Equinox West Georgia Street inspires fitness enthusiasts to work their hardest. Refurbishing the existing space into the organization’s first Vancouver club also inspired three contractors to work their hardest: Novacom Building Partners Ltd., BC Hardwood and Daryl Evans Mechanical Ltd.
The club is housed on the lower two storeys of a larger building and covers 33,000 square feet of floor space. The club’s design echoes its Pacific Northwest setting, and features bleached walnut, concrete floors, and blackened metal to provide a contrast between natural and manufactured materials.
For Novacom Building Partners’ president, Brandon Drewlo, the project represented an orchestration of fine detail.
"We continued to work in a budget-conscious fashion to achieve the original design intent, even if it involved making changes as we progressed," he says.
That concept was reflected in the floating entrance stairs, which Novacom and the project’s steel contractor worked to redesign on the fly.
"One of the best examples is the feature ceiling," says Drewlo.
"With about three weeks to go on the project, the CEO from the club’s New York parent company decided that the painted concrete slab ceiling in one area didn’t fit the look of the facility. Within six weeks, we helped to design and source a dropped aluminum ceiling with a plastic-laminated wood finish at a cost of 60 per cent of the next cheapest product. As a result, the ceiling cost $300,000 less than it might have."
To isolate noise between exercise studios and from the conference centre above the club, Novacom installed a series of floating concrete floors. Independent double walls and suspended ceilings throughout virtually guaranteed that noise and vibration would be contained in each studio.
"It was state of the art," says Drewlo.
The prominence of wood floor features in the facility offered significant challenges, says Dennis Bartlett, senior project manager at BC Hardwood.
"We generally work on high-end residential, but when we do a commercial job, it’s pretty special," he says.
"Our work on the Tiffany and Prada stores downtown come to mind."
The company installed 5,000 square feet of luxury walnut hardwood flooring at the club. However, the project required three different types of installation: glued; glued to 3/4-inch plywood nailed to concrete; and floating subfloors involving two layers of 1/2-inch plywood on rubber pads.
The pièce de résistance: an Equinox logo stenciled onto the floor, followed by a fresh coat of finish.
Other rooms required distinct flooring choices: two types of rubber, and three types of cork. In total, BC Hardwood installed 5,000 square feet of rubber and cork combined.
"We finished the project with only one hour of deficiency work," says Bartlett.
For Daryl Evans Mechanical, the biggest challenge involved completing a full mechanical installation inside an existing building as a tenant improvement.
"Things never go as smoothly as they would in new construction," says Richard Pfefferkorn, project manager with Daryl Evans Mechanical.
"We had to work with existing building conditions. That included rerouting mechanical systems that served the rest of the building, which had to be rerouted when walls in the club space were demolished to create an open concept. These systems included storm waste and roof drains."
The mechanical contractor was also required to coordinate with American suppliers to make sure their products met Canadian standards."
Pfefferkorn notes that keeping the project on schedule required two teams of installers, one on day shift and another on nights.
"That offers its own challenges because you now have two supervisors who need to share every detail of the project’s progress," he says.
"It’s easier with a single supervisor."
For his part Drewlo calls the Equinox West Georgia Street project the most rewarding of his career.
"We really achieved an overall sense of partnership between ourselves, the owner, the design team and our trade partners," he says. "Everyone was invested in the outcome."
Novacom Building Partners Ltd. received a 2017 VRCA Silver Award for tenant improvements in the general contractors category for work on this project; BC Hardwood’s received a Silver Award in the trade contractors category for projects up to $1 million and Daryl Evans Mechanical received a Silver Award for mechanical contractors in the project’s $3 million to $8 million category.
Novacom installed 5,000 square feet of luxury walnut hardwood flooring at the Equinox West Georgia Street fitness club. Certain rooms required distinctive flooring choices.
Photo: Image courtesy of VRCA"
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