Michael Sasges
Sun
Cressey’s Tracy Chong, at the Mantra model in the new-home project’s sales centre, says one building would have been too much building at the corner of Fourth and Pine. Photograph by : Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
Thirty of the 68 Mantra households will reside in the B plan apartment, the floorplan shown here. Plan B apartments are one-bedroom, one-bath, with den residences ranging in size from about 650 sq.ft. to about 680 sq.ft. Five Plan B households, on the second floor along the lane between West Fourth and fifth, will also enjoy unusual-for-apartment outdoor space, terraces ranging in size from about 460 sq.ft. to 510 sq.ft.
The captain’s bed and cabinetry in the show-home bedroom and the den cabinetry are show-home items only, but could be ordered by Mantra buyers from the millwork company that made them for the show-home. Tracy Chong advises.
MANTRA
Project location: West Fourth at Pine, Vancouver
Project size: 68 apartments, 2 5-storey buildings
Residence size: 1 bedroom; 1 +den; 2 +den; about 650 sq. ft. — 985 sq. ft.
Prices: $454,900 — $939, 900
Sales centre: 2060 Pine, at West Fifth
Hours: Noon — 5 p.m., Sat — Thu
Telephone: 604-734-3488
Web: yourmantra.com
Developer: Cressey
Architect: IBI/HB
Interior design: InSight Design Group
Occupancy: Spring 2009
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The Mantra new-home project is the latest demonstration of the contribution of neighbourhood to felicitous design, interior and exterior.
Mantra is a lowrise development; its apartments will be heated and cooled geothermally; and their kitchens will facilitate fine dining at home.
Kitsilano is a Vancouver neighbourhood in which proximities facilitate the preparation of the memorable meal, engender environmental considerations, and keep the built environment close to the ground.
Granville Island Public Market, and its butchers and fishmongers and green grocers and bakers and wine and beer merchants, is a 10-minute stroll from the Mantra property, to the north.
The six-block West Fourth shopping district starts one block away and to the west.
The 10-block South Granville shopping district starts two blocks away and to the east.
Cressey could have selected apartment-sized appliances. It has elsewhere, but didn’t at Mantra.
What it is installing, in every Mantra kitchen, is a KitchenAid Architect II “suite” consisting of a four-burner gas cooktop, a wall oven, a dishwasher, a hoodfan, a microwave and an under-the-counter wine cooler.
The last is, if not the first cooler I have seen in a new-home project, then probably the first.
To linger on the Architect II site of the KitchenAid web page is to become quickly convinced that here is an appliance batterie de cuisine worthy of the market opportunities around Mantra.
Further, Cressey is building in dry-goods storage that will permit the economical household to take stock-up advantage of all those opportunities.
Each Mantra apartment will have a “pantry wall” of enclosed narrow shelving and a pantry or small storage room.
“We’re looking for buyers who like to do things at home,” Cressey’s Tracy Chong said in an interview.
At the last Cressey new-home project she directed, the Donovan highrise now under construction on Richards Street downtown, Cressey was not trying, firstly, to appeal to homebodies.
“At Donovan, we had smaller appliances in a more compact kitchen. I think the people who buy downtown and the people who will buy here are looking for different lifestyles.
“This is for people who will go down to Granville Market, buy fresh produce, come home, cook dinner, [then] go for a walk on the seawall.
“If you’re in Yaletown, you will go out to a restaurant. Sure, there is a seawall in Yaletown, but it’s a different kind of dinner first.”
The storage, she says, reflects a fact of life — we have a lot of ”stuff” and its storage is a challenge to elegantly occupy a home.
Each Mantra apartment, accordingly, will have both “basement” storage locker and plentiful in-the-home storage. “It’s nice to put things away and to keep your space neat and tidy,” Chong says.
Kitsilano is the Vancouver neighbourhood in which proximities might facilitate the profession of environmental sensitivity.
Vancouver‘s most enduring contribution to world environmental awareness, Greenpeace, started in Kitsilano.
Some of its founders were living in an old Kitsilano Craftsman a few blocks away from the Mantra property when they started Greenpeace. They maintained an office on West Fourth for years.
One of Vancouver‘s earliest geothermal adventures is to the west of the Mantra property, in a mixed-used building on West Fourth anchored by a Capers grocery and a Coast Mountain Sports shop.
The Mantra households will all reside in apartments heated and cooled geothermally. (Cressey is a pioneering sponsor of geothermal heating and cooling locally.)
Cressey is telling Mantra prospects that geothermal heating and cooling will reduce each household’s energy bill by as much as 70 per cent annually, and will not add the 53 tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions that 68 conventionally heated and cooled apartments would.
“We look at geothermal with every project that we’re doing,” Tracy Chong reports.
“Concerns about global warming have really come to the forefront. They’re top of mind for consumers and us at Cressey.
”This is a company philosophy, to try and do our part to ensure every new project we build treads as lightly on the environment as possible.
“Geothermal is good for the environment and the purchaser, cost-effective heating in winter and air-conditioning in summer. It’s a win-win situation.”
Where Cressey departs from the neighbourhood ”model” at Mantra is in construction technique: The Mantra buildings will be concrete buildings, highrise architecture and sound-proofing and glazing in a lowrise project.
The first pass of densification in Kitsilano, about 40 years ago, was very much executed with the wood-frame lowrise.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
