I love my job because we get into the nitty gritty with each client. It’s a challenge sometimes because I think people confuse modernism with stark old interiors. True modernism is actually designed that response to current geography, its very sight focused, it relies on being really current with the methods on how we build and how we actually move in the world. I don’t think people understand that modernism isn’t something you can just buy, it’s actually living modern, and it’s a lifestyle. It’s the choices you make when you eat, how you get up in the morning, how you basically move in your space. What I love about modernism, it’s the questions we ask. Why do they want whatever it is they want? Whether it’s the number of rooms to how do they really want to live in their homes. That’s the biggest challenge now because there are so many things economically that’s really changing how people buy homes. We have young families now that are trying to have a career, raise children, run a business. Now a youth issue that we are seeing more and more is we have a lot of people figuring out how to take care of their parents. Were really just kind of distilling what it means to have a home and what does design do for your life. If we can teach people to love where they live, love what they do. I think there’s a sense of care in everything in their home and there’s a satisfaction that anyone who works in the project is just completely fulfilled with the outcome.

Video Transcript: People always constantly ask me, what’s the hottest trend Gail? What’s the hottest thing that you’re working with? People think that design is something that you buy, I constantly have to kind of reset and say, we can’t follow trends. The problem is trends fall out the waste side. There’s a lot missing in the homes that I have been seeing over the years and especially in development work. And we cannot keep on building the same way we have been building, we have to find ways where people can actually afford to live in a good home. In Europe and Japan there density issues are so much more relevant because they just don’t have the land that we do. So they are forced to look at how to be more innovative, how to build more efficiently and how to build better quality because they don’t have the time or the space to be as disposable as we are in North America. So that is probably the biggest challenge being in residential right now. I have realized that the average person that wants a home that critique is coming so much more challenging, balancing it all. From dropping off kids in the morning, to going to work on time, to being able to come home and make a meal. Home is like, really interesting how everyone is working from home. It’s not just home as it used to be where it’s where you sleep, it’s literally, and people are doing a lot more in their homes.Developments are starting to really pick up on responding to a more modern lifestyle. Vancouver is very urban, which is really great. We have these new concepts for condo living. We have amazing groups of architects right here in Vancouver.

What I like about working with Alair is they have a very innovative way of creating sustainable business practices for construction. I think contractors, small to large, what ends up happening with smaller contractors is there’s a broken system. And there’s only so much a small business can do in terms of scaling, so it’s really an interesting concept to franchise construction because it gives the ability for builders to focus on what they do well and have a system behind them to operate on a very high level. At the end of the day everyone just wants to provide a good job, a good outcome for clients, Alair allows that. We have been fortunate to work under very challenging circumstances. We did the Lane Way home for IDS West and it was probably one of those pivotable moments for me where I saw a team work together under very tight time constraints. In the industry we never actually work in that kind of way but it was the best thing we could have ever done. For me, Alair has opened up my eyes to seeing what it takes to do a good job and then allow me to focus on our clients a bit more, to not have to worry that those jobs are not taking care off. They have given confidence back to our projects. I totally applaud Blair and David and the team for totally standing behind us and making sure we can execute
and no matter what the challenge is to find a solution, so that’s been really awesome.