Cassandra Kosterman looks forward to a dream-come-true urban lifestyle

Sun

CAPITOL RESIDENCES

Location: Seymour Street, between Robson and Smithe streets, downtown Vancouver

Project size: 372 apartments and townhouses, 43 floors

Residence size: 577 sq. ft. – 1,249 sq. ft., 1 bedroom; 1+ den; 2 bedrooms, 2 + den

Prices: 1 bedroom, from $360,000; 2 + den, from $640,000

Sales centre : 757 Seymour

Hours: noon – 5 p.m., Sat – Thu

Telephone: 604-688-0819

Web: capitolresidences. com

Developer: Capitol Residences Limited Partnership, with Wall Financial Corp. the managing partner

Architect: Howard Bingham Hill Architects

Interior design: Bob’s Your Uncle Design

Tentative occupancy: February, 2009

Cassandra Kosterman and the Capitol new-home project that Bob Rennie begins selling today are ideal fits.

An increasingly difficult find in the downtown peninsula — a high-rise with astounding views — the Capitol has been the object of the BCIT student’s residential desires since late last year.

Winner of last fall’s Vancouver Sun’s condo-giveaway contest, Kosterman selected a Capitol apartment as her prize.

She is young (23), loves urban living (theatres, shops and restaurants will be just outside her front door) and is excited to still be living close to the great outdoors (Stanley Park is only a bike ride away.)

Yes, our prize winner is, indeed, representative of the Floors 1 – 30 prospect at whom Capitol developer and veteran real estate agent are directing their pitch.

(Floors 31 to 43 will have bigger homes under nine-foot ceilings, with air conditioning and a more expensive kitchen package.)

For Kosterman, an opportunity to own her own piece of downtown Vancouver was a dream she never thought she could afford. It came as no surprise that she would pick a Capitol home over five other homes in the Lower Mainland, located in Maple Ridge, Burnaby, Richmond and Port Moody.

But Kosterman, who already lives in Vancouver in a rented one-bedroom, prefered to stay in the city. She and and her boyfriend plan to move in when the Capitol is completed,

“It’s too beautiful not to move in. It’s quite spectacular,” says Kosterman.

“It’s a great location. I can walk to the Bay and Robson Street. There are lots of restaurants and you could ride your bike to Stanley Park.”

The latter is a big plus for Kosterman, a lover of the outdoors who is in the second year of British Columbia Institute of Technology’s Fish, Wildlife and Recreation program.

Kosterman also loves to cook so is thrilled with the gourmet kitchen, (which includes GE stainless steel appliances and gas cooktop) and open concept floor plan her one bedroom unit (approximately 606 square feet) on the 8th floor offers.

Capitol is another joint venture between Peter Wall and Rob MacDonald (Capitol Residences Limited Partnership with Development Management by Wall Financial Corp.) The two teams, have already worked together on the highly successful Hudson, Yaletown Park and Electric Avenue at Paramount Place and the Sheraton Wall Centre in downtown Vancouver.

As Bob Rennie, of Rennie Marketing System who has been involved with the sales of their previous condo projects, aptly points out these past projects have translated into “amazing focus groups.” Theu result is Capitol knew exactly what previous condo consumers have said they want in their ideal condo.

And ideal it is from an expanded use of marble in the bathroom to a more efficient open concept kitchen/iving area.

All units have marble flooring in the bathroom and either marble or limestone around the shower and tub surround, sink backsplash and under the tabletop sink itself. There’s also sleek flat-panel cabinetry in the kitchen with smooth granite or stone slab countertops and above the multi-functional island, with its built in sink, is a open-shelf wine rack and display cabinet. The kitchen cabinets also have some with frosted glass panel with aluminum trim.

Rennie’s take on the Capitol project is it will not only be a wonderful place for buyers wanting the “live/walk to work” lifestyle but it is also a safe haven for investors.

“We are one of the few cities in North America where no one is building rental inventory. If you are buying it for the future for your kids it’s very safe because you can rent it out,” says Rennie.

“We are seeing a limited supply of residences on the horizon downtown,” notes Rennie. “What’s really important to us and all the condos downtown is it’s 43 floors. That is very difficult to achieve in the downtown core today. The city really has its direction of preserving its office space and there are so few sites available.”

Rennie says most condos are in the 12 to 16-storey range but this higher density was achieved with “valuable views” on the upper floors because the developers are working with the city and the arts community to improve the Orpheum, adjacent to the Capitol.

The theatre, which opened in 1927 as a vaudeville house, was once the largest and most opulent threates on the Pacific Coast. It was bought by the city in 1974 and reopened in 1977 as the permanent home of vthe Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Although an interior restoration was done with a restored concert hall more work was needed.

The developers have agreed to provide a recital hall and extend the back of the house. There will also be a new community music school on site. (See sidebar story for more information from a city perspective.)

And while this development does promise to be a benefit to the entire community those actually living there have the most to gain. Condo owners themselves will enjoy amenities, such a 24-hour concierge,

an overheight wall to wall glass lobby, a landscaped terrace, fully-equipped gym, tv lounge with pool table and a reading room, meeting rooms with a kitchenette, and a Eco co-op auto network on site.

The latter will likely prove to be popular with condo owners who opt not to buy a parking space and instead rely on the seven designated cars that has been bought by the developer to be parked at Capitol.

Rennie says the auto network was done at the Electric Avenue project and proved to be the most highly used station in the network.

He says buyers opting to forgo a parking stall will save about $45,000.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Sun

VANCOUVER — Housing sales re-accelerated across the Lower Mainland in February with a surprising jump in prices, which helped reverse a slowing trend that settled into markets last June, statistics from the major real estate boards show. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported 2,859 MLS sales in February, still 2.8 per cent below sales in the same month a year ago. The benchmark price for Greater Vancouver detached home hit $666,983 in February, compared with $641,596 in January. The Fraser Valley Real Estate Board reported 1,413 MLS sales, which was 15 per cent below February, 2006 sales, but 41 per cent higher than just a month previous. The average price on a Fraser Valley detached home was $507,439, 16.8 per cent higher than February last year. Helmut Pastrick, chief economist for Credit Union Central B.C., wrote in his weekly economic briefing that that Greater Vancouver’s February sales “held up better than expected,” with January and February being the strongest consecutive months since May-June 2006.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

John Mackie
Sun

To most people, the old house at the corner of Dunlevy and Prior would have been a teardown. The exterior hadn’t been painted in decades, and the interior was more or less trashed.

“There were literally bullet holes in the walls where the old guy that lived in here used to shoot at the rats,” says Graham Elvidge. “He’d sit there with his .22 and shoot at the rodents.”

Most people would have recoiled in horror at the thought of buying such a place. Not Elvidge. Having an architecture degree, he understood that ‘neath the decrepit surface, the house was still in good shape. And so Elvidge and his wife Kathleen Stormont purchased the home in June, 2004, for $300,000, and set about restoring it.

On Feb. 19, their efforts netted them the Award of Honour at the City of Vancouver’s Heritage Awards — the city’s highest heritage accolade.

Boy, do they deserve it.

The couple has taken a house that Herman Munster would have been scared to step into and made it into a heritage showpiece. To do so they had to overcome some daunting obstacles: The loss of their copper plumbing pipes in a break-in, the theft of all their tools when their vehicle was broken into, and a bizarre accident where a teenager lost control of a rented $100,000 sports car and drove it into the house.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget about the decades of dog urine that had seeped into the floor. The previous resident had several pooches that apparently did their business in the house for years.

“When a dog [urinates] on the floor three times a day for 50 years — oh, the things you learn — what ends up happening is the moisture evaporates, but the uric crystals stay behind,” explains Elvidge.

“So, the board ends up with this incredibly high kind of saline content in it. What happens is that whenever the humidity rises, moisture is attracted to that highly saline board. So the humidity would rise and we’d end up with these wet patches that would bloom out of the floor and reactivate this ancient [urine].

“We used that as a means of mapping the floor. Before we took the floors up, we did like a police body line, spray painted this body line around the grim zones.”

The couple then took up the floor and did a “sniff test” to figure out which boards stunk. They cut out the offensive bits and were able to reuse 60 percent of the floor — saving a lot of money, because old-growth Douglas fir floors are worth a fortune.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Their house was built in 1899, when Vancouver was only 13 years old, the population was about 20,000 and Prior street was on the False Creek waterfront (the eastern part of False Creek was filled in for railway lands from 1916-20, pushing the water back to its current boundary).

It’s one of the few local examples left of a Queen Anne home, an ornate Victorian style featuring exterior details like fish scale siding, gingerbread trim and semi-circular “knee brace” brackets over the upstairs windows.

It was built by a man named Frederick Sentell, whose family was one of early Vancouver’s premier builders — the Sentells built Vancouver’s first city hall on Powell Street. In the 1920s it was purchased by the Winchcombe family, who owned it for eight decades.

Elvidge and Stormont had been looking for a house for several months, and been outbid several times, when they found out the Dunlevy house was for sale. They knew it well, because it’s in the historic Strathcona neighbourhood just east of the Georgia Viaduct.

“Anybody who grew up in Vancouver knows this house,” says Elvidge.

“When we saw it was up for sale, we literally turned to each other and said ‘Oh my God, it’s that house.'”

The house was in rough shape, but was all original.

“It had never been renovated,” says Elvidge.

“We couldn’t believe it. When we first came by and looked at the house, our jaws just dropped. Not to mention our noses, because it stunk in here. But the visuals were just amazing, it totally seduced us.”

When he says it was original, he means it. The house had one layer of wallpaper in each room, the layer that had been put on in 1899. The floors had linoleum carpets (linoleum designed to look like an area rug). The baseboards, moulding and plaster and lathe walls were all intact.

The kitchen appeared to be an early 1900s addition off the north side of the house, which is also where the house’s only bathroom was located. Incredibly, there was no plumbing in the original house, which was probably built before the city’s water system reached the street.

The electrical had also never been updated.

“The electrical that was in the house was all surface mounted,” says Elvidge.

“A couple of tiny little wires coming into the house, the common and the hot, single phase 30 amps. Couldn’t have even run a fridge on it I don’t think without blowing the main breaker. And that was it, just surface mounted.

“The house was never plumbed, never had any sewer in it, and never had any proper electrical system in it. It was weird. We were the first ones to ever drill the walls for that stuff.”

Elvidge decided to make the house restoration his job, and spent two years on the project.

“We’re kind of the poster children for sweat equity,” he laughs, estimating that the couple and their friends and family have spent 8,700 hours renovating the house.

If they had paid someone to do the reno, he thinks it would have cost about $300,000. But by doing it themselves, it cost about $70,000.

“If you had to pay somebody else to do it, they never would have done it to the standard that we did it,” he says.

The first thing they did was to lift the house up and fix the foundation. The roof had been leaking, so it was replaced, as was the plaster and lathe walls. The floor came out, was refinished, then reinstalled. So were all the baseboards.

Many contractors save money on such extensive renos by using cheap wood or a substitute like MDF. But Elvidge is a perfectionist, and scoured demo sales for replacement Douglas fir floors and siding.

“With this house you want clear grain Douglas fir for anything you’re doing, it’s wrong to use any other material,” he says.

“We looked for free salvage wherever we could get it. We would change the construction to fit whatever was happening at the time. Typically the salvage is ‘This house is being torn down tomorrow, come and get what you can.’ So you have to shut down whatever else you’re doing and go and do that.”

A good example is the siding, which he took off the old Varsity Grill on West 10th with two friends shortly before it was demolished.

“They were tearing it down, so we peeled the siding off of it, beautiful old Douglas fir siding,” he recounts.

“We ran all that through my friend’s surface planer, he has a millwork shop, ripped all the old paint off. Then we pre-primed it on all sides and put it all back up. This Douglas fir lap siding, you can’t buy that stuff for love or money. I figure we got $5,000 to $10,000 worth of siding for six hours work, 18 man hours.”

He tried to keep the design of the house as original as possible, but did make some changes. He ripped the kitchen addition off, then knocked down a wall between the parlour and dining room to make one continuous space. The dining room then became the kitchen, and the parlour the dining room.

He then took one of the three bedrooms upstairs and divided it into a bathroom and walk-in closet. The closets for the other bedrooms backed onto each other at the head of the stairs, so he got rid of them and made a landing, adding a window for light.

Loads of natural light is one of the features of the house. The downstairs has nine-and-a-half foot high ceilings, and there are two-storey bay windows on both sides of the home.

“There’s a few things about old buildings that made a lot of sense,” he says.

“It was all about light and ventilation. This was just on the edge of getting electricity to Vancouver, so there was still the idea that you would want big tall windows and big high ceilings to bring lots of light into the building.”

There is some amazing millwork in the house, none more so than the elaborate newell post on the stairs.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Elvidge.

“It’s weirdly ecclesiastical. That alone just about sold us on the house, it’s such an incredible piece. [But] it used to scare the living [daylights] out of me. It roughly has the proportions of a woman, about five foot five, and I’d be working away and turn around and go ‘Whoa! Who the hell is in here?’ And it would be the newell post staring me down.”

Above the stairwell is a vintage multi-tiered commercial light fixture, which is often called a butcher’s light because it used to hang in turn of the century shops.

“That came from the old Vancouver courthouse,” says Elvidge.

“Because this is one of those houses that everybody’s seen forever, it had a certain amount of notoriety. This man and his brother were the demolition contractors for the courthouse in the ’70s when it was being converted to the art gallery. At that time all this beautiful old Edwardian stuff was just being chucked in the bin, so they saved a few things. This sat in a basement for 30 years; he thought this would be a good place for it to land.”

All sorts of people dropped by during the renovation to offer odds and sods, or just encouragement. The masses seem to love the house at Dunlevy and Prior as much as Elvidge and Stormont; they were happy that someone would fix it up.

“I think most people are a bit horrified by the loss of history in the city,” he says.

“It’s rare that something actually gets saved; often something that’s really quite worthy ends up getting [destroyed]. So to see something that’s so thrashed, that’s clearly bound for the wrecking ball actually get saved, I think captures people’s imagination.”

Stormont agrees. But she’s not so sure she would go through such an extensive renovation again.

“Ignorance is bliss,” she laughs.

“I knew it was going to be a lot of work, because I had seen Graham on his other projects, but I had no idea that it was going to be two-and-a-half years later and we still don’t have a kitchen.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Athletes centre will become condos

Derrick Penner
Sun

Wednesday night’s Vancouver Regional Construction Association February dinner at the Hilton Vancouver Metrotown Hotel in Burnaby was somewhat of a debutante’s ball for the Olympic Athletes Village project.

Roger Bayley, design manager for the development at Merrick Architecture, was the guest speaker. He brought photographs of site models to give the construction industry its first public introduction to the much talked-about, long-pored-over project.

The project’s builder, Millennium Development Group, is about to tender the contract for elevators, followed by the first main construction contracts. All will be let by July 3, Bayley said.

At a time when the industry is stressed by skilled labour shortages and skyrocketing construction costs, Bayley said the event was important to “fire up enthusiasm and get people excited about what we’re doing.”

And not just fired up about the straight business proposition of building a signature venue for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Bayley said the southeast False Creek village will become Millennium Water, a 1,100-unit market and non-market condominium development embodying the City of Vancouver’s long-held desire to create an environmentally sustainable community at southeast False Creek.

“One of my aspirations is to significantly influence the development industry in Vancouver relative to the acceptance of sustainable design and green-building techniques,” Bayley said. “That’s really the thrust that the whole design team has embraced, and Millennium has certainly made a significant contribution to.”

Four main architect groups are designing the project, including Arthur Erickson with collaborator Nick Milkovich, Stuart Lyon at GBL Architects Group Inc., Walter Frankl and Merrick, which will design the main buildings of the Olympic Village as well as coordinating the design team.

The project will be an experiment in guiding cutting-edge environmentally friendly building techniques through the municipal permit process, Bayley said.

“We are pushing at the boundaries of those issues …. Building-code issues and development permit issues and requirements that traditionally have guided development in the city.”

He added that city has been accommodating to date.

Millennium has about 30 months to complete the eight-building, 1,100-unit project.

Construction association president Keith Sashaw said there is little doubt the 120 general contractors, trade contractors and suppliers at the dinner will be keenly interested in participating in the “flagship” project.

Contractors want to take on challenges such as the Olympic Village, Sashaw added, so they can build a reputation in “being on the forefront” of the latest trends. “Given what’s been happening with the whole discussion around the environment, Vancouver is really getting a reputation for sustainable design and construction.”

Maureen Enser, executive director of the Urban Development Institute Pacific, said the whole development community’s eyes are on the Millennium project. She added sustainable design elements are not new, but the Olympic Village will be the first time they are applied “on a grand scale” in a project pushed through the city’s development-approval process.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Sun

VANCOUVER – A realtor who bought a False Creek condo from a client, then flipped it a month later for $95,000 more than she paid, has been told by the B.C. Supreme Court to repay her profit to the original owners.

Dian Dai-Qing Gao and her realtor husband Norman Chan with Sutton-Killarney Realty were sued by a couple who put their condo up for sale in the summer of 2005.

The couple had purchased a new home in West Vancouver and listed their condo for sale at $529,900 with Gao.

They had accepted an offer for $517,500, but the day the offer was to go through, it collapsed, the court was told.

At this point, Gao and Chan decided to purchase it themselves. The couple testified that they were assured by Gao that the apartment wouldn’t be flipped but would be kept by the realtors as an investment. Six days after Gao took possession, the condo was listed for sale at over $100,000 more than she paid for it.

Justice Janet Sinclair Prowse found that Gao had breached a fiduciary duty she had with the couple and ordered her to repay them the profit of about $70,000 she made.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007