Block’s metal, brick
cladding an architectural salute to the original industrial purpose of Mount Pleasant
Pleasantly in Mount Pleasant
Michael sasges
Sun
Saturday, May, 09, 2009
Afelicitous response by developer
and architect to The Block’s location makes this townhouse development an
exemplary addition to the Vancouver residency opportunity.
The Block’s exterior metal
cladding and brickwork broadcast location in an original Vancouver neighbourhood,
Mount Pleasant, with a history as much industrial as residential.
The decks on the townhouses’s
roofs broadcast higher-ground location. (The 50-metre elevation runs through the
property.) The views of the downtown high-rises, commercial and residential, and
the North Shore mountains will lure Block households to their roofs in all months
in good weather and keep them there in a glorious July or August.
“Where in the city can a woman
put on a bikini and lay out on a chaise lounge without people staring at her?
I’d be up there all summer,’’ says Cristy Edmonds, the general
sales manager at ParkLane Homes, an observation she shared in answering a question,
tell Vancouver Sun readers your favourite feature in the townhouses.
The organizer of the Block sales
and marketing campaign, ParkLane marketing manager Krista Shirreff, advances as
her favourite a feature three floors below the decks, the private, secured passage
between 25 of the 32 townhouses and the common parking garage.
‘‘Lugging your groceries
into an elevator and down a hallway is not the best of times,’’ says
Shirreff, an apartment resident herself. ‘‘ Here it’s almost
like you have your own little single family home. You can drive in, you’re
safe and secure in your own parkade and, boom, you’re right upstairs in
your own kitchen unloading your groceries.’’
Every household will have its own
front door, either on the street, Guelph Street or East 11th, or the courtyard
that is a common feature of newer Vancouver townhouse developments.
Nineteen of the townhouses front
on the courtyard and, therefore, face each other.
Nine of the townhouses front on Guelph
Street and, across the street, the almost-100-year-old Nightingale elementary
school.
Four of the townhouses front on East
11th.
Not only righteous possession of
site makes The Block worth seeing.
Possession of a novel quality makes
it worth knowing about: it is the first newhome project in Vancouver in ParkLane’s
history – more than 5,500 homes, and more than 250 provincial and national
awards, in almost 30 years.
ParkLane is firstly and primarily
a suburban tract-home developer. More than that, it develops whole neighbourhoods
of which Heritage Woods in Port Moody is the leading example. Westcoast Homes
reporters were probably visiting the new-home community twice a year a few years
back.
The Block, therefore, is a small
project for ParkLane. But it’s an important, maybe critical, undertaking
on the cusp of the company’s fourth decade.
In that decade it will turn almost
130 acres in Vancouver’s southeast corner into a multi-residence neighbourhood
called, by all involved, East Fraserlands.
‘‘I think definitely
moving into the multi-family business is something ParkLane wanted to do from
a corporate perspective before we moved on to the Fraser lands,’’
Krista Shirreff says. ‘‘It’s something very different.’’
ParkLane has not yet opened the Block
sales centre and show home to the general public, Shirreff advises. To visit either,
contact sales manager Jenny Wun at the telephone number or email address published
in the information box at the start of the story.
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