Sun
Interior of Richards show room. Glenn Baglo/Vancouver Sun
Eggersmann cabinetry and panelling exemplifies functional and structural design mastery, room enough for thousands of cans of soup in a kitchen and for a fridge in the living room, a result of open-plan design.
All involved in a new-home project went outside at Richards, at Bob Rennie’s suggestion, for the inevitable sales-centre shoot. He wants you to know that Richards is a Yaletown opportunity. Th at’s why he led Sun photographer Ian Lindsay, t wo Rennie Marketing Systems associates, president Tracie McTavish and project manager Greg Zayadi, and an Aquilini Investments executive, Barry Savage, down to the loading docks of the old warehouses of Mainland Street. ‘ . . . we are really trying to sell proximity,’ Rennie says. ‘ Walk the life. This is a walk-the-life location, walk to work, walk to everything. This is right in the middle of getting to work and getting to a beer and getting to the seawalls. Whether you’re jogging or drinking or working, we can get you there.’ From the left in the photo, McTavish, Rennie, Zayadi and Savage.
The Richards sales centre is flanked by two homes from Vancouver’s early days. They will be rehabilitated by Aquilini Investments and relocated, from their Richards Street sites to Helmcken Street sites. They are for sale. By city hall’s count, 16 residences like them remain downtown. Three of them are located around the corner from the Richards site. Moving the t wo Richards Street homes there ‘ will form a representation of an early, historic, end-of-block development pattern once common in the area,’ in the words of a city hall document. The to-be-relocated residences were built in 1907 and 1908. Their rehabilitation gains Aquilini Investments more square footage than the zoning permits. ‘I think, these memory points are good, very good,’ Bob Rennie says of the Richards heritage component. ‘It costs more to restore those houses than they can sell for. The city works very closely with developers. When it comes to putting back and retaining part of that older fabric, they’ll let you build more new fabric.’ This is probably also the place to acknowledge one loss Richards will bring to the city. The Richard’s on Richards night club will come down to make way for the Richards building. The new-home project’s logo is based on the nightclub’s logo, Rennie reports.
VANCOUVER – The latest glass-tower-residency opportunity downtown is a proposition that is equally basic and elegant.
A European-sourced mastery of small-space residency or, perhaps more accurately, domestic activity, is one part of the proposition.
A shortage of rental properties around Metropolitan Vancouver and of developable properties downtown is the other part.
As the organizer of the Richards sales and marketing campaign, Bob Rennie, points out, the smaller-apartment vacancy rate locally is less than one per cent and has been since 2006.
Four per cent is the comparable vacancy rate in other Canadian metropolitan areas, as the national housing agency, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., notes.
Further, properties downtown on which builders and developers can erect rental homes are few and far between, Rennie says.
This dearth not only signals that 20 years of supplementing the original industrial and commercial purpose of the downtown peninsula with a residential purpose has claimed most of the properties there are to claim, he says.
It also signals a concern at city hall and a determination to limit the conversion of downtown properties from industrial and commercial use to residential, he says.
(It won’t hurt anyone considering a downtown property purchase – commercial, retail or residential – to have a look at city hall’s “Metropolitan Core Jobs and Economy Land Use Plan” home page. The web address is too long and ugly to publish here. Just get yourself on to city hall’s home page, vancouver.ca/, and then root around.)
”To sell real estate now, we have to look at fundamentals,” Rennie says. “And one of those fundamentals is how much product is really out there.”
By his count, about 500 homes are for sale in downtown Vancouver for less than $500,000, 200 of them for less than $350,000.
”That’s it. For a city like ours. . . We’re at a time when everybody is looking for fundamentals and nobody has better fundamentals than downtown, for the investor or the homeowner.”
At Richards, 60 per cent of the homes are being sold for less than $500,000, in another town, perhaps, an astounding sum, but here, a bid for affordability by a long-time builder and developer and his broker.
”It’s Yaletown,” Rennie says, of the most likely Richards prospects. ”It’s young buyers who want to be in the city and we wanted to hit that affordability level for them.
”And you can’t deny that investors are attracted to Vancouver.
”With rental rates going up, it makes sense. I would love to put in the article an observation about this investor who we all raise our eyebrows at: without the investor there is no rental inventory being supplied to our market.
”And we’re seeing a lot of pressure on [rental] rates right now. Without that investor, there would be even more pressure.”
Another fundamental component of the Richards proposition is the developer, Francesco Aquilini, the owner of the Vancouver Canucks.
His involvement means that Richards buyers are buying from ”not only a developer who’s been around, but a developer who’s going to be around” and, further, a developer ”with a brand to protect and we’ve seen developers in this market who have no brand to protect.”
That ”brand,” in Rennie’s opinion, is more than the Canucks and GM Place, the NHL club’s arena.
”You can’t say the name Aquilini in this city without talking about the Vancouver Canucks, of course.
”But they’re doing this project, they’ve assembled this block, which is one of the rarest blocks left in Yaletown.
”And they’re doing Maynard’s in Southeast False Creek. They’re going through the master planning for General Motors Place, with office, retail and residential. They’ve got a building coming up in Kelowna. They’re a force to be reckoned with.”
Aquilini Investment’s Kelowna project is a 24-storey, 201-residence building.
The company is one of at least four property owners working with city hall to create a new entertainment district around GM Place.
The Maynards Block development will add 245 residences in two new buildings to the city’s housing numbers, while preserving and restoring the old Maynards Auctioneers building.
The interior designer of record for both the Maynards and Richards new-home projects is Mona Foreman of Sheffield Design Studio.
Kitchens in both new-home projects will demonstrate storage and cooking-and-cleaning efficiencies that suggest commercial purposefulness.
Working with Inform Interiors of Vancouver, the sole Canadian distributor of Eggersmann cabinetry from Germany, Foreman has designed kitchens that minimize the aggravations of preparing dinners and cleaning up.
The above-the-counter storage will be shallow. The below-the-counter drawers will have internal dividers. There will be a pantry, and an appliance ”garage” behind a roll-up door.
There will be, in other words, no reason to misplace anything in a Richards kitchens, no hunting through storm-tossed drawers and black-hole storage for a missing ingredient or tool.
Harvey Reehal of Inform Projects Inc. employs a memorable pointer when talking about the Richards kitchens: The more than 102 cubic feet of storage in each kitchen will accommodate 4,350 cans of soup.
Inform Projects is an Inform Interiors division that specializes in the design and supply of European kitchen and bath cabinetry. The Living Shangri-la households in Vancouver and Toronto will reside in homes with Eggersmann cabinetry, for example.
”The Eggersmann kitchens for the Richards project are, in a way, the heir to the unique virtues of European living,” Reehal said in an interview.
”There, smaller spaces are not uncommon. There, living spaces have been designed for efficiency, but without compromising attitude and esthetics.”
In the product-rich Vancouver new-home market, ”the smallest gradients of quality – esthetically and functionally” matter when a potential buyer compares opportunities, he says.
” . . . Eggersmann provide several necessary elements for the contemporary Vancouver homeowner: forward designs for kitchen storage, modern, even transitional esthetic statements, a commitment to environmental responsibility, and a tool suitable for multicultural cooking trends.”
The appliances will be worthy of that sensibility, of course. Two other German companies will supply them: Blomberg, the fridges and dishwashers, and AEG, the cooktops and ovens.
Don’t think of a Richards homes as a home located at the intersection of Richards and Helmcken streets.
Think of it, instead, as an address located at the intersection of the formidable and the fundamental.
Vital Statistics:
Richards
Project location: downtown Vancouver
Project size: 226 apartments and townhouses, 2 detached heritage homes
Residence size: Apartments, 553 sq. ft. – 885 sq. ft.; townhouses and penthouses, 1,168 sq. ft. – 1,315 sq. ft.
Prices: Apartments, $399,000 – $775,000; townhouses and penthouses, $886,000 – $1.5 million
Sales centre: 1066 Richards, between Helmcken and Nelson streets
Hours: noon – 5 p.m., Sat – Thu
Telephone: 604-688-2875
Web: richardsliving.com
Developer: Aquilini Investment Group
Architect: LDA Architects
Interior design: Sheffield Design Studio
Occupancy: Fall, 2011