from the start so they reinforce rather than interrupt the brand work.

Spec the ACP backing. Vinyl applied directly to plywood weathers unevenly and doesn't come off cleanly. The ACP layer is what gives you a consistent surface for the full run and a clean removal at the end of the build.

Lundon Calling handles construction hoarding wraps, fence scrims, and project signage across Ottawa, Eastern Ontario, and Western Quebec. If you're a developer, GC, or property manager planning a build in Ottawa and want the hoarding working from day one, contact us for a consultation.

Lundon Calling is a full-service commercial signage company based in Ottawa. We design, permit, fabricate, and install exterior and interior signage for property managers, general contractors, developers, dental practices, and franchise brands across a 200 km service radius.

📞 (613) 854-9255 📧 info@lundoncallinginc.com