From Arthur, with Love
A pair of architects give an Erickson-designed loft a whole new lease on life.
Architect Jeremy Sturgess’s stepmother is notoriously hard to buy gifts for. So when the Alberta-based creative discovered the perfect tea towel while visiting Granville Island’s Circle Craft Gallery, he snapped it up to give her at Christmas. It depicted a survey drawing of downtown Vancouver circa 1891—a nod to Sturgess’s own city drawings from the Calgary practice he shares with his architect wife, Lesley Beale.
But he couldn’t have known just how perfect it would be: it turned out that the tea towel print was actually a drawing by Sturgess’s grandfather, Robert Palmer, who had also been an assistant engineer with the City of Vancouver. “No one in our family knew this history and the connection to this city—stumbling onto that opened up a door to our past,” says Sturgess.
Just four years earlier, Sturgess and Beale had begun casually looking for property in Vancouver while on Christmas break. And though they had hopes of finding something larger to develop, it was a compact condo for sale in the Arthur Erickson–designed Waterfall Building near Granville Island that ultimately won them over.
“We already knew about this building and had a huge respect for Arthur Erickson and Nick Milkovich,” says Beale. “It’s sometimes hard for architects to live in other people’s designs. But not Arthur's—it speaks to the quality of the design.” This little piece of Vancouver’s architectural history was originally constructed as artist lofts and studios with live/work zoning. As such, the space was spartan, with the walls, ceiling and stairs cast in concrete; one small bathroom on the second floor; and a tiny but serviceable kitchen. “It was deliberately done without closets so it was kept affordable for artists,” adds Sturgess. “It was meant to be bare bones.”