Langley-based developer Marcon teamed up with Nemesis Coffee to open a cafe called Tri-City Pavilion. The cafe is intended to give buyers a taste of the future of Marcon’s master-planned, multi-tower community.Tri-City Pavilion
Britannia Beach was at one time one of British Columbia’s most contaminated regions. And now, after a couple of decades of clean up and new development, the village is attracting interest as a food and beverage destination for residents of West Vancouver and the Squamish region.
Developer Rob Macdonald played a role in its remediation. There was some wrangling. First, he bought a heavily discounted mortgage off a China-based mortgage-holder, and then he foreclosed on the owners of the Britannia Beach acreage. Britannia Beach is about a half-hour drive from West Vancouver, and a 10-minute drive to Squamish. It is dramatically scenic, sandwiched between the ocean and the mountains. The government cleaned up the site and built a contaminated water treatment plant. In return, Mr. Macdonald donated 9,500 acres to the province, keeping 500 acres.
In partnership with Adera Developments, Macdonald Development has sold the condos and is selling the few townhomes that remain. There are refurbished historic buildings, trails, employee housing, amenities and a commercial village with about 30,000 square feet of retail. To maintain the vibrancy of the village, Mr. Macdonald chose carefully when he brought restaurants on board. He was a regular at Beaucoup Bakery and Café in Kitsilano, and they’d already set up shop in his hotel, the St. Regis downtown, so he asked them to come to Britannia. And he was a regular at Autostrada restaurant in Vancouver, so he asked them as well.
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In a slow-moving market where buyers and renters have options, some developers are focusing on the overall vibe of the places they are creating. Those who understand the mood of the public are getting creative, and for those successful indie entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry, it can make for a strategic partnership.
The location might not generate the kinds of returns that a big corporate chain restaurant requires, but it can bring in healthy returns for an independent, said Mr. Macdonald.
“I got very, very much involved. And I’m not a retail expert. I don’t pretend to be,” he added.
“We could build it very quickly at the lowest possible cost, which we’ve done. We built that whole restaurant.”
A month into the venture, the Britannia Beach Autostrada is booming, says Autostrada Hospitality president and co-founder Dustin Dockendorf.
“Frankly, Britannia was not on our radar,” said Mr. Dockendorf. “But we were inspired by the story. We were inspired by the whole process of bringing this village back to life.
“It was definitely a bit of a risk as far as a location goes,” he said. “But we believe that, in this day and age, where people are exploring more and out seeing the world, thanks to social media, they’re going places they didn’t go before.”
And as the population moves outside of Vancouver’s urban centre and remote work continues, otherwise urban assets are emerging in other suburban areas.
Langley-based developer Marcon has teamed up with Nemesis Coffee to create a cafe called Tri-City Pavilion that it hopes will be a cultural hub and “an incubator for some of the best food and beverage concepts in Metro Vancouver” at its sales centre at 2968 Christmas Way. The build-out of their master-planned, multitower community will take years, but the developer looks to the Pavilion to give buyers a taste of what’s to come with a sleek, minimalist structure with wood beams, glass walls and a travertine floor. Popular Vancouver restaurant Ask For Luigi has also opened a bistro called Gigi’s at the Pavilion.
Marcon wants the Pavilion to become a cultural hub.Supplied
Nemesis Coffee founder and chief executive officer Jess Reno said he gets about five or six offers a week to open up satellite locations.
“We’re popping out to these other cities that haven’t really had anything like us, to be honest,” said Mr. Reno. Many of his customers know Nemesis from having visited its Vancouver location. “Now we’re just meeting them closer to home.
“You know, a lot of people can’t afford the core, so they’ve moved out,” he said.
Nic Paolella, executive vice-president of Marcon, said the slow real estate market has meant more competition and pressure to get back to the basics. He said there’s an “inflection point” happening in development. The successful developers will need to step up their game.
“You know, the traditional presales journey was a very, I would say, stale experience that had been kind of rinse and repeat for decades,” said Mr. Paolella.
“[Now], everyone has to be more focused on the core fundamentals. What your customer wants matters,” said Mr. Paolella. “There’s not an overflowing bucket of renters and buyers to go around.
“When people have options, and now they’re making a choice of where they want to be, they’re going to start picking the places that are most additive to their lives.”
Developer Barrett Sprowson, senior vice-president, residential at Peterson Group, said his company is taking a similar approach with a new 19-acre master-planned community near Sperling Station in Burnaby, B.C.
“With leasing, you curate your retail space, and that’s what we do,” said Mr. Sprowson. “You probably want a grocery store that has some scale. … Then you layer in. You want a funky coffee shop; you want some kind of cool pizza place that’s not a chain,” and so on.
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Developers of large purpose-built rental buildings are also adding food and beverage and event spaces to attract renters in a competitive market. Chard Development, based in Vancouver, is adding an independent local coffee retailer to a couple of their rental buildings in Victoria. The buildings have hundreds of units, so the idea is to attract renters by building a community.
“So how could it be we bring in a chef, and we can do a Friday night date night with, let’s say, 10 couples from the building? Could we be doing a painting night within some of those amenity rooms or offering group fitness classes in the actual gym?” said Byron Chard, president and chief executive officer.
“And that’s something that you can’t do in the smaller rental buildings. I would say that’s the evolution, is that there are rental buildings of this scale now. There wasn’t too many of them previously.
“I think this is just an evolution … of housing as some of these buildings are becoming denser.”