The Salient Group

Insertion Points – Gair Williamson Architects
cdnarchitect.com
Tevor Boddy
August 2009

A view of Williamson's own suite in the Paris Block. Photo Credit: Ed White

A small architecture firm is well-known for nimbly grafting and inserting new architectural elements into the existing urban fabric of Vancouver.

Clients turn architects from dreamers into schemers. Williamson has had a close and positive relationship with Salient Development, which is headed by the successful Robert Fung (son of the former Toronto Waterfront Commissioner of the same name), often sharing office space with the firm. Salient took more advantage of the transfer of development rights (TDR) policy than any other Vancouver developer, and now finds itself controlling nearly half the unplaced density benefits nearly a year into a city council embargo on their sale (the issue for City Hall is the mounting store of potential building density without sufficient sites to “land” it on specific locations in a developing-out downtown).

Williamson is responsible for one of the best applications of these Vancouver heritage mechanisms in his adaptive reuse and rooftop addition for Salient to the Bowman Block, part of a line of early 20th-century warehouses on Beatty Street south of West Georgia Street. Williamson’s design cut back the window-side floor plates of timber-beamed and wooden mill floors to open up two-storey lofts, with bedrooms set back to increase the sense of space, while revealing original elements of the 1906 structure–for example, the former beam seats are retained as a marker of the building’s past.

Similarly, designer and developer resisted invisibly bricking-over the line where the subtracted floor plate was excised, intending it to be left visible. In some of these loft condos, the location of the former floor plate is marked with a very contemporary steel I-beam, which also helps with seismic stiffening of the masonry shell building.

Read the full story at cdnarchitect.com

Indie style finds home in Gastown’s fashion district
Straight.com
September 3. 2009
Patty Jones

The working hand loom at the new Gentille Alouette (left); and an Ora bag from Nouvelle Nouvelle.

In Gastown’s thriving fashion district, upstart boutiques and ateliers are offering something different by design.

Indie fashion is happening, right this very minute, in Gastown. In the window of the new Dickensian-chic boutique Gentille Alouette at 227 Carrall Street, Vancouver Community College fashion grad Ben Newcombe is constructing a dress on the retro-green sewing machine. “When there’s nobody else here, I pop this up onto the table,” says owner, textile artist, and designer Eliza Lau, pointing to a kick-ass–looking hand loom tucked under it.

“Hell or high water, I was going to open my own place,” Lau tells the Straight in her atelier. Lau was a stylist and special-effects costumer in her former life. She once wove “alien animal pelts” for Stargate: Atlantis. But her textile-arts roots were nudging her. “I envisioned representing local designers, providing a workspace. I wanted people to see the art and incredible skill of dressmaking,” she says. The Gastown scene is decidedly all about that DIY ethic.

“To me, Gastown represents returning to grassroots. There’s that lovely historic feeling,” says Lau. “The shop owners are a community, everybody wants everybody to succeed.” She adds, “And I think that fashionistas are discovering Gastown is a real fashion nook.”

Anyone following the bloody quill on Gentille Alouette’s sign—homage to both that nasty children’s song and nearby Blood Alley—into the boutique can nab stunning dresses ($270 to $489) and floaty felt and silk collars ($140 to $260) by Genevieve Graham, former Obakki designer and Project Runway Canada runner-up. Also on the racks are Lau’s own repurposed-leather dresses ($148 to $375) and cavegirl-sexy lei scarves ($148 to $229), woven from recycled fur, alpaca, and other exotic scraps. “My aesthetic is very deconstructed,” she says. She brandishes a work-in-progress wenchy bustled skirt, “a Vivienne Westwood ragamuffin thing”.

It’s another planet on Water Street. Moose and beavers abound in disturbing plush. Furniture emporiums and currency exchanges have accelerated breeding programs. There’s maple syrup on tap. No, wait—that’s beer. Here, T-shirts ask questions: “Does this shirt make me look Canadian?” Eh? But there is the Water Street style vanguard: Obakki (44 Water Street), Fluevog (65 Water), Alife (350 Water), One of a Few (354 Water), and Two of a Few (356 Water).

Read the Full Story at Straight.com

The Woodward’s Experiment
Vancouver Magazine
September 1, 2009
Michael Harris

The Woodward's redevelopment is a massive social experiment bringing people together, regardless of income Image Credit: Christina Lanteigne

Who says East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet?

From his book-crammed office on the sixth floor of the Dominion Building on Hastings, Jim Green has monitored the reinvention of Woodward’s. If Woodward’s is anyone’s baby, it’s his. Beginning in 1985 (five years before the store was shuttered), Green led the community lobby for its transformation into a complex that would draw all elements of the city into one mixed-use mecca. His opening came in 2003 as the province, which owned the land, was trying to get a reticent COPE city council to sign off on the Olympic bid. When Gordon Campbell asked how he could get council’s support for the 2010 Games, Green, a COPE kingpin, gave a list. One element: “I need Woodward’s.” The deal they struck: the City bought the whole block for $5.5 million. (It was valued at four times that.) And somewhere in there, the Olympics got a new tag: “The inclusive Olympics.” Green believes the urban experiment that followed will be mimicked in other cities. “I’ve studied this for a long time,” he says, “and there’s nothing like this anywhere in the world.”

At the fractious joint between the Downtown Eastside and the posh towers to its west, architect Gregory Henriquez has designed a new kind of urban hub. In its conjoined towers are one million square feet of market and non-market homes, government and nonprofit offices, a contemporary art school for SFU, a grocery store and other retailers, and a childcare facility. On one city block, this microcosm of the city wreathes a central courtyard that has the potential of a train station. “The whole city should be mixed-use,” Henriquez says. “Anything less is a tragic mistake. Human lives are not meant to exist in compartments.”

Read the full story at Vanmag.com

Robert Fung is a real-estate developer on weekdays and a home-loving dad on Sundays. Photograph by: Jon Murray, The Province, The Province

What do B.C. people like to do with their Sundays?
Vancouver Province
August 30, 2009

Robert Fung is a Vancouver real-estate developer best known for restoring the city’s heritage buildings and redeveloping them on the inside into new condo developments.

As president and founder of the Salient Group, Fung has led several heritage restoration/ conversions in Gastown, including the new Terminus building and Paris Block.

The married father of three little girls, aged seven, five and three, might have a long-held passion for history, but says these days, the best things in life revolve around his family.

How do you spend Sundays? It almost always involves coffee at Cafe Artigiano, usually with the whole gang. But if it’s during the school year, I’ve got three young kids, so it almost always involves a birthday party — either attending or holding. And then running around on that basis. And as much as we can, just hanging around as a family, playing on the swingset or going to the park. Generally uninspiring, but sometimes, those are the best days. It’s the time to hang out with the kids, because they don’t see much of me during the week.

And what about the rest of your week? It’s early mornings in the office in the summer. And once the school year starts, it’s two or three days a week taking the kids to school. . . and then it’s to the office. And I really make my best effort to have dinner with the family every night. I think it’s really important. I try to be home for six ‘o clock dinner, then put the kids to bed and then work until whenever. I usually work at home until midnight, and then fire it up again.

Pamela Masik stands in front of ‘Mona’, the first of 69 paintings.
Photo: Kristen Thompson/Metro Vancouver

The first painting in artist Pamela Masik’s series The Forgotten (www.theforgotten.ca) was unveiled at The Salient Group’s terminus June 23rd at a fundraising event to benefit a new arts program for women at the Union Gospel Mission in the Downtown Eastside. The painting, Mona, depicts Mona Wilson, a 26-year-old First Nations woman who went missing in 2001. Robert Pickton was charged with her murder.

The Forgotten series consists of 69 massive 8-by-10-foot portraits to remember each woman who has disappeared from the Downtown Eastside. “Because these women were from high-risk groups and marginalized communities, they were forgotten even before they were murdered,” says artist Pamela Masik. “The intent of this work—not just creating the paintings, but the exhibition of the collection with performance and video/photography of the process—is to raise awareness of society’s perception that prostitutes and drug users have no value and can be discarded.”

Masik founded a new arts program at the Union Gospel Mission to help women—many of them friends of the missing women—express themselves through art. “These women are survivors,” says Masik. “I believe it is our collective responsibility to empower them to heal and grow, and live a self-sustaining, healthy lifestyle. That’s the goal of the art program.” Mona and some of Masik’s paintings from her earlier resin series (www.masik.ca/Masik-Paintings.htm) will remain on display at terminus (www.theterminus.ca) until mid-July. Part proceeds from the sale of these paintings will directly benefit the arts program.

“It is an immense honour to have been chosen by Pamela to unveil a work that is so personal, yet so important in the memory of our city,” says Robert Fung, event host and principal of The Salient Group. “Pamela’s new program to benefit homeless women helps make our communities more vibrant, and more livable.”

The Union Gospel Mission is a non-profit urban relief organization serving Metro Vancouver and the City of Mission, providing hope for the hungry, hurting and homeless since 1940. www.ugm.ca

Media coverage of the event can be found at:

Metro Vancouver – Art Honours Slain Women
Vancouver Sun – First of 69 missing women portraits unveiled by Vancouver artist
24 Hours – Mona Remembered
Globe & Mail – Pickton victim honoured in first of portrait series
Video: Toronto Sun – Portraits chronicle city’s missing women
Video: GlobalTV – News Hour on Global, Tuesday, June 23

A few photos from the unveiling:

Shelley Penner's new shop is located in the 110-year-old Flack Building kitty-corner to Vancouver's Victory Square, "Sustainable," or green, shoppers are her target market. In the Flack Building, of course, her customers will enter an exemplar of the green experience in the city, a building reclaimed and recycled recently by the Salient Group.

Living Green – Breaking new ground in providing decision-making sales support
Shelley Penner says merchants need to provide more in-store information and she is practising what she preaches in her new shop
Vancouver Sun
by Kim Davis
June 13, 2009

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a “savvy shopper” smartphone application: an app that allowed a person considering a purchase to type in a product name and return all the details needed to make a decision reflecting that person’s budget and values – ingredients or materials, durability and longevity assessments, cost comparisons.

While eco-labelling and the Internet are helping to qualify product claims and make product information more readily available, Shelley Penner of Penner & Associates Interior Design feels that merchants need to do more to communicate at point-of-sale.

“Retailers need to respond to the changing expectations of consumers,” she says, “Consumers are not automatons with credit cards, they are much more savvy than a lot of retailers give them credit for, people are thirsty for knowledge.”

Continue reading “Vancouver Sun: P+A Furniture: Breaking new ground in providing decision-making sales support” »

Mike Rowlands of Octopus Strategies, one of the tenants at the Flack Block, wrote an interesting piece for their e-newsletter, and it was brought to our attention. Mike shares a bit of Flack Block’s Vancouver’s history, and combines it with some interesting business tips about how collaboration might just be the answer in today’s economic times. A great piece worth taking a look at.

The Legacy of Tommy’s Gold

The climb was more than Tom had bargained for. One foot in front of the other. Again, again, again. Onward. Upward.

The infamous Chilkoot Pass seemed to tower unassailable, far above his head. Yet limbs screaming, he plodded on, and on, eventually cresting the peak, and moving down to stake his claim: Tom had joined the gold rush.

By 1897, Thomas Flack had found gold, and returned with his fortune to the young city of Vancouver on Canada’s pristine west coast. There, he set about to build a landmark building at the centre of the city.

The William Blackmore-designed masterpiece would open in 1898, serving as home to retailers, barristers, insurance agents and others. Its location and style made it a treasured part of Vancouver’s heritage.

Yet like the neighbourhood to its east, The Flack Block fell into disrepair. For much of the past 100 years, the building has gone unnoticed….

The story is continued, and those great tips on business collaboration can be found over on the Octopus Strategies website.