We're proud sponsors of the GVHBA Ovation Awards (and have been since, well, before the GVHBA Ovation Awards were called that!), and besides sponsoring the awards, our Ovation Awards photography projects keep us busy during the late-fall and winter months photographing what often turn out to be some of our favourite projects of the entire year. It's even better when our clients make use of our photography to help them win! Last night the GVHBA unveiled the finalists for the Ovation Awards, and we're pleased to report that several of our clients are in the finals.

Porte's Origin project at UniverCity, an interior of which was featured in our calendars as the January/February photo, is a semifinalist in the Best Multifamily Lowrise Development and the FortisBC Award for Excellence in Energy Efficiency for New Construction: Multi-Family Home. Ironically, this project won an award sponsored by FortisBC by...not using FortisBC's product (natural gas, for those of you outside BC) for central heat. The award nominally requires photos of such things as one's mechanical room, window installs, and the central gas meter room. Since Origin uses district heat and a backup ground-source heat pump, I got the distinct pleasure of failing to photograph the central meter room because...there was no such place! Without further green building geeking ado:

 Tien Sher's Quattro3 also placed in the Best Multi-family Lowrise Development category. We originally shot this project for the Georgie Awards (where it's a finalist for Best Landscape Design), and it's great to see it show up  in the Ovation Awards as well. Incidentally, their website is a great example of using construction progress photos to keep people informed about the status of a project; something we don't often see yet despite us (and our friends at Braun/Allison, among others) recommending it as a good practice.

TQ Construction placed in the prestigious RenoMark Renovator of the Year - Large Volume category, and their Yale Kitchen project placed in the always-hotly-contested Best Kitchen Renovation: $100,000 and Over category. This cleverly designed kitchen features a clean, elegant design with a number of uncommon features, including an asymmetrical breakfast bar, tons of built-in storage, and grate-bottomed drawers allowing wet shoes to dry appropriately slowly 'for free' using an extension of the radiant infloor heating system.

Victoreric Design Group's Chen Residence placed in the Georgie Awards and also placed in the Ovation Awards, this time in the Best Custom Home: Over $2 Million category. You've seen this lovely house on our website:

Mark your calendars now: awards night will be on April 20, and it's always a good party. We'll be photographing on the night, so if you see someone holding a flash high above the crowd, say hello! We're looking forward to seeing (to paraphrase Iron Chef) "who gets it? who will win? whose project will reign supreme!?", but in the meantime: congratulations to everyone who entered, and double congratulations for everyone now in the finals!