Malcolm Parry
Sun
James Schouw and Nazanin Afshin-Jam will leave their penthouse for one he’s building 200 feet higher. JAMES SCHOUW and former Miss World runner-up Nazanin Afshin-Jam have just about got their 5,000-square-foot Yaletown penthouse how they like it. Now they’ve recruited star realtor Malcolm Hasman to flog it for them.
The residence is atop the 19-unit, seemingly stone-walled building Schouw developed at Richards and Drake Street to architect-father Paul’s design.
The building is named Grace for the Graceland nightclub that once occupied a neighbouring site, and its penthouse possesses more decks than most Yaletowners do 10-year-old wines. There’s also a blue-tiled, 40-foot indoor lap pool with a thermostat Schouw keeps turning down and Afshin-Jam keeps turning up. Stacked beside the pool — which has no wave generator — are several surfboards painted by rock guitarist-singer Jim Cummins, aka I Braineater.
At a sale-hyping party the other night, Hasman called the joint “well-priced” at $3.5 million — i.e., $700 per square foot in a market where some touch $1,200.
“This stands alone in my professional opinion as the most spectacular penthouse in the city, although it doesn’t offer the view of your buddy Bob Rennie’s Shangri-La,” said Hasman, waving toward Ferrari and Maserati cars he’d parked beside the complex’s locking gate six floors below.
The vendors should enjoy a more expansive view next spring. That’s when they’ll move to the top of Grace Phase II, a 300-foot tower Schouw pere et fils are building next door. That project was to have been completed by now, but builders and buyers of the nearby Metropolis tower complained it would impede their views. A resulting micturational tournament took 18 months to resolve.
There’ll be no lap pool in the new building’s three-floor penthouse. But its living room will feature 40-foot-high windows and a 10-foot-higher ceiling.
Let’s see how Hasman describes that when the time comes.
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JOHN KOERNER, the 92-year-old painter, will vacate his low-rise penthouse this fall. He and bride Lisa Hobbs Birnie, the former Vancouver Sun scribe, will move close to the West End waterfront.
Koerner’s autobiography, A Brush With Life, will appear at the same time. It will include stories of his student-and-artist doings in 1930s Paris. Given the Czech-born Koerner’s innate courtliness, though, there may be less about 1938, when Britain and France betrayed his democratic homeland to futilely appease German dictator Adolf Hitler’s perverse ambitions.
One year later, Koerner and his estimable, long-lived clan began setting examples of energetic perseverance in Vancouver.
That Koerner still has his nose to the canvas was clear when his Celebration exhibition opened at the Diane Farris gallery Thursday.
Asked what land was represented in the smashing floral still-lifes, Koerner tapped his hair-covered head, smilingly flashed even teeth and, with clear eyes twinkling, said: “The one up here.”
“He’s adorable isn’t he?” said Birnie, who seldom showed such sentiment in her reportorial days.
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JURGEN GOTHE, the CBC-Radio DiscDrive show host and sometime Vancouver Sun reviewer-columnist, scored a hat-trick in Manhattan this week.
He received his third gold medal from the International Radio Festival of New York. It was his second time to be named as best network/syndicated personality. DiscDrive snagged another gold medal there in 1988 for best regularly scheduled network music program.
As well as radio, Gothe is getting encouraging news on the radiation front. Another batch of treatment appears to be keeping his cancer at bay.
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RED ROBINSON, the half-century disc jockey, says sales continue to rock and roll along for his and Greg Potter’s Backstage Vancouver: A Century of Entertainment Legends. Unsurprisingly, the book’s success has spurred others to volunteer photographs — so many that Robinson says a second edition is inevitable.
Of course, the inveterate collector — [email protected] — will always welcome more.
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BIF NAKED, the New Delhi-born, Winnipeg-raised rocker, is criss-crossing Canada to release her first-in-three-years album, Superbeautifulmonster.
The successor to her Purge and I Bificus albums was launched this week at the Yaletown waterfront’s Quay eatery-drinkery, where Naked — formerly Beth Torbert — displayed her extensive gallery of real tattoos. She was flanked by Fit For Women gym manager Alissa Martin and Simon Fraser University third-year philosophy student Vanessa St. Arnaud, whose similar skin embroidery was fake.
Wearing wigs with red devil horns, the latter two echoed my youngest brother Doug Parry, whose Doctor Doug and The Damned band wore Viking horns protruding from uber-englische bowler hats.
Naked’s 13 songs include some devilishly cheeky lines.
From I Wait, co-written with producer Peter Karroll: “Hey! What’s your name? / Hey! Where ya from? / Hey! Where have you been all my life? / You look like a red-hot lover / Do I look like your future wife?”
In Funeral of A Good Girl, Naked sings the rock-reasonable lines: “You be the kid and I’ll be the candy store / Take me down, Baby / Do it to me now / Do it to me now.”
Then comes the unexpectedly demure: “I can’t believe I just said it out loud.”
Tattoos or no, Naked’s a rare one.
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NORAH ASHMORE, the jazz singer turned Kamloops schoolteacher, completed a three-year labour of love for Canada Day. It is the play Over My Mountain, on which she conspired with professional dancer Desiree Dunbar.
The show is based on characters who lived in B.C.’s Bridge River Valley — Ashmore and Dunbar‘s birthplace — between 1900 and 1928. It ally premieres today. The locale will be a town that also came back to life: Bralorne.
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MORRIS PANYCH, the hotshot writer-actor-director, is expected to make a trapdoor appearance at Performance Works July 7. That’s the night Chris Tyrell will host a $20-ticket party to benefit Performing Arts Lodge, the Coal Harbour retirement community for theatrical folk.
It’ll be a two-on-Granville Island night for Panych. His and longtime partner Ken MacDonald’s 1982 Last Call . . . A Post-Nuclear Cabaret will preview at the Waterfront Theatre, with David Adams and Marguerite Witvoet singing and drinking after an H-bomb apocalypse.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
