There’s a lot of coffee in Fabric Living’s office. Enough that one of the artworks hanging in its speakeasy (yes!)—a coffee-themed piece by Nigerian artist Jimbo Lateef—was commissioned specifically for the space.
It’s a small but telling detail. Fabric’s Mount Pleasant office is full of motifs that feel personal and playful: walnut doors, art chosen by the team, trinkets that nod to inside jokes and spaces designed as much for hanging out as getting work done. There’s even a mini putt in the lobby. For a company whose tagline is “Not boring,” the space takes the brief pretty literally.
The cool quotient runs through the projects the 10-person real estate development company builds, too. Founder Jordan MacDonald launched Fabric in 2015 under a different name. For its first five years, “it was just me,” MacDonald says. By then, he had gravitated toward East Vancouver, drawn to its “young creative energy” and to projects where he could have a more direct hand in shaping how a building interacted with its neighbourhood.
Perhaps the clearest expression of its approach is Assembly, a 50-townhome Strathcona development with more than 17,000 square feet of commercial space and a mix of market and non-market housing, industrial, office, retail and restaurant uses. A pedestrian mews cuts through the project, underneath a 4,000-square-foot art installation telling the story of Vancouver and Strathcona. “We basically tried to recreate Strathcona within Strathcona,” MacDonald says. “It became a really, really cool project, like a labour of love.”
MacDonald says Fabric has completed roughly 300 homes, with another 500 or so in the pipeline—a portfolio that now spans everything from an $100-million townhouse development to an 81-unit rental building sold to BC Housing for $51 million. Next up is a 21-storey East Vancouver project that aims to borrow more from boutique hospitality (think Toronto’s Ace Hotel) than the standard condo playbook.
Back at Fabric’s office, the same instinct is visible on a much smaller scale: make a place useful, certainly—but give people a reason to get excited about being there.
