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The Keefer suites' interiors are designed with a modern flair and an eye to comfort. The Keefer's rooftop pool also forms the ceiling of the fifth-floor penthouse suite. The Keefer aims to fill the gap between a short-stay hotel and a high-end rental by offering all the conveniences of concierge life. Developer Cameron Watt rehabbed a century-old warehouse in downtown Vancouver with attention to its antique details. The Keefer Bar plays on the hotel-residence's Chinatown location with its Asian tapas�inspired fare and signature cocktails. |
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Like most Olympic host cities, Vancouver is busily sprucing up its tourist quarters in anticipation of the waves of international visitors that will descend upon it in February for the 2010 winter games. But thanks to a number of visionary developers and strong municipal support, even some of the city's formerly seedy corners are being groomed for their close-ups. Along with a spate of trendy lounges and restaurants, a new boutique hotel-residence called The Keefer is preparing its Chinatown digs to become a hub for locals and international jet-setters alike.
“Chinatown used to be a place where you'd go out at night—my parents used to go to for dinner and drinks—and that just sort of died out like twenty, thirty years ago,” says the property's developer, Cam Watt. Founded years before Vancouver was incorporated, and bolstered by a wave of immigration following the United States Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinatown became an anchor for the immigrants who built the Central Pacific Railroad. It's now North America's second-largest Chinatown, behind San Francisco's, and the area has endured points low (Canada enforced its own anti-immigration Exclusion Act from 1923 to 1947) and high (the city designated it a historic district in 1971) ever since.
In other words, the neighborhood was primed for an adrenaline shot when Watt purchased the four-story Edwardian warehouse at 135 Keefer Street in 2006. An unlikely rose among its industrial surroundings, the warehouse was built for the Vancouver Gas Company a century ago. Over the years it has retained all the original details imagined by G. L. T. Sharp and Charles Joseph Thompson, the famed Canadian architects who drafted the Burrard Bridge, the Vancouver Club, and much of the University of British Columbia's original campus. Watt hired Gair Williamson Architects, a local firm that specializes in historical modernizations, to return the warehouse exterior's glazed brick, metal spandrels, timber mullions, and double-hung wooden-sash windows to their original glory. Watt had planned to convert the building into condominiums, but when the real estate market crumbled, the Vancouver native realized that he could use it to fill a void in the city's hospitality market and help revitalize the neighborhood.
If all goes according to plan, Watt and his fellow entrepreneurs will have helped this placid, agreeable city to live up to its cosmopolitan nickname, “Hollywood North,” so dubbed for the influx of film and television industry types lured north by government subsidies and favorable filming conditions. (Juno, Jennifer's Body, and 2012 were all filmed here recently.) In fact, Watt reconceived The Keefer as a long-term hotel-residence in part to attract film moguls as well as upscale tourists and corporate clients. “There's such a shortage of large, nice spaces in Vancouver that are fully equipped,” says Watt, noting that The Keefer eschews the minifridge-desk-and-a-couch ethos of most long-term rentals for something decidedly edgier and more inviting via such amenities as a pool, en-suite gyms, and a full-service concierge. “It's almost a hotel,” explains Watt. “What we're providing is a true home in the city, where people can get comfortable.”
A home, perhaps, but not homely; The Keefer is one of the hippest abodes you could imagine, with art by the likes of Generation X novelist Douglas Coupland on the walls; a spartan, boxer-friendly gym (outfitted with a medicine ball, speed bag, and chin-up bar) in each of the four suites; a late-night Asian tapas bar; and a ten-yard-long, glass-bottomed rooftop pool that forms the ceiling of the fifth-floor penthouse. The Keefer won't open until mid-November, but Watt has already been inundated with requests from wedding parties to use the rooftop, which features a sleek, cantilevered pergola and stunning city views. He is also fielding calls from various ski and snowboard manufacturers, who are eyeing the entire building for possible use as hospitality suites during the Olympics.
While The Keefer's 2,400-square-foot, two-bedroom suites are usually bookable only by the month, they'll be offered for daily rates during the games (see below for information). Inside, Watt's former wife, interior designer Wendy Williams Watt, imbued each suite with a rustic modernity, with milled white-oak floors and contemporary Italian and refurbished antique furniture, punctuated by bright Pop-art works commissioned from Coupland, Cam Watt's pal since high school. In the penthouse hangs The Queen Is Dead, a glossy, 110-by-88-inch word piece made from a matrix of lacquered and painted wooden tiles, and twenty-four-foot groupings of painted canvases that feature the contorted bodies of 1960s slam wrestlers in the other suites. “I wanted ikebana”—the Japanese art of flower arrangement, which emphasizes form and balance—“but didn't want to use flowers per se,” says Coupland of the work. “It's a leap in all senses.”
The same might be said of The Keefer Bar, designed by cutting-edge Vancouver firm Battersby Howat. A dark tunnel of charred wood, vintage Chinese signage, lightboxes glowing with street photography, and industrial chandeliers hewn from orange extension cords and Edison light bulbs, it more than lives up to Watt's comparison to “an old alley in Shanghai.” Local chefs Karl Gregg and Allan Bosomworth match the cuisine to the mood by using classic French techniques to render jiu cai (Mandarin for “liquor food”) from various Asian cities. Translation: fire-grilled edamame with sea salt, hand-pickled vegetable condiments, and dim sum filled with meats from British Columbia's award-winning Polderside Farms. There's even a charcuterie plate with house-made sausage, barbecue pork, Mantou bread, and Peking duck rillettes.
And if you're in town for the games but can't score one of The Keefer's suites, take heart—the bar's tasty tapas and Asian-inspired drinks will be served into the wee hours. Watt also recommends two new establishments right around the block: “There's a girl starting up a little izakaya [Bao Bei], and there's a nightclub behind me called the Fortune Sound Club, which is the place in Vancouver,” he says. “The Chinatown Merchants Association is really excited about this because nothing new has happened in Chinatown for a long time.” Until now, that is.
The Keefer, 135 Keefer Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, www.thekeefer.com. Opens mid-November, with suites starting at $4,950 per month. Daily rates during Olympics available upon request.
Michael Slenske is a writer based in New York. He is a contributor for GQ.com and Interviewmagazine.com.
Photography credits:
- Courtesy The Keefer Vancouver
- Courtesy The Keefer Vancouver
- Courtesy The Keefer Vancouver
- Courtesy The Keefer Vancouver
- Courtesy The Keefer Vancouver
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