April 27, 2009

A rendering shows what the new Oak Bay Beach hotel will look like. The hotel is planning to include a number of sustainable building features including reusing gray water and bioswale to filter stormwater.

Sustainable Building Practices

New development at former Oak Bay Beach Hotel site takes green building to heart

Shannon Moneo

correspondent

More than two years ago the 80-year-old Oak Bay Beach Hotel was taken down, but plans are in the works to replace it with a green development.

Owner Kevin Walker has been encouraging investors, neighbours and Oak Bay politicians to embrace his leading edge vision for the new 100-room hotel, spa and 20 luxury residences to be resurrected at the desirable Beach Drive site near downtown Victoria.

Wastewater treatment and water conservation are priorities for the project.

“We’re trying to contain our own services,” said Walker, who grew up at the original hotel, run by his father.

And while building to LEED Gold standards, the high-end inn is also subscribing to the Hotel Association of Canada’s Green Key Eco-Rating Program.

The program aims to help hoteliers reduce operating costs and reduce impacts on the environment.

Hotel developers follow guides in nine areas of sustainable hotel operations including indoor air quality, energy and water conservation, and hazardous waste management.

The Oak Bay hotel is working toward the highest rating – 5 – given when high standards of environmental and social responsibility are demonstrated throughout all operations.

“We found many similarities between 5 Green Key and LEED so we decided to blend the two,” said Walker.

Water treatment and water use at the proposed hotel will get the royal flush. All showerheads, toilets and plumbing fixtures will be low-flow.

Water from the showers and bathroom sinks will be collected and used to irrigate the hotel’s grounds.

An ultra-violet filtering system will neutralize the gray water.

If not needed, the gray water will be released into the sewage system during the low-demand, nighttime period.

Storm water and run-off from the buildings and permeable surfaces will be collected.

Then, it will slowly make its way through a bio-swale stream, which will blend into the landscaping and make its way downhill to the ocean, meandering not far from the spa and mineral pools.

A landscape architect will determine which grasses and plants can be used to filter and clean the water, said Doug Makaroff, an urban planner contracted to work on the project.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Ministry of Environment have to be convinced that the filtering system’s mechanics work before storm water can be directly deposited in the ocean.

“We’ll deal with it on-site and if need be, discharge on-site,” Walker explained.

The new hotel also will give Oak Bay’s aged sewer system a break.

Growth and monster homes have put it at near capacity and Walker doesn’t want to add the hotel’s by-products to the old pipes.

“The hotel’s going to have a dedicated main, rather than using the overloaded system,” he said.

The facility’s standalone sewage line will travel right to the municipal pump station.

One intriguing use of water will be the hotel’s planned geothermal exchange system.

Makaroff discovered that horizontal drilling in the ocean could be used to create a closed loop system.

The ocean has a constant temperature of about 15 C, so the plan is to cool the ocean water to about 2 C.

The 13-degree difference will represent captured heat that can be used by the hotel.

The geothermal exchange concept is being applied to the hotel’s three-storey, 200-spot parkade.

Makaroff, who was a municipal planner in Arizona, calls it his cave theory.

Caves self-adapt to a temperature of about 17 C, he said.

In the cave-like parkade, an air exchange system will operate to either pull hot air in or dissipate the heat.

Makaroff, vice-president of planning at Mexico’s Loreto Bay Company from 2003-06, also touted the adaptive re-use scheme.

When the hotel was demolished, it was estimated that 80 per cent of the material would be recovered.

Astoundingly, 95 per cent of the material was saved from the dump.

Timbers, beams, bricks, windows, copper and furniture were salvaged.

Items were numbered and labeled before being put into storage.

“There were 7,500 bricks, a wood-burning fireplace, 30 mugs. All this history,” Walker recalled.

Even 110 plants, some of them large and mature, were stockpiled.

Everything will be used when the new hotel is built.

These initiatives, and others, should help the hotel reached LEED Gold certification.

While the plans and targets are based on computer modeling, Walker is confident the 21st-century recreation of a 20th-century local institution will prevail

“A very special place is coming back to this site,” he said with a smile.

Financing has stalled construction, but since a bond offering was announced in March, $10-million had been raised within a month.

Walker now plans to break ground in November and finish in November 2011.

One benefit of the delay is that the projected hard cost has dropped about 10 per cent to $55-million and could head south even further.

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