Malcolm Parry
Sun
A rendering shows what Arthur Erickson’s Residences at the Ritz-Carlton tower will look like.
ARCHITECT HONOURED: Arthur Erickson received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s 2007 Prix du XXe Siecle award for “enduring excellence and national significance to Canadian architecture.”
An even more tangible and enduring tribute will follow. That’ll be when Simon Lim’s Holborn Holdings firm completes the Residences at The Ritz-Carlton tower on West Georgia Street, a half-block west of Erickson’s late-1960s masterpiece, the Macmillan-Bloedel Building, and alongside Lim’s Terasen Gas Building.
That’s the site of the old Shell Oil office Lim bought from Cadillac Fairview in 2004, long after plans for the ritzy, Hong Kong-based Newport Club fizzled.
“Arthur should be on our skyline,” Lim said recently of the 60-floor building that will contain 130 hotel rooms and 123 residences ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 square feet and fetching up to $13 million each.
The city’s urban design panel earlier rejected a proposal that would have put a Musson Cattell Mackey design on the city skyline.
Brought in to join MCM and the Davidson Yuen Simpson practice, Erickson got the nod for a twisting tower that met city hall’s view-cone requirements while benefiting the developer. That’s because its rotation will enhance the harbour-mountain view for upper-floor residents, who’ll pay more for it. Condo sales mogul Bob Rennie, who “brokered” the Erickson deal, joked that the latter “earned every dollar of his outrageous fee.”
Lim, who shares a June 4 birthday with Rennie, makes self-deprecating jokes about himself. Wearing a sweater with the emblem of his then-favourite Bentley automobile, Lim said he dropped in unexpectedly at one of Bentley owner Rennie’s sales events. He was met by a staffer with: “Are you here to pick up Bob’s car?”
Lim, who says he’s his Malaysia-based family’s “head janitor” here, has picked up more than that. “Bob made me buy the Bay Parkade site,” said Lim of the $62-million Georgia-Seymour-Dunsmuir-Richards Street property. “It was a lot of money, and the city had been talking about no more development in the downtown core. But Bob said: ‘Buy it and figure it out later,’ And, you know what, it’s my best purchase ever.”
Lim even bought the Kingsway-at-Nanaimo Eldorado hotel, where Rennie’s mother Margaret was a restaurant server. Holborn plans to develop the $270-million, 22-floor, 350-unit The Hills project there. It is also one of 20 candidates for redevelopment of the Little Mountain pubic-housing site, which, depending on final zoning, is valued around $100 million.
His firm got that name because Holborn station was where Lim caught the “tube” while studying at London‘s Middle Temple law school. Other enterprises are named from A to F stations, so let’s guess the next Lim incorporates will be Greenwich.
Lim, who was the first North American developer Ritz-Carlton permitted to dictate suite sizes, is “talking about” another such collaboration in Calgary.
He also has plans “still marinating” for the 12-acre tennis-court site in Whistler Village. That $375-million-range project should include a 350,000-square-foot hotel, 220,000 square feet of town-homes and 50,000 of other amenities. In Squamish, the 200-house University Heights and 200-acre Thunderbird Creek projects are joint ventures with First Cambridge Capital (Douglas Day) and Rick Ilich’s Townline firm.
No word on Erickson’s involvement. But he’ll be on our skyline for sure.
