One of the world’s largest hotel chains has been lined up to operate North America’s tallest mass timber hotel, planned for Granville Island in Vancouver. It comes after Wyndham Hotels & Resorts revealed that the ‘WaterWalk by Wyndham’ brand would operate a 160-room hotel on the site of Vancouver’s disused rail yards. That is according to new project plans and renderings submitted by Arno Matis Architecture to redevelop 1500-1588 West 3rd Ave. into a 162-ft-tall, 18-storey hotel tower.
The new plans comes after Wood Central revealed in March that Arno Matis Architecture and Urbanism revealed plans for a 175-foot hotel to be built over land acquired by the city from the Canadian Pacific’s Arbutus railway corridor that would be taller than University of British Columbia’s 174-foot Brock Commons Tallhouse student residence, for a time the world’s tallest mass timber building. Wood Central understands that the revised scheme, 12 feet smaller than the March plans, now calls for a hotel with 160 rooms, which Arno Matis Architecture and Urbanism said would still be one of the world’s tallest built out of wood.
Speaking to Daily Hive, the firm said the design and details, which are subject to change, will help the city address a chronic shortage of room nights and include very preliminary conceptual artistic renderings depicting a slender building with an exoskeleton-patterned facade inspired by organic forms, active ground-level hotel spaces, and indoor and outdoor hotel amenities on a landscaped tower rooftop.
According to the application, its hybrid mass timber design—a first for a hotel in Vancouver—not only provides environmental benefits compared to conventional steel and concrete structures, but its lightweight prefabrication also reduces construction costs and timelines: “Exposed mass timber construction would be ideally suited for a boutique hotel project and very much in tune with the timber vibe of the adjacent Granville Island shopping district,” according to Fast + Epp, one of the world’s leading structural engineers when it comes to mass timber.
The new scheme comes after Canada’s third-largest province changed its construction code to allow British Columbia developers to build all-timber buildings up to 18 storeys – a 50% increase permitted under the old code. The British Columbia Building and Fire Codes (BC Codes 2024), which came into effect in March last year, is part of a sweep of programs aimed at reducing embodied carbon and decarbonising construction – and comes as Canada, in 2023, became a signatory of the coalition of countries that will incentivise wooden construction to meet net-zero.
- To read more about the push to grow mass timber construction in Vancouver, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
