How Vancouver’s New Condo Tower Blends Affordable Housing with Luxury Units

Vancouver is a tale of two cities. Its downtown real estate prices have duelled with Toronto’s for the most expensive in Canada, with wealthy buyers casually snapping up one-bedroom condos for $760,000, their current benchmark price. At the same time, housing advocates estimate that Metro Vancouver needs to build roughly 11,000 new affordable units each year to stem the city’s homelessness problem. The Butterfly, opened earlier this year, houses residents at the high and lower ends of the income spectrum—in one extremely tall package.

The project took off in 2012, when the Canadian developer Westbank tapped Revery, a local architecture firm, for a very specific job: fusing a luxury tower that would “take their breath away” with affordable rental units and community amenities closer to ground level, on land owned by the First Baptist Church of Vancouver. The Butterfly was the first tower proposed under the city’s West End Community Plan, meant to diversify the area’s housing offerings. Still, with such mixed uses, its blueprint drew scrutiny from the city for stepping outside of the typical glass box; rezoning alone took four years. By the time the Butterfly emerged from its construction cocoon this spring, it was 57 storeys high, with 331 luxury units in the tower portion. Adjacent to it were a seven-storey apartment complex (with 61 affordable units) and an expansion of the church’s original Gothic Revival structure.

The tower takes inspiration from other buildings with open breezeways, like the Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. Glass fibre–reinforced concrete and blue glazing give the exterior a rippling, cloud-like look. Each floor includes between four and eight condos—starting at $3.5 million—and a “sky garden,” which, at every third level, has a planter with saplings inside. At the base, an inward curve evokes the tops of church pipe organs.

The tower is slowly welcoming residents from the bottom up, with penthouse-dwellers expected by early fall. The other two builds, meanwhile, are already operational. The reno’d First Baptist Church, linked to the tower by a public atrium, now has extra room for its gym, an emergency overnight shelter and a community dining hall with a commercial kitchen. Across the way, residents are filling up urban garden plots and enjoying the rental building’s outdoor kitchen and landscaped playgrounds. There’s something for everyone.