slocan village market
slocan valley, bc
The Slocan Village Market is a bussling hub of activity in Slocan, an ex mill town located at the north end of the Slocan Valley. The original market building by one of Canada’s most celebrated architects, James H. Kinoshita, who moved to Hong Kong in 1960 and helped make it one of the world’s most dense cities and to define the design culture of that place. His start was the design of his parents’ grocery store on Harold Street in Slocan, where he was raised. Now called the Slocan Village Market, the store has been in operation for over 50 years.
Slocan is not the most dense place in the world, but in recent years it seems to be waking up from a nap it took after its mill closed in 2014. With layers of additions on this historic building, laid down as local industry came and went, we sought to make the latest interpretation, with the deepest respect to its original creator, and as many hours puzzling over why its later additions were built in such unconventional ways.
designed by f2a architecture ltd.
in-progress
The program is to add a pot shop to the program. Now highly regulated, the sale of grass must be done from a lockable, opaque box. After studying various options originally targeted at mitigating the appearance of the store’s truly weird-looking back of house, we decided to infill the Harold Street frontage. The intervention will reference the original design’s proportions, window modules, and vertical wood cladding. In order to reconcile roof drainage with a 1970’s beer cooler added to the market’s north wall, the addition will wrap over part of the original main facade, hiding some of Kinoshita’s delicate hand from the future, but embracing design excellence by keeping it simple while responding to complexity.
