Semi-detached Villas a ‘provocative’ fusion of history, geography
Michael Sasges
Sun
Master- suite layouts will differ from home to home in the Coast Villas project, but their particulars will not. The views will be quintessentially coastal and the ensuites luxe. Tubs and showers, for example, will be clad in polished limestone. Marble will top the vanities; basins will be under- mounted.
The Coast project from the Bastion development company consists of apartment- homes in two buildings and semi- detached homes in five buildings, a road dividing the two components.
Pulse in Kitsilano is another example of the company’s command of prominentproperty architecture.
COAST VILLAS
Location: University of B.C.
Project size: 10 semi-detached homes
Residence size: 3,530 sq. ft. — 4,090 sq. ft.
Prices: From $2.058 million
Sales centre location: Walter Gage Road and Wesbrook Mall, UBC
Hours: Noon — 6 p.m., Sat – Thu
Telephone: 604-222-8439
Web: coastliving.ca
Developer: Bastion
Architect: IBI
Interior designer: BBA Design Consultants
Tentative occupancy: Spring 2009
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A new-home project from a developer with a history of sponsoring right-for-site architecture, the 10 Coast Villa homes will more likely than not be an exemplary addition to their tip-of-Point Grey site. Competitively priced, they are also more likely than not to sell quickly.
Every new-home project from the Bastion development company recorded recently by Westcoast Homes has seductively asserted its possession of a site located on a Vancouver thoroughfare. The two-building Coast apartment-project, now under construction at Chancellor Boulevard and Marine Drive, UBC, and immediately “above” the Coast Villas site. The Corus tower, nearing occupancy, “above” the Coast projects. Pulse — now selling — at Broadway and Maple. Montreux at First and Yukon.
The Coast apartment project and Corus tower project are certainly contributors to per-square-foot asking prices for the Coast Villa residences, which range from $700 to $750. They’re “unbelievable” prices — the superlative belongs to Bastion’s Kim Maust – relatively one-half to three-quarters of the asking prices of comparable view homes at Coal Harbour or on the north shore of False Creek, for example.
They’re order-of-birth prices, basically. Coast Villas, which consist of 10 semi-detached 2 1/2-storey residences, is the third new-home project at UBC that Bastion and its brokers are selling from the same sales centre and building with more or less the same labour, expertise and material suppliers.
Right-for-site components of the Coast Villa architecture start with the exterior cladding. It will be mostly of stone or its derivatives and equivalents.
The roofs will be either flat or gently pitched.
The glazing will be expansive.
The living opportunity will be equally expansive, with all-season outdoor spaces accessible from all three levels of the homes.
On the first level, terraces front and back will bookend an open-floor plan consisting of living, dining and family rooms, a kitchen and a powder room.
On the second level, a deck will be located off the second bedroom. On the top, or third, level, another deck will take up the floor space not occupied by a study/office and bathroom.
Both second and third-level decks will be covered by generous roof overhangs.
The expansiveness of the glazing will serve two purposes. Firstly, it will frame, from the rooms, the big views generated by the homes’ peninsular location, of English Bay and the Strait of Georgia, the North Shore mountains and the downtown and Stanley Park.
Secondly, it will admit the extraordinary natural light and breezes generated by that peninsular location.
The exterior cladding and the roofs will speak of proximate influences.
The cladding will approximate the granite cladding on an 80-year-old UBC landmark, the Iona Building, home of the Vancouver School of Theology, located above the Coast homes, apartments and villas.
The roofs will more whisper than shout about the nearby university. It helps to know that flat and gently pitched roofs were the roofs of choice for the architects who created the “West Coast Modernist” style of architecture in the middle decades of the previous century. Of course, many of them are, or were, either UBC school of architecture instructors or grads.
(The flat and gently pitched roofs also minimize the view loss the lower-storey apartments will experience.)
Bastion executive Maust is equally certain that when the 10 villas are built, they will be seen as deserving a 21st-century entry in the “West Coast” stylebook by peers in the construction and design fraternities.
“The villas are based on contemporary West Coast architecture” she said in an interview. “We [developer and architect] intend them to be a provocative, site-specific work that advances on tradition; that respects the timeless composition of base, middle and top; and that demonstrate clarity and simplicity. We want a form that the non-architect can sketch from memory.”
Maust, of course, is equally certain the villas will not be found wanting by the market. Their outdoor spaces are an especially important selling point, she says.
The first-level terraces will manifest the growing contribution of landscaping to the mediation of the public and private person, she says.
The “gardens will seem more like living works of art,” she says, a “medium” for both contemplation and creation. (“Homeowners may want to grow their own plants and vegetables.”)
The upper-storey balconies and decks demand some consideration of the villas as beachfront homes — if only figuratively. (Literally, they’re cliff-top homes.)
“A beachfront villa typically treats the waters beyond the beach more as part of the landscape than as separate seascape, with lots of windows and wrap-around balconies providing access to the panoramas,” Maust observes. “Our villas are multiple-balcony homes with lots of windows.”
It is not so much the outdoor space itself, but what it signals that has really grabbed the interest of visitors to the Coast sales centre, reports Ivy Wu of MAC Marketing Solutions.
There is so much “yard” outside a Coast Villa residence because there is no garage outside, attached or detached. Coast Villa residents will garage their cars under their homes, driving in and out through the Coast underground parking facilities.
