The gorgeous new Peter Busby-designed building at Broadway and Cambie is nearing completion, with London Drugs already in one portion of the street-level space and Whole Foods due to move in first (thereby guaranteeing that the last of our disposable income will disappear in short order).
Lululemon was supposed to be moving its headquarters into that Crossroads building from the current location on Clark Drive, but that won’t be happening now.
Instead, Vancouver’s engineering department will be taking over the 85,000 square feet of space in the building instead for the next 10 years, says the city’s real-estate director, Mike Flanigan.
Flanigan said Lululemon got in touch with the city in July about possibly taking over the space, which the company had signed for three years earlier before the building started construction.
“The way retail was going, they decided they would rather be conservative,” said Flanigan, who says the city got the space at an attractive rate. (But he couldn’t say what because it was, um, an in-camera decision.)
The move is actually the beginning of what will become a gradual takeover at Cambie and Broadway for an expanded city precinct. The city owns the land kitty-corner from the Crossroads building and will be developing that some day to create even more space as its departments continue to expand out of the historic but crowded 1930s city hall building.