Restoring and renovating properties has been a shared passion for Fia Cooper and Alex Chuaqui.Jonathan Folk Media
980 Gower Point Rd., Gibsons, B.C.
Asking price: $1,998,000
Lot size: 11,625 square feet
Property taxes: $3,294.18 (2026)
Listing agents: Katie Burkard, Sue Scott, Engel & Volkers Vancouver
The Backstory
It may not seem like songwriting has much to do with building a home, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts – or perhaps the studs and nails – they really are quite similar.
For Fia Cooper and musician Alex Chuaqui, restoring and renovating properties has been the couple’s shared passion, but when they had the opportunity to build something from the ground up on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast they found an entirely new groove.
“Alex’s musical influences impact how he builds. He thinks about it the way a musician thinks about composition. He’s aware of how elements interact and how the space feels,” said Ms. Cooper. To compose means to put two or more things together, to create a new form, and that’s exactly what’s happened here.
Mr. Chuaqui didn’t start life as a builder of homes; he was still in high school when he and his friends formed the band Queen City Kids in Regina in 1968, which recorded albums and toured together until the early 1980s. Along the way, he worked in construction, renovating and flipping homes on the prairies and even building some new ones in Manitoba. After moving to Vancouver, he focused his renovation efforts on historic Gastown, and that’s where he met Ms. Cooper, an artist and metalwork designer who worked with him on some projects.
While cottaging on the Sunshine Coast, the couple came across two lots on Gower Point Road that posed a unique challenge: One was directly below the other, and though the lower lot was empty, building something there could impact the views of the house just above it. In 2025, they opted to renovate the home higher up on the hill and work with engineers and architects to fit a new home underneath those views.
Both are now for sale, but the lower house is special to them – a dramatic new building that combines some of their favourite techniques, materials and textures into a modern, contemporary home that still feels like a work of art, a song or a sculpture.
“Gower offered this opportunity to do something really tasteful, really elegant and hone in on the details to a really refined end,” said Mr. Chuaqui. “I don’t often say this, but we achieved about as close to perfection as possible with that house, with very few compromises.”
The House Today
As you pull up to Gower, the built-up landscaping of the hillside partially conceals the house until a long concrete driveway guides you up, past the lower-floor walkout and carport, up to the side where the garage is located. The long side of the house faces the road and the ocean beyond, and two longer wings are clad in black metal, centred by a square of cedar shake cladding that juts out into the balcony (and carries on below on the lower level) which extends across the common living spaces.
The front door also faces the ocean, and is framed by reed glass (a type of privacy glass with vertical grooves that diffuses the light), which reminds Mr. Chuaqui of his grandmother’s house in Chile, which had some of this glass in her kitchen. “When you get your face right up to it, you have this beautiful distortion. It triggers something very classic for me,” he said.
Inside the front foyer, there’s an opening to the kitchen and a long hallway that runs along the back of the house connecting all the rooms on this level. That hallway opens up in the combined living and dining space, and narrows again as it travels toward the two bedrooms, with the primary suite as the ultimate destination of the hallway.
In the kitchen, the white quartz counters sit below gigantic picture windows showing off the ocean, with a peninsula housing the gas range separating the space from the dining room. An island centres the space.
In the living room/dining room, there are two oversized sliding glass doors, with transom windows above to pull more light into a space that has 13-foot ceilings. In the corner opposite the windows is a fireplace in a pearly Venetian plaster, done by hand by Mr. Chuaqui, who became obsessed with the craft years before.
“That’s one of my passions,” he said, “When I had no money, I was working with a woman doing set design, and she introduced me to different textures and different plasters. I was just fascinated by it. It’s a very tricky material; there are three or four layers, and you can’t stop, or they look unseemly. It would be an eight- to 10-hour process to burnish all these layers.”
The two artists found places in the house where they could use certain materials in order to add flourishes to the space: Ms. Cooper was particularly pleased to include, outside the downstairs walkout, a wall of board-formed concrete, which gives the texture of a wooden wall.
“I’m drawn to natural materials,” said Ms. Cooper. “The satisfaction of craftsmanship, it feels really good.” The couple may have spent more time and money on some elements than is necessarily economic, but they were drawn to the problem-solving and creative solution-making of the process more than trying to cut corners for the budget. “If you don’t enjoy it, you’re just a developer,” Mr. Chuaqui said.
Outside
During early the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple moved across Howe Sound from the more rock ‘n’ roll environment of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to stay full-time on the Sunshine Coast. While this home’s proximity to the ocean – just a three-minute walk – provided inspiration to orient the house toward the views, it has other benefits that inspired the installation of a steam shower in the primary ensuite.
“[Alex] goes and jumps in the ocean every morning and has a steam shower and a coffee,” said Ms. Cooper.
He’s been doing that for about four years after seeing Ms. Cooper’s mother, in her 70s, doing the same thing.
“There was an enormous change in her disposition – she attributed it to going in the water,” said Mr. Chuaqui. “It was transformative. It became so therapeutic and so cathartic, it puts you in the moment. There’s a wonderful connection with nature on the Sunshine Coast. It is a great place to connect, and you suddenly don’t miss that buzz of Vancouver.”