Last week, I was able to attend the open house and launch for the Westholme Hotel proposal for the corner of Pandora and Government. This is at least the third iteration for a hotel on this site over the last many years. Given the look of the last one, I was going in with some trepidation. The Westholme Hotel was the original name for the Victoria Plaza Hotel which burnt down in 2019. You can read my article following the fire here. Since the fire, the site has sat vacant, with wooden hoarding up around it. So while some might say that anything is better than what is there, I don’t agree and am glad that we didn’t get the last iteration, still we also can’t wait forever for something that will please everyone. These are tall orders for a developer.
As soon as I went into the open house I was presented with a rendering of the proposal. The building is completely unlike the previous design and really unlike other buildings in the area or the city. The words modern and bold came immediately to mind as I looked through the assortment of renderings that were presented. This proposal is a joint project between Redbrick and Aryze Developments. The open house itself, held in the atrium of 1515 Douglas was vibrant and busy and there were lots of staff there to answer questions. That said, I left thinking more about the potential impact of the building rather than the design itself. But, as with any proposal for a new building, you have to start there, with design. Following on from that though, are the important aspects of the economics, and the context both of the specific site and the broader area of downtown.
The Design
This project sits at the south east corner of the intersection of Pandora and Government, right across the street from MEC. The building has two main components. A three storey podium and a 14 storey tower above it. Compared with many of our recent proposals, the design here is really modern, elegant and unique. The podium has a over-height main floor, which is what every building downtown should have, followed by two more regular height floors. The ground floor looks to have commercial and some sort of bar on the corner. If that bar is called anything other than the Prince Saloon, I will be disappointed. The facade material appears to be brick and it is clear that the building is meant to be an homage to old town and the original Westholme Hotel. I would say that it has some visual links to 595 Pandora down the block though done in a less Po-Mo way. Above the podium, is an open level with a massive deck. I imagine this will either be the spa or some of the guest amenities. It is from this floor up that the visual nature of the building completely shifts to a narrower and set-back glass tower. The tower is layered in three storey portions which are each slightly off-set and different than each other. It is a striking modern design that would definitely set a precedent for quality in the core. While I can imagine there will be significant pushback on the height (I have already seen concern on my facebook post that went up), I think that when we are balancing the need for investment and this specific site, the tradeoff is definitely worth it. Also as many of you will know, I am not of the opinion that height should be the determining factor of whether a building should be approved or not. Often you don’t have to go much beyond the first few floors.
Outside on the corner of Government and Pandora would be a large plaza, which exists today, but is mainly just empty space and Victoria’s only pissoir. The plan would be to turn this into an actual plaza with benches and greenery. I will note, that there was an opportunity at the open house to add comments on the plaza about how best to activate the space. You can be sure that I said that there needs to be multiple things going on to make it a place people want to go.
The Economics
Victoria is at an important juncture when it comes to its economy and tourism specifically. With the impacts of less office workers still being felt in the core, the city needs to find opportunities to increase the amount of people downtown throughout the day. While we are seeing a large number of residential projects moving forward, they are just a small drop in comparison to the workers that were lost. There is another source of people and one that is highly motivated to spend money around the city, and that is tourists. With the removal of AirBNB as a real option for visitors, it’s clear that we can no longer provide enough space for everyone that wants to visit here and at the same time ensure it doesn’t get too expensive. Destination Victoria says we need about 2000 more hotel rooms. While I fully recognise the concerns around tourism from a climate change and housing perspective, Victoria has had tourism as a central piece of its economy since the early 1900’s. It will be a monumental and painful shift for us to ever move off of it as a major pillar of our economy. The benefit of living in a city that has significant tourism is that we get stores, restaurants and amenities that you would never get in a city of our size without it. And that brings me back to this specific hotel which would bring 198 rooms to this north central part of downtown. When full, each of the likely couple hundred people there would be going out to events and restaurants around the hotel. This leads nicely into the next item I want to discuss.
The Context
There are two key pieces to the context of the city that this building will sit in: its placement on a challenging part of Government Street and the potential for this hotel to help spur a new central hotel district.
The 1400 block of Government has been a barrier in the downtown core since I moved here in the 1990’s. As Victoria’s main tourist thoroughfare, you would think that it would be an easy walk for tourists from the northern part of the Government Street pedestrian mall to Chinatown, but the 1400 block has always held back a good portion of those that may have considered walking north without direction. As residents, it is easy to look past the challenges of a block. We know what is past it, but think of the last time you were in a new city for the first time exploring. You are constantly looking for visual cues to let you know that it is worth continuing on in the direction you are going and that it is safe to do so. For many years, the central cues of the 1400 block were an old dilapidated office building with reflective glass on the ground floor and a strip club on the other side. I had high hopes for the redevelopment of the building into The Vogue, as it is known. Unfortunately, having a single commercial unit that runs an entire block only marginally improves things from the perspective of the visitor and across the street, we have dealt with an abandoned building which eventually burned down and has been a vacant lot for seven years. You would have to go back likely at least 40 or 50 years to find a time when this block would have been inviting to stroll along. This project, at least the details that I have seen so far, will change this. As I said before, there is a plan for over-height windows and commercial and restaurant space along the ground floor. This creates an inviting tapestry of uses along the eastern side of the street that will compliment the few stores that already exist along there. The small plaza the the northern end of the site will provide some greenery and hopefully some animation to the street. While any potential hotel on this site could theoretically do this, I think that the proposal at this point looks very promising and when we have been waiting for this long to improve this block, maybe it is time to take someone up on it if they have an inviting design and well thought out plan.
As I said in the economics section, hotels can provide a vibrancy to a city that residential buildings and office can’t. They have captive residents that want to go out to eat and shop. As it stands now, there are few hotels in the central part of the city, but that is changing. If this hotel proceeds there would be four decent sized hotels within a block of each other with The Rialto, The Carlton Plaza, and the under-construction, Hyatt Centric on Broad Street. If you count Swan’s, a block to the west, it makes five right in this area. The opportunity around a hotel zone for places like the McPherson Playhouse, as well as the many restaurants and shops is immense. I think it also shows a little of the changing face of Victoria, which especially when it has come to tourism, has been focused along the water and around the legislature. Here instead, we are seeing quality hotels focused on the city itself.
While there are still many details to be laid out for this proposal, meetings with the community and city planners to be had, for a first go at a proposal, I think that it is very strong. I look forward to seeing it proceed, so long as it is somewhat close to this current vision. I would love to hear your thoughts though. What do you think of the design? What would you change and why?
