One vintage downtown Vancouver home that appears to be in jeopardy has become busy and beloved recently — and not just by spiritual seekers, full-moon drummers and young moms looking for community. In March, Wattle Tree Place won Vancouver’s Downtown Association’s award for the Best New Business of 2017.
Wattle Tree — a New Age-flavored cafe and hangout that offers everything from oracle readings and massage therapy to children’s story time and occasional live music in its imaginatively landscaped backyard — was launched in August by two Australian sisters whose unlikely life paths landed them in downtown Vancouver. They contend that they sketched their dream business property on a piece of paper, and it miraculously manifested on East 16th Street near Main: a 1910 arts-and-crafts bungalow with a covered porch, brick columns and exposed rafters and brackets. It’s a classy, friendly old place on a leafy downtown street.
“I wanted to own my own business, ” Anna Phillips said, one focusing on healing and wellness, motherhood and meditation, community and coffee. Phillips, her sister Sophie Wegecsanyi, and their husbands have installed cafe infrastructure on the ground floor, remodeled upstairs rooms for massage therapists and midwives, and developed a complex backyard landscape of pathways and sandboxes, picnic tables and gardens, patios and canopies. They’ve also heard from descendants of former residents, who tell tales of life in the house in decades past.
But the sisters don’t own the property. They rent it from a Portland developer who bought the whole block a few months ago, and said it was his intention to redevelop.
“When we took it on, we knew the chances were good that it would sell,” Phillips said. “The shock was that the business took off.”
That success underscores a real need for community in downtown Vancouver, they say. Their clients and fans keep expressing amazement and gratitude that such a people-friendly outpost is alive and thriving here. Meanwhile, the sisters have sized up the other vintage properties on their block and tried manifesting still more of their ideal: a whole Wattle Tree campus, featuring not just expanded spiritual and therapeutic opportunities but also a guest house or hostel for tourists.
That vision of the block has been blocked. In recent weeks, a crew started demolishing Wattle Tree’s neighbors, including a 1901 brick home on the northeast corner.
Phillips emailed the property owner, the Mark R. Madden Living Trust of Portland. The response was what she had feared: Her month-to-month lease would keep getting extended for now, but she should start looking for a new site to occupy by the end of this year.
What’s Madden’s plan for the block? According to a pre-development application filed with the city, it’s 96 apartments in two buildings, plus 43 parking spaces and a covered outdoor area.
The sisters say they’ve already started searching — and that Wattle Tree is essentially a community, not a building — but they’re also dismayed that Vancouver would undermine a successful, people-pleasing business in a historical property in the downtown core.
“There’s got to be some way the community can stand up and tell the council to stop this,” Phillips said. “What does the community want this city to look like? What do we want for Vancouver?”
