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Weekly roundup of three properties that recently sold in Metro Vancouver.

3354 Peak Dr., Whistler

Type: Five-bedroom, four-bathroom detached

Size: 3,958 square feet

B.C. Assessment: $7,230,000

Listed for: $7,900,000

Sold for: $6,700,000

Sold on: April 1

Days on market in this listing: 196

Listing agent: Steve Cartner PREC and Martina Cartner at Rennie & Associates Realty

Buyers agent: Nick Swinburne PREC at Angell Hasman & Associates Realty

The big sell: This private sanctuary in Whistler’s Blueberry Hill neighbourhood epitomizes understated luxury blending rustic charm with refined modern updates. With a design esthetic that focuses on natural elements perfectly crafted to create a stylish interior, the result is one of sophisticated warmth showcasing soaring vaulted ceilings offset by exposed beams, full-height stone-surround fireplaces, a Shaker-style kitchen, and expansive windows that frame mountain and forest views. The interior is laid out over three floors with bedrooms on each level, and an energy-efficient system with air conditioning, radiant heat, and a heat pump. The property was built in 1996 on almost a third-acre lot and resides at the end of a cul-de-sac backing onto forested crown land ensuring that nature is front and centre, while Whistler Village, lakes, golf courses and trails are all nearby.

73 – 2212 Folkestone Way, West Vancouver

Type: One-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment

Size: 1,045 square feet

B.C. Assessment: $855,600

Listed for: $855,000

Sold for: $785,000

Sold on: March 20

Days on market in this listing: 28

Listing agent: Holly Calderwood PREC at Royal LePage Sussex

Buyers agent: Kathleen O’Donnell at Century 21 Queenswood Realty

The big sell: For a one-bedroom apartment, this unit is big on space with a floorplan laid out over two levels allowing for a loft room that could be used as a second bedroom or a home office. Add to the mix a penthouse location offering unobstructed panoramic ocean and city views from Mount Baker to Vancouver Island. It forms part of West Vancouver’s Panorama Village, a 32-unit pet- and rental-friendly complex that was built in 1976. The home was renovated in 2021 with slate countertops, European tiles and fixtures, wide-plank oak floors, radiant heat under stone floors, French wallpaper, and a wood-burning fireplace. There are airy 15-foot-high vaulted ceilings and a spiral staircase that leads up to the loft. New balcony windows were installed to the tune of $24,000, and there is balcony access from the principal rooms. The home comes with a parking stall, storage locker, and a monthly maintenance fee of $793.43.

125 – 6505 3 Ave., Tsawwassen

Type: Two-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse

Size: 1,736 square feet

B.C. Assessment: $1,452,000

Listed for: $1,498,000

Sold for: $1,505,000

Sold on: Jan. 30

Days on market in this listing: Six

Listing agent: Darryl Sjerven and Karel Palla PREC at ReMax Select Realty

Buyers agent: Scott Franklin PREC at Homelife Benchmark Realty

The big sell: According to the listing agents, this detached single-level townhome offers the best of both worlds — the privacy of a house and the security and convenience of a gated strata. The home is located in the Monterra community within Tsawwassen’s Boundary Beach district and represents one of only two standalone units. The two-bedroom, two-bathroom rancher features air conditioning, a spacious kitchen that overlooks the adjacent family room with its gas fireplace, a primary bedroom with newer ensuite bathroom and walk-in closet, a laundry room, and an extra-large private patio that faces a park. A full-sized two-car garage completes the picture. Monterra provides residents with a number of amenities including a clubhouse with an indoor swimming pool, a sauna, and a party room. The home’s monthly maintenance fee is $663.87, and pets and rentals are permitted with restrictions.

These transactions were compiled by Nicola Way of BestHomesBC.com.

Realtors – send your recent sales to nicola@besthomesbc.com

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Innovative design trends often follow from the hospitality industry where stylish boutique hotels and restaurants create unique interiors that are dramatic departures from the conventional or popular styles of the moment. Those spaces feature esthetics that then become aspirational for homeowners such as the hotel-chic bedrooms that were all the rage not long ago as were spa-inspired bathrooms. More rare though is when the art world, specifically modern art, becomes the jumping off point for a new approach for using paint within the home.

A recent collaboration between British paint manufacturer Farrow & Ball and American artist Carol Bove at the Guggenheim Museum in New York became the inspiration for a fresh interpretation of using colour in a residential context. Joa Studholme, Farrow & Ball’s Colour Curator, worked with Bove to create custom colours to make the museum’s rotunda walls not only a backdrop to showcase her vibrant-hued abstract sculptures but also as part of the exhibition with its own colour story. The result is a graduated colour scheme of greys that begins on the ground floor with a deep hue and gradually winds up the spiral in varying degrees of lighter shades of the same colour family.

“Carol Bove’s team and the Guggenheim approached us to work with them on helping to bring the artist’s vision of creating a graduated ribbon of colour to life,” Studholme recalls. “We worked with their brief to create over 20 custom colours that operate as steps connecting each of our signature colours to the next in a seamless transition of colour as you move up the iconic rotunda.”

Seeing the bold effect of the graduated application of colour in a large public environment lead Studholme to wonder how it could be applied in a domestic setting and embarked on formulating how “the idea of graduated colour schemes can be embraced in the home.” The key is to use colours of the same colour family which produces a harmonious transition of the colours throughout the space. And while there is no rule to how many colours one can use, Studholme advises using no fewer than three, noting that the bigger the space, the more colours can be incorporated.

According to Studholme, there are endless possibilities when selecting a colour palette to create gradient colour schemes. As long as the tones are from the same colour family, she says, it will always work and will produce “a layered, polished effect.”

“Warming earth tones running from deep Tanners Brown through to glowing Stirabout work particularly well, as do neutrals, but my favourite is graduating from rich Preference Red through Dead Salmon to Scallop,” she says. (Note: the dead in Dead Salmon refers to the matte finish and not an expired fish.)

Just as there are no defined rules for the number of colours to create a gradient effect, there isn’t just one way to work with the various colours. Given that they’re all in the same colour family, there’s a lot of flexibility to where and how they can be applied, Studholme explains.

She cautions though that “the gradient of colour is much enhanced when the strongest colour is used at the bottom to ground the room and add depth and nuance with lighter colours above to open the space. The lightest tone should be used on the ceiling to unify the design, ensuring that the ceiling feels like an intentional element rather than an afterthought.”

The most recent paint trend favoured by many interior designers has been colour drenching where walls, mouldings, ceilings and even built-ins are done in the same colour and sometime the same finish. So for anyone who opted for that effect, the introduction of gradient painting doesn’t mean that colour drenching will disappear or feel passé as it’s been around since Georgian times, Studholme notes, adding that “there is definitely room for both forms of decoration in the modern home.”

And while colour drenching essentially envelopes a space in colour, Studholme believes that “rooms painted in graduated colours open up and out so there is a general uplifting feel of growth.”

The positioning of each colour and its finish should be intentional, and, while graduated painting can give the room an enveloping effect somewhat like colour drenching, it produces a sense of dimension and visual interest.

“The feel is seamless but never flat,” Studholme says.

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A 1910 Craftsman residence with original floors, stained glass and claw foot tub is one of nine sites on the 2026 Heritage Discovery Day tour .

Participants on the self-guided tour will have a chance to check out a curated selection of nine heritage properties in Mount Pleasant and Riley Park. Another stop on the tour brings together mid-century modernist roots with what later became typical Vancouver Special layout and design.

Since 2003, Heritage Discovery Day has showcased the stories behind the architecture, design and history of some of the city’s most interesting and distinctive homes. Last year’s event drew 600 people to Kitsilano.

Ticket holders are provided with a guidebook that includes information about the homes as well lesser-known places and spaces that have shaped the neighbourhood. Volunteers are also on hand to provide information.

Biking and transit are encouraged, although some sites are walkable and parking information will be provided.

Heritage Discovery Day

When: June 6, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Tickets are on sale now at vancouverheritagefoundation.org.

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Ricardo Brites has spent much of his career helping move engineered timber buildings from ambitious design experiments into practical housing solutions.

Originally from Portugal, Brites completed his PhD in timber engineering before working in the United Kingdom during Europe’s rapid expansion of mass timber construction. At the time, Europe was already delivering large-scale timber buildings while North America was still cautiously testing the concept.

“I was part of projects with Lendlease, Mace, and Berkeley Homes when mass timber was transitioning from niche to near-commodity in that market,” says Brites.

Today, as director of engineering and VDC at Mercer Mass Timber, Brites works across Canada and the United States on projects ranging from libraries and universities to large-scale residential and commercial developments. His focus is not simply on promoting timber buildings, but on solving one of the industry’s biggest challenges — how to make them practical and affordable enough for mainstream housing.

“What drives me is not the structural performance of mass timber. That case has been made. What drives me is cost competitiveness,” he says.

Mass timber products such as cross-laminated timber, or CLT, are engineered by layering wood panels together to create structural components strong enough for multi-storey buildings. Increasingly, these systems are being paired with steel or concrete in hybrid designs that aim to balance performance, cost and speed of construction.

The most interesting and commercially viable work is almost always hybrid, says Brites.

That approach reflects a shift away from viewing timber as an all-or-nothing material. Instead, hybrid systems use each material where it performs best.

“A well-designed hybrid doesn’t compromise the timber story. It makes the whole building work better and land closer to budget,” says Brites.

One reason architects continue to gravitate toward engineered timber is the atmosphere it creates inside buildings. Exposed wood interiors can feel softer and calmer than conventional concrete structures, while the structural systems themselves often produce cleaner lines and more efficient interior layouts.

“There’s a quality to exposed timber that reads differently from any other structural material,” says Brites. “Warmer, quieter, more grounded,”

Brites says the bigger story is less about esthetics and more about industrialized construction.

One of engineered timber’s major advantages is prefabrication. Structural components are manufactured off-site using highly precise digital modelling, then delivered ready for installation.

“Prefabrication shifts where problems get solved. Instead of resolving co-ordination issues in the field, you resolve them digitally before a single component is fabricated,” he says.

That can shorten construction timelines significantly while reducing costly surprises during the building process.

Canada, particularly British Columbia, has become one of North America’s most active mass timber markets. Brites says the region’s progress has been driven by a combination of housing pressure, supportive policy and growing manufacturing capacity.

Projects such as UBC’s Brock Commons Tallwood House helped establish confidence in tall timber construction, while newer housing policies are encouraging more standardized mid-rise development.

Still, Brites believes the industry remains in a transitional phase similar to what Europe experienced years earlier.

“What we’re in now is a transition from early demonstration projects toward broader market adoption,” says Brites.

One of the biggest barriers is that developers often struggle to evaluate timber systems early enough in the design process. By the time cost estimates and engineering assessments arrive, many projects are already locked into conventional concrete and steel assumptions.

“By the time a project team had enough information to evaluate a mass timber solution properly, the design had already hardened around conventional assumptions,” says Brites.

To help address that problem, Mercer Mass Timber partnered with ZGF Architects and Fast + Epp to develop BuildSpec, a free digital platform that allows architects, engineers and developers to quickly test hybrid timber systems during the earliest planning stages.

The platform generates real-time information about structural feasibility, constructability and carbon impacts for mid-rise housing projects, helping teams compare systems before major design decisions are fixed.

“What previously required weeks of consultant co-ordination can now be explored at the massing stage in minutes,” says Brites.

For Brites, the long-term goal is not simply to create standout timber buildings, but to help the industry move toward repeatable systems that become more efficient over time.

“The housing supply problem in Canadian cities is not going to be solved by better-designed individual projects. It’s going to be solved by delivery systems that can produce good buildings repeatedly, predictably, and at a cost that works,” says Brites.

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