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There’s only so much time you can spend marvelling at the mountains of Canmore through the window of a hotel room.
That’s what Jemma and Barry Murray of Calgary were doing more weekends than they care to admit, travelling the road west with their son, Noah, to enjoy the fresh alpine air and friendly confines of a 20- by 14-foot rented room.
Now the small family, complete with their 13-year-old terrier, enjoys a true mountain lifestyle in their very own 1,200-square-foot townhome in Versant at Stewart Creek, near Canmore’s Stewart Creek Golf Course.
“There are about three different developments in the Three Sisters area that we looked at, but when we discovered Versant, it was absolutely beautiful. Absolutely stunning,” says Jemma, a 37-year-old financial reporting manager. She and husband Barry, a joint venture specialist, emigrated nine years ago from Scotland.
The Murrays’ unit in Grassi Lodge, one of three buildings in Phase Two of Versant, was a tad over the couple’s budget when they first contemplated making an offer.
“We originally looked at the unit next door and fell in love with it even though it was at the high end of our budget. But we procrastinated and by the time we came back, it was gone. The place we’re in now cost more, but in comparing it to other condos in location, size and value for money, we decided it was worth going over our budget to get this place,” Jemma explains.
The two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit boasts an open floor plan with living room, dining room and kitchen. Each bedroom is spacious enough for a king-sized bed with room to spare and offers lots of storage. Their ground floor unit has a patio on the main and another on the second level. The Murrays can hardly wait to entertain both sets of parents scheduled to visit from Scotland this year.
Two new show suites have just opened in the Uto Lodge at Versant at Stewart Creek, the last property before the golf course on Stewart Creek Drive, just off the Three Sisters Parkway on the south side of the Trans-Canada Highway. Each building or lodge is named for early Canmore guides and mountain pi- oneers. The project as a whole was called Versant, a French word for “rim rock” because of its location high on the mountain.
Wheeler and Webber Chalets are in the now-complete first phase. Phase 2 features stacked townhomes in the Uto, Grassi and Engler Lodges with a planned Phase 3 which will bring the total number of homes to 52. There are currently 24 units at different stages of construction in Phase 2 and only 14 are left according to project manager John Third.
“These are two-bedroom, two-bath and three-bedroom, threebath stacked townhomes,” says Third, a longtime Canmore recreational property specialist who is also the builder and developer of Versant with partners Keith Brown and Richard Bremner.
He refers to them as lodge-style, meaning each unit has an exterior front door. The beauty of Versant, apart from the obvious and natural beauty of the surrounding mountains, is the style and quality of the architecture of each lodge.
“All of our product is really well done. We’ve built quality. Real timber frame rather than decorative timber frame and real rock facades rather than what I call sticky stone or artificial stone on the outside,” he describes.
Each lodge has a deluxe underground parkade and each owner has two parking stalls.
“If you run up on a Thursday and your husband decides to run up on Friday, you want to make sure you have enough parking, especially in a mountain environment where the weather can change quickly,” he says.
Third refers to Versant as being a baby boomer product.
“It’s for people looking for a lifestyle change or who want to downsize so they can spend more time in the fresh air, in a healthy community like Canmore,” he says.
The Murrays may be younger than many Versant buyers, but they feel completely at home.
“We know most of the people here and we look out for each other. The lady next door is of Icelandic heritage and she was doing some baking the other day and brought some round to the neighbours,” Jemma says. “It’s only an hour and a quarter or an hour and a half away from Calgary but it feels like a million miles away. We really got lucky.”
It’s for people looking for a lifestyle change or who want to downsize so they can spend more time in the fresh air, in a healthy community like Canmore. John Third, project manager, Versant at Stewart Creek