Designed and Installed Across British Columbia

Vancouver outdoor space is expensive, overlooked and wet for eight months of the year, so the question is almost never how to get shade. It is how to make a space you already own usable in more weather, without losing the light, the view or the neighbour's goodwill.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

4

Burnaby asks two different questions of the same product range. On a terrace in Metrotown, Brentwood or Lougheed the binding constraint is who has to approve the work and what you are allowed to fix into a building envelope you share with everyone else in the tower. On a lot in Capitol Hill or on Burnaby Mountain it is grade, water and a ground snow load the City publishes at two different values. Work out which question your property is asking and the system almost chooses itself.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon

An Okanagan patio has to survive two opposite problems in the same year: summer afternoons hot and bright enough to drive people indoors, and shoulder seasons cold enough to end the evening early. A roof alone solves neither. Roof, screens, heating and lighting specified together solve both.

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Pergolas & Louvered Roofs

Named local projects

Coming soon

Coquitlam writes its own ground snow load and bands it by height above sea level, so a cover specified for the bottom of the city carries roughly half the load of the same cover on the upper slopes. Two addresses in one municipality are two different structural problems, which is why the first question here is where the ground is, not which roof you like.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon

Langley is one name over two building departments and two completely different kinds of property. The City starts from a published exemption on a small urban lot. The Township starts from a bylaw where every structure needs a permit, on a lot big enough to put the structure almost anywhere. So the first decision on a Langley project is not which roof you want. It is which Langley you are in, and what the ground out there will give you.

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Exterior Shade Screens

Named local projects

Coming soon

North Vancouver is two municipalities with different rules and a lot of properties built on a slope, in the rain, under trees. The projects that work here are the ones that treat water, ground and approvals as design inputs rather than as things to sort out on installation day.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon

Richmond gives a covered outdoor structure an easy roof and a hard everything else. The design snow load is half the North Shore's, so the beams are not the problem. What decides the project is the ground the posts land on, which the City itself describes as still settling, and the wind, which arrives across open delta with nothing in front of it.

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Exterior Shade & Motorized Screens

Named local projects

Coming soon

Delta carries the lightest published ground snow load in the Vancouver Region alongside one of its heaviest wind pressures, so a cover here is decided by what holds it down rather than by what holds it up. Then the rulebook charges that roof twice, once against lot coverage and again against a separate ceiling on how much of the lot may stop absorbing water. And whether you are in Ladner, Tsawwassen or North Delta, or on Tsawwassen First Nation land rather than in the City of Delta at all, changes which rulebook you are reading.

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Exterior Shade & Motorized Screens

Named local projects

Coming soon

In two parts of New Westminster the City has already written down what a shade structure should look like, in numbers: a preferred slope, a projection range, a height to the underside and a list of materials and shapes that are out. Everywhere else the ordinary zoning and building rules apply. So the first question on a project here is often not how far it spans. It is which elevation it faces, and whether anyone has published an opinion about that elevation.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon

West Vancouver properties tend to sit on a slope, near a creek, close to forest or on the water, and any of those can add a planning step that has nothing to do with the structure you actually want. Getting the site questions answered first is what keeps the project simple.

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Rolling & Security Shutters

Named local projects

1

Port Moody answers the question "how big can it be" with a map rather than a measurement. The same 10 square metre figure turns up in four different places in the City's documents doing four different jobs, and inside the environmental overlay it stops being a size at all and becomes a four part test that counts what is already standing in the yard, whether a tree protection zone is touched, and which named creek you are near. On a heritage street the City goes further still and publishes the awning shapes and materials it will accept.

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Exterior Shade & Motorized Screens

Named local projects

Coming soon

Wind is not a footnote in this valley, it is the brief. The published hourly wind pressure for Squamish is higher than for any city we have written about, and the District's own wildfire plan describes a summer where high winds are close to a daily event. Then it gets strange. The specification that wind pushes you toward, a system held in a track or steadied at grade, is exactly the one the District's Zoning Bylaw stops calling an awning, and that reclassification changes the paperwork more than the hardware does.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon

Whistler is the one municipality we work in that declines to publish a ground snow load and publishes an equation in its place, to be solved against the elevation of your own address, with no value offered at all above 1,000 metres. Because the answer runs past what the building code's prescriptive tables anticipate, a licensed Professional Engineer designing to Part 4 is the entry condition for a covered structure here rather than an upgrade somebody sells you later.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon

Two things decide a White Rock project and neither of them is the roof. The sun arrives at an angle for most of the hours anyone actually sits outside, which makes this a blades and screens problem rather than a bigger roof problem. And the Zoning Bylaw counts a covered deck as lot coverage while an uncovered one counts as nothing, so the ceiling on how much of the lot may be built on is often binding long before any setback is.

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Patio Covers

Named local projects

Coming soon