Pleasantly in Mount Pleasant
Michael sasges
Sun
Flowering cherry trees proclaim the Block new-home project’s location in an old Vancouver neighbourhood. Glenn Baglo – VANCOUVER SUN
The third, or master-suite, floor in the Block show home is a declaration that suburban luxury – interior spaciousness – is possible in an urban residence. “Efficiency of space is something we really pride ourselves on,’ ParkLane’s Krista Shirreff says to the question, what from Port Moody and Fort Langley and White Rock has her employer brought to Vancouver. ‘ We have our inhouse senior designer, Grant Miller, who works on every single design and reviews every single community that we build, maximizing room sizes. The master bedroom bed is a king. The walk-in closet is enormous. The en suite is even bigger.’ That’s Jenny Wun, The Block’s sales manager, sizing up the bed in the show home’s master suite, left above. Below, the walk-in closet. Bottom, the study on the second floor is another example of a popular suburban innovation that elevates an upper-floor utility, a landing or hallway, with extra purpose.
The deck, above left, on the roof of the show home is one of the townhouse’s four outdoor spaces. A deck on the master-suite, or third, floor, above right, is another. A juliet balcony on the second floor is a third.
Appliances clad in stainless steel, counters topped with granite, backsplashes of ceramic tile and a floor-to-ceiling wine rack will infuse the Block kitchens with an architectural purpose worthy of open-plan residency.
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.