DOWNTOWN VANCOUVER I Air conditioning, overheight ceilings also set L’Hermitage apart:
Michael Sasges
Sun
STUART DAVIS /VANCOUVER SUN The claim to presence, luxury and taste at L’hermitage will include kitchens supplied by European and high-end domestic manufacturers and a lobby furnished from Giorgio Armani’s home collection. That’s Sarah Yada Seto in the showhome kitchen and (left to right) Kathy Stilwell, Susan Chow, Frances Sung and Victoria Farrell of the L’hermitage sales staff on an Armani Casa sofa. The floor-plate model cost $88,000 to build, Bob Rennie reports. To move one wall in it costs as much as moving one wall in a real home, he adds. Floor-plate repetition is key to the construction economies that permit Millennium to offer the L’hermitage homes at about $500 a square foot, not a luxury price downtown.
CREDIT: Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun The claim to presence, luxury and taste at L’hermitage will include kitchens supplied by European and high-end domestic manufacturers and a lobby furnished from Giorgio Armani’s home collection. That’s Sarah Yada Seto in the showhome kitchen and (left to right) Kathy Stilwell, Susan Chow, Frances Sung and Victoria Farrell of the L’hermitage sales staff on an Armani Casa sofa. The floor-plate model cost $88,000 to build, Bob Rennie reports. To move one wall in it costs as much as moving one wall in a real home, he adds. Floor-plate repetition is key to the construction economies that permit Millennium to offer the L’hermitage homes at about $500 a square foot, not a luxury price downtown.
L’HERMITAGE EN VILLE
Showhome address: 688 Richards, at Georgia, Vancouver
Showhome hours: 12 p.m. – 6 p.m., Sat – Thu
Telephone: 604-605-1118
Email: info@lhvancouver.com
Project size: 32 storeys, 203 apartment residences and penthouses
Residence size: Apartments, about 650 – 1,550 sq.ft
Prices: One bedroom, from $348,000; +den, from $398,000; two bedrooms, from $434,000; +den, from $524,000; three bedrooms, from $1.029 million; penthouses, from $1.66 million
Developer: Millennium Robson Homes Ltd.
Architect: Gomberoff Bell Lyon Architects Group Inc. and Lawrence Doyle Architect Inc.
Web: www.kigloo.com/lhvancouver
“The fins are off the Cadillac.” The speaker is Bob Rennie; the subject, the latest collaboration between the real-estate agent and the Millennium Group, the L’hermitage en ville tower-residences at Robson and Richards in downtown Vancouver.
This model year’s “Eldorado” is larger than Bob Rennie has been selling, he reports, and is more voluminous than much of the competing product, with ceiling heights approaching nine feet in most homes.
Air conditioning and German cabinetry, appliances and plumbing fixtures are standard. Italian furniture will grace the L’hermitage lobby.
Additionally, this “Eldorado” features after-sales “services” that will complement the ‘hood. There will be a grocery, operator to be named. And there will be affordable rental accommodation, owned and operated by the City of Vancouver.
About the almost 50 rental suites, Rennie comments: ” … what was once the site of two forgotten hotels and some very, very rundown living environment could either be next to our new tower or we could say, ‘Let’s go deal with it.’ I think Millennium was extremely progressive in … replacing them with 47 shiny new units and handing them over to the city.
“It was a real collaboration between [city hall] and Millennium. It’s the future.”
About the grocery negotiations, Rennie comments: “You can’t live downtown and buy your groceries at, eat at, Holt Renfrew.
“You need milk and bread and the developer is current negotiating with IGA Marketplace. And if it’s not IGA Marketplace it’s going to be another food store.”
Jimmy Pattison and Millennium (maybe!) … city hall and Millennium
… Bob Rennie and Millennium (a collaboration that goes back a decade). Any other partnerships contributing to the construction of L’hermitage en ville?
How about Inform Interiors and Millennium?
“There are many partnership opportunities available in Vancouver, with many different people, and there’s no reason to work with anything but the best,” Inform’s Nancy Bendtsen says of the latest collaboration between Millennium and her company.
Millennium, its designers, BBA Design Consultants’ Sharon Bortolotto and Merike Lainvool, and its marketer, Rennie Marketing, are “the best that there is in Vancouver.”
“At Inform Interiors, we’ve been around for more than 45 years, always editing the best collection of contemporary design available from around the world. We believe passionately in the power of good design to improve our lives.”
Partnership between a developer and a high-end retailer have been done before in Vancouver, with the introduction of middle-class home-owners into a neighbourhood the strategic outcome sought.
Designer-furniture store Oni-One of Toronto has twice provided interior designs for Intracorp, first at its UNO project at 11th and Kingsway, Vancouver, and, more recently, at its Centrepoint project , Metrotown Centre, Burnaby.
Additionally Oni-One will anchor the retail presence in UNO, its first store on the West Coast.
Inform’s contribution to the L’hermitage homes includes Eggersmann cabinetry and Dornbracht plumbing fixtures, both from Germany, in the kitchens and bathrooms and Armani Casa furniture, from Italy, in the eventual lobby and current presentation centre.
As contribution, they merit consideration as surety of the developer’s intention to sell not just homes at L’hermitage, but delivery the promise, in the project’s sales literature, of “luxury, presence, taste.”
“Presence” is the sharpened teeth on that old real-estate saw, location, location, location, Bob Rennie acknowledges, the file used the Robson Street address of the project.
“It’s lifestyle, on Robson, and how does L’hermitage intrude, fit in, expand on that.
“I think it’s looking at the . . . tower, and how it’s going to affect Robson, and then stepping back the tower.
“We took it back off Robson so it wasn’t a huge intrusion. But there are not a lot of residential addresses on Robson. So that’s the presence that we’re after . . .
“Then taking [the project] to the style level that Robson demands . . . when you say Robson there’s always an implied warranty that goes along with it. So how do we be part of that presence, of the Robson lifestyle. And that’s what you see, the designer kitchen, the designer bathroom, the Armani Casa.”
The associations and affiliations and attachments evoked in the L’hermitage design and marketing could be evoked by men and women with less history in these parts then Rennie or the Malek family, Millennium’s owners, Rennie says, but not necessarily with requisite finesse.
“You could with research, but there’s a larger chance of error by, maybe, over catering to Robson,” he says.
“It’s those fine differences between what a Yaletown demographic wants, what a Coal Harbour demographic wants, what a Concord Pacific demographic wants, what Robson wants. Robson is downtown. It’s urban; it’s really urban.
“So we put in this unbelievable kitchen in a 600-square-foot suite knowing that the buyer may never eat in the suite. But people want that piece of furniture called a kitchen.”
There will be people in the building, by the way, who won’t want a kitchen ever. They will be the guests of the small hotel Millennium is planning for the building.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005