The company that keeps Vancouverites fueled with coffee and pastries at three in the morning has applied to build a 30-storey hotel.
Breka Bakery and Cafe is behind a rezoning application for 8555 Cambie Street, a 391-foot tower with 324 hotel rooms, filed with the City of Vancouver in May.
According to DailyHive’s report, the applicant is Breka Laurel Holdings Inc., an entity of the bakery chain.
The site sits about 180 metres from Marine Drive Station, currently occupied by a two-storey industrial building used as a vehicle dealership.
For a bakery best known to locals as the place that never closes, a hotel is an unusual next move.
There were rumblings years ago that Breka was coming to the Marine Gateway area.
A hotel tower was not what anyone had in mind.
The bakery part is not an afterthought bolted onto the lobby, though.
It is the base of the building.
The application puts an industrial bakery on the first floor and an attached mezzanine, and the proposal carries a 1.21 floor space ratio of industrial space, roughly 22,000 square feet across the lower levels, set up as a mass-production hub for Breka’s baked goods.
Large windows are designed to show that production to people on the sidewalk and to hotel guests.
A separate street-level retail space of about 1,100 square feet along Cambie is set aside for another Breka cafe.
Above the four-storey podium the building turns into a hotel.
Twenty-five storeys of rooms sit over five floors of fitness, meeting and conference space with outdoor podium amenities attached, and a restaurant occupies the 30th floor with views toward the Fraser River and the downtown skyline.
The proposal leans on a City directive to add hotel rooms outside downtown, and on the Marine Landing policy updates that govern this stretch.
Photovoltaic panels are proposed on the southern face, angled to shade the building in summer and let light in during winter.
At street level the application promises widened sidewalks along Cambie, retail patios, and a pedestrian link on the south side of the site.
None of this is approved yet.
A rezoning application is the start of a process, not a permit, and the site is currently zoned for industrial use rather than a hotel.
What makes it worth watching is the shape of the bet.
Breka is a family-owned business that started with a single Fraser Street cafe in South Vancouver and has grown to nine locations while marking 20 years, and this would put its production floor, a cafe and a hotel in one tower.
The Cambie corridor has been filling in for years with towers.
A rezoning for a hotel with a working bakery in the base of it joins other Vancouver projects in the pipeline, alongside openings like Maria Celeste in Fraserhood and Nami on Main Street.
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Address: 8555 Cambie Street, Vancouver, BC V6P 3J9