Inspired by Kelowna
The proposed Aqua Residential Resort is a comprehensively planned and designed tourist oriented development. Inspired by the City of Kelowna's desire to reinforce the tourist commercial fabric of the Cook Road Tourist Commercial Area, Aqua seeks to provide accommodation that will allow visitors to enjoy Kelowna in a way that reinforces and supports the immediate context that is both existing and emerging.
Aqua is an enclave of accommodation that recognizes that responsible development provides public benefits. Those benefits facilitate the ability of the City of Kelowna to link the Mission Creek Greenway with the Okanagan Lake waterfront boardwalk. Aqua not only adds a significant length of new lakefront public access, but it allows for a pedestrian connection to Mission Creek in advance of waiting for the remaining private properties to redevelop in the future. The Design of Aqua actually invites and welcomes the local resident's of Kelowna to the Lake Front via two pedestrian walkways that are publicly accessible.
The entire waterfront promenade in front of Aqua provides community amenities including a reclaimed beach, a large waterfront public plaza, a children's water play feature, and a public pier. A waterfront food and beverage facility further enhances the security of the Public Realm and fosters the potential for public enjoyment all year round.
The massing and form of the proposed Aqua Development is inspired by the setting of the City of Kelowna itself. The 2 storey raised plinth with its water features and landscape punctuated with vertical building forms speaks to the very nature of the regional character of the Okanagan Valley and surrounding mountain ranges.
The location of the 3 tower forms purposefully frame views of the surrounding context and allow the people who will frequent the resort as well as neighbouring developments to benefit from that morphology. The tower forms themselves introduce a more casual, more lake inspired architecture. While the lower rise buildings incorporate a heavier masonry image, the curvilinear glazed towers convey a lightness appropriate for a lake front building expression.
In planning for the Aqua development, the design team took it upon themselves to improve and enhance the adjacent City owned boat parking lot and the public parking facility, and we have provided public toilets. The traffic pattern and access to the boat launch ramp has responded to the City's plans for improving Lakeshore Road. In achieving these shared objectives with the City, the private land parcel and the adjacent City owned land parcel have been reconfigured to better accommodate the new Cook Road alignment and the various land uses.
From the very beginning, the overall design of Aqua has been a collaboration of Architectural and Planning expertise, Landscape Design expertise, Sustainability expertise, Development expertise and Construction expertise. This team approach recognized from the outset, the importance of the site, and the responsibility to provide a solution that truly benefits the residents of Kelowna. The public meetings have allowed the design team to learn from public input and the design itself has changed significantly and evolved to reflect that public input.
