Pom Poms for Pomaria
It was an apple-sweet moment for Persian expatriates Mohammed Esfahani and Roger Navabi last week, when their 30-floor Pomaria tower at Beach and Howe received the Urban Development Institutes' excellence award for highrise multi-family development. Pomaria means "apple garden" in Latin and the name could - but likely won't - be realized by appropriate plantings on the tower's 16th and 19th-floor "treed oases".
But that's not what saw Qualex-Landmark Group managing director Esfahani and president Navabi's project cited. The ace in the hole for the related-by-marriage pair, who merged their Landmark and Qualex firms and 37 years of local expertise in 2000, was meeting the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) silver standard. That partially derived from their building Canada's first purely residential project with home heating, cooling and domestic hot water produced wholly by geothermal exchange.
As well as saving 1,000 Mwh of energy annually, the systems' 56 100-metre boreholes save tenants money, mechanical engineer Navabi said. That's because Terasen Energy Services, which owns the $600,000 geothermal installation, charges a monthly $50-range premium that will not vary with gas or electricity price fluctuations.
The persistent upward climb of land prices means no Pomaria II is envisaged. But civil engineer Esfahani said it's "very likely" a 760-square-foot mixed-used project on Calgary's downtown 10th Avenue will be all geothermal. Still unnamed, the $500,000 project will include a Shangri La-style 60-floor hotel-residential tower and 40-floor neighbour, and street-level retail facilities.
The self-styled "boutique" developers will break ground on that project, designed by Rafii Architects, in 2009, when the third tower of a 560,000-square-foot Calgary development should be completed.
Land and construction costs in Alberta haven't languished either.
It cost $140 per square foot to build the Stella tower's now occupied 20 floors, Esfahani said. Under construction, the adjacent Nova's sold-out 28 floors will cost $220. And the pair estimate the 32-floor Luna will break ground next spring and come in at $300.
Although priced out of Vancouver for the time being, Esfahani and Navabi have June 2008 schedules for a start on their Luxe project beside Burnaby's Brentwood shopping centre. This $150 million job will entail 25- and 30-floor towers with 300,000 square feet of living space. With a geothermal system?
"We're not sure, yet," Navabi said.
What they are sure of is continuing to turn down opportunities in Victoria and Kelowna.
'We don't want to be spread too far around, "15-year condo-dweller Esfahani said, "because the quality is compromised."
That ethic also applies to their 2,000 square foot Melville-at-Thurlow office, where Qualex-Landmark's entire head office complement totals 10.
~Malcolm Parry, Vancouver Sun
Dream Gardens
Pomaria tower the latest 'green' foray by a local developer
What follows is one man's early nomination for novel sleeping experience, downtown Vancouver category, 2007 calendar year: It might occur in at least a dozen apartments in the Pomaria residential tower on Howe at Pacific.
A floor-plan notation for one of the apartment schemes, "glass wall levels 19 to 21," was my first intimation of the nightly novelty a lucky few will experience in the 30-floor building on its completion two years from now ... a wall of glass, however eventually executed, separating one of the bedrooms in at least three apartments from the adjacent threestorey "skygarden."
Where do you put the bed? What do you do to sleep past daybreak, if that wall of glass is not a wall of windows? Where do you buy blackout curtains these days?
At least a dozen apartments will either overlook the two "skygardens" in Pomaria or share floors, the 16th and 19th, with the gardens. None may have my hoped-for walls of glass, but will certainly have windows from which to view the gardens.
Common property, but limited common property, the gardens will be accessible only to residents of apartments on those two floors.
The three 19th-floor apartments have been sold, Pomaria's Chris Colbeck reports, but two of the four 16th-floor apartments were unsold, as of earlier this week.
"Additionally, three homes [of nine] remain that look onto the skygardens. The ones that look onto the skygardens are priced at more than $730,000."
As of this week, of the 138 Pomaria residences, 66 have been sold. The developer only opened the Howe Street preview centre last Saturday, but started selling over the Christmas holidays, in response to word-of-mouth interest.
Of all the features of this tower, and they include its landmark location "between the bridges," the variety and largesse of the homes and the amenities ownership accrues, the gardens stand out for their contribution to Pomaria's relative singularity and as the latest expression of the emerging "green'" sentiments of local developers, builders - and newhome buyers.
Those gardens are both explanation for and emblematic of an ambitious, pioneering commitment by the Pomaria developer, Qualex-Landmark, the pursuit of LEED certification for the building.
They signal expense undertaken and revenue foregone and marketing foray, of urban oasis or sanctuary. (Pomaria was a town in Roman Africa, named for nearby orchards.)
Short for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, LEED's purpose is recognition "of leading edge buildings that incorporate design, construction and operational practices that combine healthy, high-quality and high-performance advantages with reduced environmental impacts," in the words of LEED Canada.
"In every project we do we try to do something that differentiates us from everybody else," Chris Colbeck responds to the question, why bother?
"That effort here started with the architectural style of the building, with the skygardens. We had the skygardens set into the 16th to 18th floors and then into the 19th to 21st floors. The city liked it . . . So some of it came from the city collaboration. It helped us with our rezoning. It was an evolution of what we saw coming down the pipe for urban living in downtown Vancouver.
"And, you know, there were certain stages at which we considered pulling out the 16th to 18th floor skygarden because we could put three more homes in there and get money for that."
There are at least a couple of approaches to healthy, green buildings, the engineer's and architect's and builder's and the average home-buyer's approach. Kim Davis, a Vancouver environmental consultant
and architectural researcher, covers off the former elsewhere in today's Westcoast Homes. Chris Colbeck covers off the latter with this observation:
"We say to people, you're getting a new home without the new-home smell. People like that. It puts LEED in understandable terms.
"They walk into a new home and they smell the off-gassing of the carpets and cabinets and the glues. We don't have that."
Pomaria buyer Ali Hakimzadeh (with wife Shahrzad) expects residency in an "environmentally friendly'" building "will make for great dinner conversation when we have guests over."
"Living in the 21st century we all need to be environmentally aware," the Canaccord Capital Corp. executive says. "To the extent that the developers had the foresight to make the environment a major theme of their building they should be applauded."
The Hakimzadehs bought a townhouse facing May and Lorne Brown Park (on Beach) for about $800,000, "very well priced, given the neighbourhood and quality of the building and materials being used."
He's lived in the neighbourhood since 1987 and they currently reside on Hornby "just down the road from Pomaria."
"We were not planning on buying, but when we saw all that this building had to offer, the three-bedroom townhomes, the large bedrooms, the spacious living areas, a fantastic kitchen design and amenities - this one sold my wife which in turn put my mind at ease that she would be very happy here - plus the opportunity to stay in the area.
"No other product could really compete for our dollars since we immediately got pretty much all that we wanted and needed right here."
At the opposite end of the project from the "parkhomes" are four live/work residences (on Pacific). All are three-floor homes, two of them total 1,700 square feet and the other, more than 1,500.
In between are the apartments, at least three one-bedroom-plus-den schemes; three two-bedroom schemes; and three two-bedroom-plus-den schemes.
Amenities that come with residency include a second-level garden and spa.
