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Articles of Section 'Urban Living'.

Urban Living

How green and veggie beautiful is your garden?

By Angela Murrills
Small white flowers, blue-black berries, golden-orange leaves, vivid red stalks—hearing Caitlin Black describe the seasons of a blueberry bush makes you want to go out and plant your whole yard with them. Black and her husband, Owen, are partners in Aloe Designs, a company that creates gardens for people who not only care about their own patch but about the planet at large.
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Urban Living

Designs flaunt simple, sexy, and lots of wood at IDSWEST

By Angela Murrills
Wood is good was the underlying theme at Interior Design Show West (IDSWEST), held March 19 to 22 at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre.
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Urban Living

Fresh laundry, EcoRoof tiles and hot tubs at BC Home and Garden Show

By Angela Murrills
Is this a truly filthy province, or is everyone in dire need of therapy? How else to explain the cascade of cleaning aids being hustled at last week’s BC Home and Garden Show. It began as soon as you got inside B.C. Place Stadium, where a lineup of “spring clean” vignettes from the Bay took attendees past the laundry rooms of four hypothetical households, presumably neighbours.
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Urban Living

The English eccentric home

By Angela Murrills
After you’ve walked through the secret garden, up the front steps, and past the wicker chairs on the porch, the first thing you see when you enter Nikki Renshaw’s Kits heritage house is a massive Union Jack rug on the floor. Not the conventional flag, the subversive Vivienne Westwood version.
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Urban Living

Hot touches help spirit warm to hibernation

By Angela Murrills
Vancouver is split into those who do and those who don't–ski, that is. Those of us who don't welcome weekends on the slopes enjoy a cleared-out house in which to crank up the thermostat and turn on the lights. Well, maybe a couple of years ago we did, but not now that we know what we're doing to the planet. If environmental altruism doesn't get you, remember that electricity costs money.
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Urban Living

Don’t kiss your garden or its bounty goodbye

By Angela Murrills
That whoosh you just heard was summer going by. Wasn’t it only yesterday that you were idling around the garden centre, deciding between hot-pink and salmon geraniums, and taking home flats of small annuals that have now grown big and colourful (or, in the case of my usually reliable lobelia, not). What happened? Right now, most beds, borders, and balconies are at their peak of gorgeousness, but give them a few weeks and they’ll be a sorry sight.
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Urban Living | Straight Talk

NDP says BC Housing broke pledge

By Charlie Smith
NDP housing critic Diane Thorne has claimed that BC Housing officials told her last March that the redevelopment of the 224-unit Little Mountain social-housing complex would be a phased project. "That's what they told me," Thorne told the Straight . "It would be phased to try and minimize the dislocation for the tenants."
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Urban Living

Laneway houses prove smaller can be better

By Angela Murrills
With a footprint measuring only 3.7 by 6.7 metres, the wood building with the huge windows overlooking the Fraser River is too small to fit the City's definition of a living space. But you don't really need much more, say Jake Fry and Aaron Rosensweet, who, through their company Smallworks, are trying to alter the way we think about housing by providing a commonsense solution to the Vancouver problems of high prices and tall buildings: laneway housing.
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Urban Living

Cocking a naughty leg on traditional furniture

By Angela Murrills
Seeing a person's workspace is like looking inside her head. Judson Beaumont of Straight Line Designs is talking about the insights people gain from visiting artists' studios during the annual East Side Culture Crawl. So what do you glean from his office? Consider the evidence.
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Urban Living

Wanted: an urban oasis

By Angela Murrills
These days you need money, not smarts, to hang up your shingle in Yaletown or on Main Street, but the tenderloin? Susan Schroeder explains why she and partner Derek McCluskey chose to be pioneers when they opened their store, Wanted–Lost Found Canadian, (436 Columbia Street, open 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily) last November in what may well be the city's next hot area. The low rent appealed, for a start; she also loved the historic buildings: "I like the area, it's vibrant.
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Urban Living | Chic of the Week

DV Interior Design & Urban Living Expo

By Angela Murrills
Feathering your nest takes on new meaning at this year's DV (Design Vancouver) Interior Design & Urban Living Expo, taking place at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre, where highlights include a giant bird's nest being built from Stanley Park debris by local designer Brent Comber. Take a look, too, at Smallworks' small-footprint "laneway house", and new uses for all that wood ravaged by mountain pine beetles. This is the place to hook up with innovative design and designers.
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Urban Living

Enviro-friendly design gets a Swell patina

By Angela Murrills
On the one hand, there's Birkenstocks, scratchy hemp cushions, and oat-heavy granola; on the other, the elegance of French fair-trade sneakers, the patina of century-old pine, and the sweet juiciness of just-picked peaches. That's one way to explain the difference between "dark green" and "bright green" environmentalism. "Dark green," as Toby Barratt describes it, "is what people are prejudiced against.
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Urban Living

Renovating green gets easier and irresistible

By Angela Murrills
Ever wonder about the final destiny of all those empty Molson's, Merlot, and designer water bottles you return to the LDB or toss in your blue box? Try a bathroom wall. Remoulded, and imprinted with three-dimensional dragonflies and other designs, they morph into handsome accent pieces at Mellon Glass, in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast. Some terminology first: this is postconsumer glass, culled from folks like you and me.
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Urban Living

Dramatic design puts workers in the game

By Angela Murrills
You might feel justifiably twitchy if a heart surgeon’s office was rife with KISS memorabilia or your accountant hung his walls with Pamela Anderson posters. And you don’t need to check the name on the door to spot which is the art director’s office and which is the account person’s in an ad agency (or, in industry terms, which is the “wrist” and which is the “suit”). Workspace should reflect the work that goes on in it.
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Movies Features | Urban Living

Filming Mount Pleasant

By Ken Eisner
Stories, needles litter the landscape of Ross Weber’s neighbourhood
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Urban Living

Paint over the winter blues with a new hue

By Angela Murrills
One of life’s little conundrums is that during the months when you’re stuck indoors climbing the walls, you could be painting them; when it turns warm enough to open the windows to release those paint smells, though, you’d rather be outdoors. That’s how it used to be, anyway.
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Urban Living

Crafters go to pieces over ancient art form

By Janet Smith
As Mojo Nixon once claimed, Elvis truly is everywhere. At Broken by Design, the city’s first studio dedicated to mosaics, Presley’s portrait sits on a worktable, fashioned from black and white hexagonal tiles.
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Urban Living

Indigenous design informs chic importer

By Janet Smith
Things at the chic new Eighteen Karat Home Store at 3039 Granville Street are not exactly as they appear. Inside the atmospheric digs that once housed Martha Sturdy’s flagship store, towering hourglass-shaped ceramic vases, satiny black ­lacquered trays, and charcoal jute rugs epitomize the height of décor fashions.
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Urban Living

Reduce, reuse, and reupholster that sofa

The night before garbage pickup, whose thieving hands haven't surreptitiously liberated an abandoned chair from an alleyway? Ever volunteered to adopt the beat-up sofa a friend is throwing out, telling yourself you'll give it a face-lift? Then reality hits.
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Urban Living

Odds and sods inspire makers of collage

By Angela Murrills
Two minutes in the door of RubyDog's Art House and you recognize that it is a very dangerous place.
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Urban Living

Style books put soul into home and office

By Angela Murrills
No one can pinpoint the precise moment when flaky '50s morphed into midcentury modern. But then again, who knew? Before you boot any more heirlooms off to Big Brothers, grab yourself one of these gems.
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Urban Living

Design show urges to think small and woody

By Angela Murrills
Deliberately not geared to folks who occupy spacious family homes with sprawling back yards, DV, Vancouver's recent Interior Design & Urban Living Expo at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre, was aimed squarely at space-squeezed city dwellers.
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Urban Living

Assembly nurtures the lost art of letters

By Angela Murrills
One has fair hair, and the other has dark, but otherwise Rebecca Dolen and Brandy Fedoruk could be two of the Bennet sisters (the sensible, not the flighty, ones) in Pride and Prejudice. Their demeanour is modest, even blushingly shy, and they have near identical handwriting, small but perfectly formed, a notable skill in a world where putting words directly on paper is a dying art.
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Urban Living

Will design diva's trends work for West Coast?

By Angela Murrills
Awaiting us on each white-draped round table is a design quiz. "Decifer [sic] the trend," reads the first challenge. The designers and I confer. What is the symbolism behind this graphic of a flag showing a white cross on a grey background? Are we in for a spell of Swiss Army Knife kitchens? Let's get serious here. Switzerland is neutral. The colour is grey.
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Urban Living

Excavate Hidden City for tempting treasures

By Angela Murrills
I'd have been better off buying dubious penny stocks, because this much I know: cherished these past 10 years, my vintage 100-percent-authentic Princess Pat Hair Net made from Real Human Hair won't make a fortune on eBay. Not in my lifetime. Not when you can currently pick one up for four bucks at the Hidden City Collect n' Consign (4333 Fraser Street).
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All Issues Containing 'Urban Living'