The Salient Group

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” »

Renovations worth $65 million by Robert Fung’s Salient Group leave Gastown building looking old in front, but much newer from behind.

Gastown – Gotta Have Heart
Malcolm Parry,
Vancouver Sun
June 11, 2009

GOTTA HAVE HEART: The very oldest part of Vancouver is becoming new again. Not just cosmetically tarted up as Gastown was in its early-1970s first revival. “These buildings are now considered new for insurance purposes,” said Robert Fung. He meant the $65-million-worth of development his Salient Group is near to completing on Maple Tree Square and along Water Street.

The adjacent properties include the now-completed Terminus. It’s a $26- million project incorporating the 1886-built Terminus Hotel and the adjacent Grand Hotel. The latter sat unoccupied for 35 years and was owned by 11 separate deal-seeking groups until Salient acquired it in 2004. Today, the two properties feature 46 suites sized from 700 to 1,600 square feet and offered for $400,000 to $1.6 million. “Those go back to 2006 prices,” said Fung, 43, who served eight years as a Concord Pacific development manager after arriving from Toronto in 1990. “We’re selling them for what original buyers paid.”

The Terminus remained on the city’s endangered-list top 10 even after a fire that left only its 30-cm-thick facade shored up for years.

Alongside that Water Street project, the former Nagle Brothers Garage and the 1890s Cordage Building comprise a $27-million project of 34 residences ranging from 575 to 1,600 square feet. Priced from a tad below $400,000 to $1.6 million in 2007, they sold in 90 minutes.

On the square itself, the 123-year-old Alhambra hotel, is subject to a $12-million revivification, again as the retail restaurant and office facility it has been for decades.

“You can’t set up a legitimate business if the infrastructure isn’t working, and this building was falling apart,” Fung said. In fact, Salient itself will move back there after temporarily occupying the Richards-off-Pender Street Lumbermen’s Building it renovated “taking the life-cycle clock back to zero,” Fung called it – in 2007.

That project also entails opening up Blood Alley, and blending skylights and glass-walled commercial spaces into a zone characterized by vintage brickwork and leafy trees. Rather than seek LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designation, as some Gastown developers have, Fung believes “more in going for good, practical, sustainable solutions that don’t penalize the buyers.”

He’d love to get his mitts on Cordova’s Street’s venerable Army & Navy store building. Has he talked to owner Jacqui Cohen? “Yes. She is very friendly, and she’s great in the neighbourhood.” Does that mean a deal is nigh? “She has many developer friends.”

Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in downtown Vancouver.

For the second consecutive year, Vancouver has been chosen as the “most liveable city in the world”, placing just ahead of Vienna. This is hot on the heels of Vancouver ranking amongst Fast Company’s list of “most innovative cities” last week.

From The Economists website:
“Vancouver is still the most liveable city in the world, according to a new ranking from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The Canadian city topped a “liveability survey” of 140 cities, as it did in 2008.

The ranking scores each city from 0-100 on 30 factors spread across five areas: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Vancouver’s average score was 98—0.8 less than last year—but the margins at the top are all tight, with the best ten cities scoring over 96.

Vienna came second (it was top in Mercer’s similar recent study) and Melbourne third. The top ten included three Canadian cities, three Australian ones and four from Europe. High-scoring cities tend to be mid-sized and located in developed countries with a low population density. This means they can benefit from the availability of both cultural and recreational attractions, but with lower crime levels and fewer infrastructure problems than are often found among large populations.

Pittsburgh, in 29th place, was judged the most liveable American city. London and New York were 51st and 56th respectively. Harare brings up the rear, scoring 37.5 points.”

You can read the original story on The Economist’s website, and can see some of the 2008 story here.

Image Credit: Free Agency Creative

Terminus: “A Beautiful Building”

Taken from the Free Agency Creative blog:
“I had the pleasure, this evening, of touring the Terminus building in Gastown. The Salient Group has done a wonderful job in collaboration with Acton Ostry Architects, Evoke International, Haebler Construction, and Inform Interiors to produce a harmonious blend of modernity and historicism in Vancouver’s Historic Gastown. Being a resident of Gastown, it’s really nice to see projects like this come to life. I only hope more developers are able to find ways to take traditional spaces and convert them into usable contemporary residents that are relevant to today. Here are a few of my pics from the tour.”

Free Agency Creative’s studio is just across the street from us, so we appreciate hearing such a great review from one of our neighbours, particularly from a studio who has very high expectations from design – whether it be graphic, architecture or interior design.

You can see the original post with more photos here: Free Agency Creative – A Beautiful Building

Vancouver Magazine: The Unlikely Revolutionary
Joel Solomon has put his millions, and those of a powerful circle including Rubbermaid heiress Carol Newell,into a new business-first socialism

Frances Bula
Vancouver Magazine
May 25, 2009

Across from Victory Square, a crowd is celebrating the reopening of the historic Flack Block, a monument to Vancouver’s gold-profiteering past that has been transformed into a home for people who believe in changing the world one socially responsible business at a time. Mayor Gregor Robertson, reading a proclamation honouring the restored building, and several of his councillors are here on the fourth floor. So are a woman with a company that manufactures cloth menstrual pads, a man whose firm delivers organic food to people’s homes, and staff from the collection of like-minded save-the-world enterprises that have decided to bunk at the Flack Block, like Rainforest Solutions Project, IdeaLever, and ForestEthics.

Amid the bustle at what’s now called the Tides Renewal Centre, the man at the centre of the room seems unremarkable. Tall and lanky, with a thin, lined face and rectangular metal glasses, Joel Solomon, 54, is the hypersensitive host preoccupied with making sure that everyone feels good. You wouldn’t guess that this guy in shapeless black jeans, black runners, and a nondescript suit jacket is the force behind this room, this gathering, this restoration. Or that he binds this group, giving them the sense of being part of a grand revolution that will remake Vancouver.

Continue reading “VanMag: Joel Solomon – The Unlikely Revolutionary” »