Colouring the Entire Operation
Pantone 722
Pantone 414
Cream Paper
Pantone 7624
If I have a reputation, it’s as the guy who can open restaurants without hood vents,”
says Seán Heather, recalling the defining characteristic that brought him to be standing on the main floor of the former Vancouver Stock Exchange at the corner of Pender and Howe late last year. Heather, owner of Salt Tasting Room, as well as the Irish Heather and Shebeen Whisk(e)y House (all ventless, btw), was only a few blocks from his Gastown base, but he may as well have been in a different city. Those three establishments— all lacking the venting that would allow a full kitchen to operate—had been opened by Heather on his own. He did the menus, the design and, to the extent that he ever thought about “branding” (and one gets the sense he did not), he was in charge of that, too. “I was an Irish guy opening an Irish pub,” he recalls. “All I had to do was hang a shingle.” But the stock exchange would be a whole different beast. For starters, he had partner: the Swiss bankers Credit Suisse, who had purchased the building and were looking for a tenant who could bring some excitement to the main floor—and they were willing to help fund something special. That meant Heather could indulge in a little assistance this time, in the form of Phoebe Glasfurd and her team at Glasfurd and Walker, the
When Glasfurd is choosing a colour palette, she’s cognizant of the material palette and colours the interior design will use, but she also pulls directly from the reference material collected for the project: “The muted tones and colours were from the old members’ club tickets for speakeasies, the creams from a stock exchange ticker tape; the burgundy was rich, like the leathers of old bars, and the terracotta is something unique and distant that worked with these palettes, and we felt it was a good distinct look for the brand.”
Brown Leather
branding juggernauts who have put their stamp on a large swath of the new rooms that have opened in Vancouver over the past decade. But as excited as Heather was to be able to call in the big guns, he was still a restaurateur who has enjoyed an unparalleled run with his rooms by trusting his instincts as to what works and what doesn’t with the fickle crowd of patrons. And so, standing in the unfinished space of the historic building, he felt the tingle of unlimited potential: “I love history, and sitting in the room that was once a vaudeville theatre and then the (infamous) Vancouver Stock Exchange, I could immediately feel the decades of stories roll by as I walked the room, the fortunes that had been made and lost here. I was hooked,” he says. He immediately dove into finding out everything he could about the building: anecdotes, background and the local characters that populated it. It was during this research that he came across a diagram showing the unique hand signals that traders would use to execute orders; he was taken not only by the similarity to those of a patron ordering a drink at a crowded bar but also by the colourful name. So when he and Glasfurd first sat down to discuss the project, he began with:
“It’s going to be called Open Outcry.”
VA N M A G . C O M M AY/J U N E 2 0 1 9
VanMag May_June.indb 78
2019-04-11 1:47 PM