With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1181452
so my advice to my kids has been to do anything but study business." Returning to Vancouver, Gillespie got his start as a developer by working for his cousin, Rod Schroeder, whose red Jaguar XKE con- vertible he'd coveted as a child. "It's really that car that brought me to the real estate industry," he says of the vehicle, now dis- played outside the Fairmont Pacific Rim. Gillespie, who launched Westbank in 1992, lives in a house he built with Cheng on the UBC Endowment Lands. He and his wife, Stephanie Dong, whose uncle is Van- couver property tycoon Robert Lee, have three children. Lauren and Sean work in the business; Ryan is a freshman at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. "He is just so creative," says real estate marketer Bob Rennie, who worked with Gillespie for 22 years and remains friends with him despite past differences. "I know it rubs people the wrong way, and Ian will always be misunderstood. But people don't need to be understood. His obligation is to Stephanie and his family to understand him. The rest of us sit in the cheap seats and take shots at him, because there's not a lot of people that step out like that." Gillespie "wants not only recognition, he wants recognizable," Rennie says. "As Canadians, we have a tall poppy syndrome, and yet he wants to be a tall poppy. So that comes with consequences." We're like a baby Outside Gillespie's office hangs a small 1953 photo by the late Fred Herzog, whose work he collects. If you know Vancouver, you might spot the Marine Building loom- ing above the weather-beaten yellow pier building in the foreground. Most people think they're looking at San Francisco, Shanghai, Hong Kong—typically an Asian city, Gillespie says. "But that picture was taken from within 20 feet of where we are standing right now." His point? "We are the youngest big city in the world. We're a work in progress. Peo- ple want to see everything happen over- night. It's like, my God, we're like a baby. And look where we've come in such a short period of time." Given his track record of winning approval for projects, some think Gillespie enjoys favourable treatment at city hall. "It is harder for me to do business in Vancou- ver than it is in any other city I do business in, by far," he responds. "So if I have all this power, why would that be true?" At the same time, Vancouver has a strong tradi- tion of sound planning, he adds. "He's astute, and he does have the good sense to work with people who have good relationships with city hall," Michael Geller says. "I believe he gets things approved because he designs and devel- ops beautiful projects." Cheng thinks Gillespie also benefits from Vancouver's openness to new ideas. "If Ian was trying to do what he does in San Francisco, he'd probably have a lot of resistance," he says. "Our value is about the mountains, the water, the green. So as long as we reinforce those values, there's no pre- scription as to what kind of buildings you have to design." 100-percent contextual Here's how Gillespie explains West - bank's Vancouver House. The 59-level, 375-home building, which twists sky- ward from a tiny triangular lot under the Granville Street Bridge, is "100-percent contextual," he says. "If you take all of the constraints—shadows on the park, setbacks from the on-ramps, all the NOVEMBER 2019 BCBUSINESS 33 BCBUSINESS.CA