about us
The company celebrates thirty years of work, and it can proudly look back at a unique record of accomplishments in innovative areas of architecture, planning and interior design.
It started in business pioneering the construction of luxury residential high rises in 1976 with Seawalk Place, near the urban centre of Ambleside, on the beach of West Vancouver. It was the first apartment building designed for a new urban life style, featuring higher ceilings, larger suites and elegant interiors, overcoming a real estate slump and creating a new market.
In 1987, the firm negotiated the first residential rezoning in the Downtown District of the City of Vancouver for a new concept of luxury living in the heart of the City, creating the first residential high rise on Georgia Street, and helping transform Vancouver in the vibrant city that we know today, integrating uses in the downtown and preventing the collapse of property values with the collapse of the office market. The project, Palais Georgia, was one of the most successful projects in downtown Vancouver, almost entirely pre-sold and establishing a record-selling price per square foot.
The architectural practice expanded with a multiplicity of projects, ranging from new industries to schools and churches. Its first church project was featured by the CBC for the Easter Mass, and it remains one of the favourite locations for weddings in the West side of Vancouver and of the North Shore.
Restoration projects, from Yaletown warehouses to the CIBC building at Granville and West Hastings in Vancouver, allowed the architectural practice to show its artistic understanding of the link between the present and the past, culminating in the City of Vancouver heritage award for the reconstruction of 698 West Hastings Street.
New commercial projects across Canada achieved a crowning event with the opening of the new Henry Birks & Sons store at the corner of Bay and Bloor Streets in downtown Toronto in November 1998.
Throughout these years the company maintained an important focus on all types of residential projects, from unique homes to resort projects, winning many awards. It was at the forefront of the development of Whistler, from the original land use contract for Twin Lakes in 1979, to the first application at Village North (Twin Peaks Resort), and to one of the first condo hotels of Village North, the Pinnacle Hotel at Whistler, in 1996.
The company pioneered new mountain planning concepts since the 1980s, but the crowning achievement of a long series of innovative projects was the approval by the Premier of the Province of British Columbia, on March 7, 2000, of a new resort village of approximately 3000 beds west of Golden, B.C., Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, which started construction immediately afterwards and opened its doors to operations with its first phase on December 8, 2000. It is the first resort in the North American region of the Rocky Mountains designed around a dramatic access to a mountain top with one major gondola lift, equally attractive in summer for sightseeing and in winter for skiing.
This new ski and summer resort seems to epitomize the successful creativity and the ability to pull things together of our unique architectural, planning and design company.
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