Welcome to In The Village on False Creek, a unique project inspired by Live@YVR and 365 Days of Dining. I’ve moved my family into this community with my mission being to showcase the myriad of things that make it awesome by bringing you a weekly scoop!

When I took Dawn Chubai from Breakfast Television on THIS TOUR of the Village a couple of weeks back we wound up on the roof of the Compass building where I shared the fact that there are over 287,000 square feet of green roofs here. That’s roughly the size of 478 downtown apartments, and this vast expanse of green space varies from actual gardens that yield fruits and vegetables to landscaped courtyards to simple native plants in areas not accessible by residents.

Below is a recent overview of the Village and all of the rooftops. While it’s all well and good to have a super nice looking environment on top of all of our buildings (literally every parcel has green roofs) the practical importance of it is, well, super important. For one, it helps eliminate something that’s commonly known in cities as the “heat island effect”. What happens with a regular rooftop is that it’ll absorb the heat during the day and re-radiate it back into your neighbourhood, bumping it up by a couple extra degrees. Having a green roof eliminates this and helps us save energy on air conditioning while maybe enhancing our quality of life by a degree or two.

Photo: John Sinal

The second really important aspect of our green roofs is that they act as a protective membrane, stretching their lifespan (what was that recent quote about the greenest building being the one that’s already there?). And the third aspect is that the way they were designed, they collect/funnel/harvest rainwater into basins in our basements in order to be pumped up and used to water themselves as well as provide water with which we use to flush our toilets. That’s three times awesome.

We’re lucky that we have a courtyard right off of our balcony on the third floor of a six storey building, just beyond these hedges pictured below. Join me for a virtual tour!

Durante Kreuk is the landscape architecture firm who were the lead on the design of the aforementioned rain harvesting systems, green roofs and the design of both the hard and soft landscape. I called them up and asked if they could send over the blueprints of the courtyard and they obliged!

So let’s step out from behind that hedge, shall we? That’s it on the right.

If you were to walk down that path pictured above, then do a bit of a 180, this is the view you’d have.

Walk down the path a bit and you’d end up here, one of the places I hang out at every single day. That’s the historical Salt building in the background.

You wouldn’t ever do it but from the point above, if you walked backwards about 100 feet, this is what you’d see.

Now look to your right.

And to your left.

And if you had your dog with you, before you go inside please don’t forget to pick up those poops!

Learn more at TheVillageOnFalseCreek.com and stay tuned each week as I expose other unique qualities of our new community.