Firms, workers like amenities of Vancouver's downtown
23.02.12
Employees of Gravitate enter their downtown Vancouver workplace through a side-street door and climb wooden stairs to their second-floor loft space.
Open and airy, the upstairs office in the former Koplan’s Home Furnishings building includes groupings of desks that bask in the natural light coming in from floor-to-ceiling windows and unfiltered by walls and cubicle barriers. It’s precisely the kind of urban workplace today’s rising tech stars crave, in fact, demand, said William Roskowski, co-owner of Gravitate , a Web design, development and branding business.
Roskowski and partners, Michael Parker and Cyndi Parker, took advantage of Vancouver’s depressed real estate market and purchased the historic building at 1012 Washington St. in December for a bargain at $1.4 million. The company expects to shell out another $800,000 to $1 million to renovate the building’s first floor where it plans to offer incubator space to similar startups.
“We wanted to make this the creative hub of downtown Vancouver,” Roskowski said.
Source: The Columbian