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By Frances Bula published Apr 1, 2009

The Maleks—Shahram, 57, and Peter, 59—stand before the Olympic Village for which they will long be remembered. Marina Dodis

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There are two kinds of developers in this town. The first you’ve never heard of. You don’t know their names and you couldn’t identify one of their buildings if they promised you a free condo in it. They build the thousands of apartments and houses that blanket the region—some good, some awful, the bulk merely okay. They have no ambition beyond finding sites, constructing something attractive and cheap enough to entice a reasonable number of buyers, and pocketing the profits.

And then there are those who long to create—for reasons best known to themselves, their analysts, or their fathers—monuments. Their work is all around Vancouver: the aggressively tall towers, the unusual shapes, the ambitious city projects, the megadevelopments. They’re the ones willing to take on the difficult sites that require years to rezone, to hire the big-name architects who will design beautiful and expensive and sometimes impossible structures, to go through tortuous marriage-counselling sessions with city planners, to fly to Germany to pick out cabinets, and generally to turn development into a Christo-like art project.

Shahram and Peter Malek, the brothers who decided they wanted to build Vancouver’s Olympic Village—who wanted it so much they were willing to pay top dollar for the privilege—are definitely members of this second species.

“We want to build things we can be proud of, driving by, for many years after­wards. You just want to enhance the environment and make things better, be proud of it,” says Shahram in the circumlocutory manner of the British upper class as we walk along the West Van seawall on a sunny winter day. Behind us is the Edgewater condo tower, characteristic of the style Shahram and Peter brought to the city through their Millennium Development: formally elegant, with a predilection for limestone and marble, for black-and-white floors and Dangerous Liaisons landscaping. “We always had big dreams,” Peter adds. “We always wanted to build big. We wanted to build very high-quality stand-alone projects.”

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Filed Under

2010 Vancouver Olympics, Bob Rennie, Business, Economy, Housing, Larry Campbell, Olympic Venues, Olympic Village, Olympics, Peter Malek, Politics, Shahram Malek