Some Vancouver residential towers make a splash when first constructed; others are ‘sleepers’ who accrue admiration and value through the years, as the innate strength of their original design features become apparent. Pomaria is such a building. Pomaria was an early pioneer in what is fast becoming one of the most important groupings of prestige luxury condo towers in Vancouver.

At Beach and Howe is 888 Beach, the James Cheng double tower on townhouse base that in the late 1980s initiated what is now world-famous as the “Vancouverist Typology”: thin condo towers on continuous townhouse podiums. The urban amenity contribution from that project built the public park at Howe and Beach that now provides the southern edge to Pomaria. More recently, the impressive Vancouver House development rose immediately across the street, Westbank’s condo/office/retail development nestled against the Granville Bridge, a design by Bjarke Ingels of BIG.

Pomaria is a 31 storey building in a variation of the tower and podium arrangement, and was completed in 2007. The developer was Qualax-Landmark, and it received the Urban Development Institute Award as best Vancouver high rise residential tower the year it opened. The design is from Rafii Architects, where the project architect was Robert Kleyn.

There are some key features that set it apart from the pack. A portion of the podium section was granted live-work zoning, meaning licensed businesses can be operated from these units. Pomaria was also ahead of the curve by being the first LEED-certified multi-unit residential building within the City of Vancouver and the third in British Columbia. Achieved in part by using geothermal technology to reduce its carbon footprint, which in turn produced the need for a water feature in the alley courtyard to scrub excess heat in summer. Pomaria also showed environmental leadership by installing a green roof before this became near-standard practice in Vancouver.

Part of its signature and environmental connectivity are two recessed Skygardens, one on the 16th floor for the 4 units on that floor while the larger Skygarden is on level 19 for the use of the 3 strata lots on that floor. Both Skygardens expand upwards for 3 levels.

Kleyn’s design successfully questions some prevailing assumptions of Vancouver luxury housing in the early 2000s. Many architects strove to have individual physical expression of the form of each housing unit, forming into a kind of historic hill-town effect as they rise up a slope, as Howe does here. Rather than creating individual massing for Pomaria’s townhouses, Kleyn grouped them into blocks of single buildings.

Similarly, in reacting against the bare glass and concrete boxes prevailing then, Kleyn’s tower design is unusually articulated-a variety of expressions is used to make each elevation different. For example, one side of the tower is splayed, making it appear much slenderer from below.

Generally, building structure is frankly expressed on the exterior, most noticeably in the form of a super-order grid (white concrete frame two storeys high) that runs up two of the elevations, an element which accentuates their verticality. These super-order grid rises in front of gaps and take off up from roof decks, forming frames in the sky.

Some of these design elements are in dialogue with James Cheng’s 888 Beach, then Kleyn’s innovations in turn prompt responses from Bjarke Ingels’ Vancouver House, an unusual and needed Vancouver dialogue of design. Lower Howe Street has become Vancouver’s locus of housing innovation.