vancouver's dorkiest condo names?

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek article, "Seattle's Dorkiest Condo Names," got me thinking a lot about the marketing machine that processes new residential real estate in Vancouver. Although it's written about Seattle, the article could have been written about almost any city undergoing a building boom. In highly competitive markets, it is the 'branding' of a project - not its design - that gives the developer a competitive edge in appealing to a given group; as a cynical architecture student, I would even argue that the more generic a city's current brand of architecture is, and the more inadequate the suites are in meeting the needs of buyers' imaginations, the more its producers need to rely on a marketing image to make it shine. Or just to make anyone buy it.

This phenomenon is certainly going on in Vancouver, too. While there are a lot of candidates for Vancouver's dorkiest condo name (the Elan, the Virtu, the Ritz, Soma, Uno, Firenze, Espana), my personal favorite is Bohemia. Surveying some of these websites, it quickly becomes clear that the developers are not in the business of selling the real estate itself, but an image or lifestyle. From Bohemia's website:

"One day you want to go antiquing in Lower Shaughnessy, the next, it's bargain hunting in Mt. Pleasant. Whether it's finding that rare blues recording in Kitsilano, picking up fresh basil and curry from Granville Island, or taking in a new play at the Stanley, Bohemia puts you right at the source."

On the flipside of the romantic image-crafting involved in condominium sales is the dispassionate, commodity-style buying and selling of properties also common in a hot real estate market. It seems that properties in Vancouver are bought increasingly not as homes, but as investments. Buying a unit from the builder and selling it once completed, never lived in; the quick renovate-and-flip; the purchase of units sight-unseen because the price and square footage are right: the person who applies these insider tricks judiciously stands to make a substantial chunk of change. But gone is the romantic notion of the 'family home,' to be lived in for years. Instead, even the amenities most often sought in a suburban family home - back yard, sunlit windows, ventilation, space to entertain - have been replaced by symbols of a nice place to live: granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, mountain view. All of these 'amenities' - commodities, really - are not only much easier to communicate in a three-line real estate advertisement, but they are also much easier to construct without spending too much time thinking about the real quality of a space.