The Salient Group

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.”

Robert Fung has turned some of Vancouver’s worst eyesores into high-end housing. But the financing model he used to cover the added expense of saving the city’s grand old buildings has run into a brutal new reality.

Globe and Mail – Heritage projects suffer collateral damage in downturn

Kerry Gold
Special to The Globe and Mail
Friday, May. 15, 2009

Developer Robert Fung stands on Water Street in Vancouver’s Gastown, surveying a row of heritage buildings that comprise one of the city’s most beautiful streetscapes.

They represent some of the city’s oldest buildings, and each of them had been long neglected until Mr. Fung came along and restored them as work, retail and condo spaces.

“He’s the poster child of heritage,” says Heritage Vancouver president Don Luxton.

But with the downturn in British Columbia’s property markets, Mr. Fung now sees himself tied to a complex financing model that no longer works.

The Alhambra building, circa 1887, anchors Water Street, the most historic block in the city. It is part of Mr. Fung’s $60-million, three-phase, five-building project that involves “a high level of heritage restoration.” The condo building Terminus, once on Heritage Vancouver’s Top Ten Endangered Sites list, is the first phase. The heritage building, with its sleek, uniquely modern interior, is finished and mostly occupied. The Garage condos next door, once the location for the city’s first jailhouse, will be complete by November.

Continue reading “Globe and Mail – Heritage projects suffer collateral damage in downturn” »

Evoke is Robert Edmonds, graphic artist (on left) and architect David Nicolay (right).

We’d like to express our congratulations to David Nicolay of Evoke International Design for being named Western Living Magazine’s Interior Designer of the year.

Evoke has worked on several of our latest projects including terminus, Garage on Water Street and The Paris Block and Paris Annex buildings on West Hastings Street.

David Nicolay talks about the terminus project from The Salient Group on Vimeo.

See the story below:

From award-winning homes to neighbourhood watering holes and hip T-shirts, this design firm redefines casual modern living.

By Jim Sutherland

Some interior design partnerships are headed by highly focused individuals possessing intimidating training and credentials along with a laser-like sense of purpose. Other partnerships consist of, well, an architect and a graphic artist who branched into interiors primarily to outfit the bars and restaurants they wanted to hang out in.

The latter partnership describes Vancouver’s Evoke International Design, headed by David Nicolay, the architect, and Robert Edmonds, the graphic artist. And while the duo’s route to running a seven-person interior design practice may have been circuitous, that doesn’t take anything away from their work, lauded by judge Kelly Deck for its “authentic flair” and “attention to materials and atmosphere.”

terminus kitchen

Today, residential work takes up a large chunk of Evoke’s design energy. As a double-threat architect and interior designer, Nicolay was responsible for a Vancouver home (seen here) that in 2006 was named a North American Home of the Year by Metropolitan Home magazine. Other residences are at various stages of design—in some cases, Nicolay notes, their progress hampered by local zoning regulations that penalize contemporary design Much of Evoke’s recent work has been on condominiums, particularly collaborations with Acton-Ostry Architects for Vancouver developers Townline and also the Salient Group, which specializes in converting warehouses and other heritage buildings. Judge Raymond Girard lauds what he calls “real” (as opposed to “soft”) lofts. “How clever to turn utilitarian spaces like kitchens and bathrooms into sculptural elements, spicing up smaller loft spaces without cramming them full of stuff, materials and textures.”

The seed of the Nicolay and Edmonds collaboration dates to the mid-1990s and a memorable Vancouver restaurant in the Kitsilano neighbourhood called Tangerine, which Nicolay and family members launched to fill what he describes as “a keenly felt void of cozy, stylish places to eat and drink.” That soon led to other restaurant work, both as designers and proprietors. Vancouver’s Figmint and Metro restaurants are recent projects, each displaying sophisticated takes on neo-modernism. Evoke and partners also designed Main Street haunts Habit and the Cascade Room, the latter a slightly off-key riff on post-war England. Both continue a tradition of rooms that, true to the company name, suggest rather than accurately describe a style or period. Paul Lavoie describes them as “fresh spaces with thoughtfulness for heritage and reality.”

The firm was recently hired for a condominium development in Victoria. A line of T-shirts featuring vivid graphic treatments by Edmonds is also ready to go. Not everyone can live in an Evoke product but at least we can all wear one.

See the original story here, and an article the Globe & Mail posted here.

The Salient Group received an overwhelming response to the launch of their latest Gastown development “Garage”, which will be the second phase of a 150,000 Sq.Ft. mixed use development that started last year with the terminus building. The 34 residential suites at Garage sold out in a few hours upon being released for sale at the beginning of July.

The development incorporates retail, office, and residential in a fully revitalized heritage building along with the addition of 4 newly added floors. Completion is estimated to be in the 2nd quater of 2009.

A cool, modern twist to historic centre
By Thomasina Barnes 
June 29, 2007

PROJECT: Garage
DEVELOPER: The Salient Group 
PRICE: Starling in the mid $300,000′5 
SIZE: From 586 to 1,771 sq. ft. 
SALES CENTRE: 12 Water St., Vancouver, by appointment only. 
CONTACT: Phone 604-689-LOFT (5638) or www.modemgarage.ca 

Developer Robert Fung has once again shown his signature restorative touch with the new Garage condominium project off Blood Alley in Gastown. 

Fung’s Salient Group has preserved the historical façade of the Water Street building and added a four storey modernist glass cube to the top. 

“Of all the projects we’ve done, this is the one I’m most excited about,” says developer Mr. Fung. “There is nothing like it in Vancouver, especially in terms of incorporating contemporary design into a heritage structure,” he says. 

Garage merges architectural elements from 1889, 1930, 1970 and 2007. It combines two historical properties and connects them with a central courtyard which the suites will be built around. 

The project name stems from one of the original businesses on the site – the Nagel Brothers Garage, which was one of the first parkade/service stations in Vancouver during the 1930’s.

Garage has been designed as a mixed-use building (the ground floor will be retail space while the second storey will remain offices), that celebrates its historic surroundings while offering a variety of modem amenities.

Suites at Garage have overheight ceilings, Miele appliances, variable refrigerant flow heating and cooling systems, as well as modern space-enhancing features like glass sliding bathroom doors. The open-concept homes have polished concrete and maple flooring, fully-panelled kitchens and maple cabinets. Sixty per cent of the suites will have outdoor space in the form of a deck or balcony. 

Mr. Fung believes that Gastown is “the cultural hub of Vancouver” and he sees the future of the city in its past. Within two blocks of the Garage site are numerous restaurants, bars, galleries and Simon Fraser University’s new School for Contemporary Arts. “The gravity – the very future of the city rests here,” says Mr. Fung.