Capitol Residences finishes have flourish
Michael Sasges
Sun
The last prize home will be located on the eighth floor of the Capitol Residences tower on Seymour Street in downtown Vancouver. Building amenities will include a condierge, a residential terrace, a fitness centre, meeting rooms and a lounge.
There’s no business like show business, Irving Berlin once wrote (and Ethel Merman frequently sang). Please think of residency in the sixth, and final, Vancouver Sun condo-giveaway contest prize as an opportunity to discover how true that declaration might be.
The Capitol Residences, location of the Week 6 prize, will rise 43 floors above downtown Vancouver’s Seymour Street, its exceptional ascent expedited by a historic agreement between developer and city hall on additions to the Orpheum Theatre next door.
The Capitol Residences developers, Wall Financial Corp. and Rob Macdonald of Macdonald Development Corp., have agreed to construct a bigger stage for the Orpheum, a rehearsal hall and music school and loading and unloading facilities.
The city agreed to increase the allowable square footage – and, therefore, height – of the Capitol Residences project.
The agreement is the largest ”cultural-amenities” agreement in city history.
”It’s very rare to get 43 storeys in a residential tower,” says Bob Rennie, the organizer of the Capitol Residences sales and marketing campaign.
” . . . from levels 30 on there will be amazing views, right over to English Bay. And the height was only achieved through helping the Orpheum and the [Vancouver] Symphony [Orchestra].”
The apartments in the Capitol Residences will be built to – in Rennie’s words – ”penthouse-worthy” specifications, with lots of stone and steel and “architectural” plumbing fixtures.
The prize home will be located on the tower’s eighth floor, a one-bedroom, one-bath residence of almost 600 sq. ft. Views will be to the south.
In the kitchens, the floors will be finished with marble tile; the counters and splashes, with granite or stone slab; and the cabinet doors will be frameless, with the upper doors glass. The developer has selected a GE stainless-steel appliance package, including a gas cooktop; a stainless steel sink from Kindred; and a single-level faucet with sprayer from American Standard.
In the bathrooms, more marble tile will be under foot. Limestone or marble slab will top countertops and splash. Vanities, double and single, will feature porcelain basins and American Standard faucets and fixtures.
Features all residents will enjoy include a concierge; a residential terrace; a fitness centre; meeting rooms; and a lounge.
Capitol Residences previewing will begin this weekend, Rennie reports, with selling scheduled to begin in February.
For more information telephone 604-688-0819 or visit capitolresidences.com.
Sky Diner, Silk Hat: Where did they go?
Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, November 25, 2006
You’ve likely been caught sneaking a peek at the downtown Vancouver skyline and wondering, perhaps with fondness, whatever happened to all those lovely old low-rise buildings, with their thicket of neon signage, that once populated our urban core.
That nostalgic reminiscence has never been more apt than for the corner of Georgia and Granville, where the stately six-storey 1927 Hudson’s Bay building once towered over the streetscape, and where the sidewalks that head south to the bridge were once dotted with popular dance halls, discreet supper clubs and eateries with fanciful names like Clancy’s Sky Diner and The Silk Hat.
Today, of course, the downtown core has grown up into a forest of tall steel and glass towers, some residential, most built for business, but each seeming to jostle for bragging rights as Vancouver’s newest, biggest and shiniest on the block.
The rush to civic maturity has changed the downtown profile forever, and while many would argue that it’s not for the better, it’s an urban planning debate you can’t help but lose.
Because every successful city has to grow up, and while it doesn’t always happen gracefully, densification is inevitable.
And Vancouver’s downtown body mass has certainly morphed into something quite different than the shape it showed at birth.
Nowhere is that more evident than at the corner of Georgia and Granville, arguably the city’s most famous intersection.
If you took that trip down memory lane, you’d know that it’s here the let’s-meet-at-7 p.m. Birk’s clock once stood, before the stately landmark, and its store, moved north to the corner of Hastings.
It’s here that post-war lovebirds would link arms on a summer night and meander south toward the Granville bridge, under a thicket of neon, perhaps to catch a movie in one of the old single-screen cinemas, or enjoy a pint at The Castle.
Granville Street still attracts the crowds, of course, but its millennial mien is less romantic and somewhat harder-edged these days, morphing as it did in the mid-’70s into a hotly debated pedestrian mall now boasting a motley mix of dodgy shops (arcades and tattoo parlours) alongside chic boutiques (David Gordon Shoes).
The single-screen movie houses also transformed, their chandeliers, pipe organs and heavy velvet drapes lost to modernization in the rush to create a new entertainment experience called the multi-plex.
The Capitol Theatre, which opened in 1921, was the granddaddy of the original Granville theatre row, the patriarch of an entertainment family that included the Vogue, the Coronet, the Odeon and the Orpheum.
It was also the first downtown theatre to undergo major renovation, when it was subdivided in the 1970s and fitted out with six brand new movie screens, the biggest in the region.
And so it served the core, for the next 30 years, filling seats and popping corn until the suburbs and the really big multi-plexes rendered it somewhat obsolete for the sophisticated cinephile.
Today, the Capitol is cashing in one of its nine lives, its screens having gone to black and its site now set to take shape as a 43-storey skyscraper called the Capitol Residences, a condominium complex that is among the six developments featured in The Vancouver Sun’s Condo Giveaway Contest.
It’s all part of a Georgia and Granville renaissance that is taking its lead from Coal Harbour to the north and Yaletown to the east, where residential neighbourhoods have handily taken root in the footprints of old Vancouver.
It’s part of a transition, too, in our city’s modern real estate universe, one that is seeing more and more house hunters, first-time buyers and empty-nesters alike, choosing the authentic urban life, choosing to wake up every day right in the thick of things.
They’re eschewing square footage and white picket fences for a frontyard cluttered with four-star hotels, glass-fronted department stores, industrial views, noisy transportation routes and overflowing office towers.
It’s all about lifestyle literally on your doorstep, and that the Georgia and Granville address comes with a priceless Vancouver pedigree, a nostalgic scrapbook of the city’s memories, is as it should be.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
