Amy O’Brian
Sun

There’s a curious surge of youthful energy pulsing through the staid rooms of Vancouver‘s most established and exclusive private clubs.

Markedly different from the muted energy of years past when men in suits made business deals and recounted war stories over tumblers of scotch, today’s club members are increasingly young and moderately hip (in a professional kind of way).

The Vancouver Club and the Terminal City Club — once bastions of stuffiness and tradition — are offering up events and amenities in a bid to attract a young, moneyed set of members who will ensure the longevity of the clubs with their youth and fresh ideas.

“Obviously, the club image — especially business clubs — are sort of a dying breed in this city,” says Amanda Fiorini, membership secretary at the Terminal City Club.

“There’s us and the Vancouver Club that’s pretty much left.”

The only way to ensure the historic clubs don’t get gutted and converted into high-end condos is to appeal to the very same crowd that would be scrambling to get a piece of that hot real estate pie.

But in order not to scare off older members who have their roots firmly planted in the past (and still pay membership dues), the clubs are being cautious about changing too much too fast.

The lunch menu for the Vancouver Club’s formal Georgian Room is just about as WASPy as they come — beef tenderloin, braised lamb shank, Cobb salad — but the club is gradually introducing a few subtle changes to its events calendar that are aimed at pleasing a younger crowd.

Weekly after-work jazz performances followed by poker games in the club’s Bar 3 have proved popular with both older and younger members, while “Mingling and Martinis” is a monthly networking event aimed at young, professional women.

There are still weekly bridge games and local big band legend Dal Richards (now 87) plays at the monthly buffet dinner and dance, but the annual autumn Extravaganza ball — a fairly recent addition to the club’s events calendar — is a party that young board member Cara Savege looks forward to for months.

“I think the days of just a business club are gone,” Savege, a 29-year-old mortgage manager, says.

“It can’t just be a business club. It needs to be more than that. By bringing in the jazz night, and Extravaganza and poker night, it’s making it a social club as well.”

During a recent after-work jazz night at the club, Savege sat poised in a white suit on a high stool at a high table in the dim, decadent lounge of the club.

The waiter brought her a strawberry daiquiri and addressed her as Ms. Savege as the adjoining tables filled up with other youngish well-dressed professionals who had a hankering for a drink and some conversation before heading to their next meeting or home.

“It’s become a new hangout,” Savege says.

In a city full of people eager to distance themselves from the old-school etiquette and class divisions of Toronto and Montreal — where exclusive clubs and professional socialites abound — it feels slightly unnatural or simply un-West-Coastish to be among a group of young energetic people who choose to pay for the privilege of having a regular hangout where everyone knows their names.

 

CREDIT: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun Cara Savege, 29, a Vancouver Club board member, likes the move to more of a social club.

Vancouver Club

But that privilege is proving popular enough to keep the Vancouver and Terminal City clubs afloat, and even teetering close to capacity.

At the Terminal City Club, Fiorini says membership is at an all-time high and the majority of members are in the 40- to 52-year-old age group. Twenty years ago, the average age of a member was 67 and women were not allowed.

Seven years ago, the Terminal City Club built an impressive athletics facility and 30-floor tower — the income from which contributes to the survival of the club.

Fiorini says the pool, squash courts and other recreational perks of membership have helped attract younger members, many of whom have children.

“Generally, we find that it’s not a lot of older people that are wanting to join clubs these days. There seems to be a lot of interest from the younger people,” she said.

“I think the old boys’ hideaway from the family sort of thing has disappeared. The cigar-smoking, brandy drinking in the lounge has sort of disappeared. Everybody seems to be more family orientated these days. I think probably you find the family clubs are doing pretty well.”

At the Arbutus Club, where the official slogan is “putting families first,” the wait to become a full member can be as long as seven years. The wait to get “provisional membership” — which allows limited use of the facilities — is about three years.

“Over the years, it’s just gotten crazy,” Brent Elkington, CEO of the Arbutus Club, says of the feverish interest in the club.

The entrance fee is $30,000 per family and the monthly dues are $185.

Both the Terminal City Club and Vancouver Club offer substantial discounts for younger members and the rates for older members are still a fraction of those at the Arbutus Club. At the Vancouver Club, new members under the age of 35 pay an entrance fee of about $2,000, while new members older than 45 pay about $6,000. At the Terminal City Club, the entrance fee is $3,750 for members younger than 35 and $7,000 for those 36 and older.

Many of the white-haired traditionalists who made up the bulk of the membership for decades are fading out of the picture while a younger demographic is happily picking up the slack, paying the membership dues and lapping up the idea of belonging to a “club.”

Savege was first introduced to the hallowed halls of 915 West Hastings by a business associate about 50 years her senior who would take her there for lunch.

Rather than being put off by the back-in-time feel of the decor or the formalities of the place, Savege was attracted to it and became a dues-paying member in 2002.

“I loved the history of the club. They maintain a lot of the tradition, which I like, but seeing some changes in the club, I really felt it was at a pivotal point and it’s moving forward in the millennium and that I had a chance to partake in that significant point in the history of the club,” Savege says.

“I think it will become a private club that’s relevant to the generations of today.”

Savege doesn’t elaborate on which demographics the club might become relevant to, but it’s safe to assume it’s not your rent-paying twentysomething who drinks coffee on Commercial Drive and takes SkyTrain to an entry-level job in Burnaby every weekday.

“We all live in Kits,” Savege says as an explanatory aside, while she tells the group a detailed story about how she chased down a guy who had broken into her house and stolen her television.

Wendy King, a young in-house lawyer for a major forestry company and a Vancouver Club board member, insists the membership of the club “reflects [the diversity] of the city,” but on the day of the daiquiri and jazz get-together, there were no more than two non-Caucasians in the substantial crowd of about 50.

The club is doing surprisingly well, though, at attracting younger members.

According to King’s membership statistics, the average age of a new member joining in the past three years has been 37 (which happens to be her own age). Twenty years ago, the majority of new members were older than 45.

King says many of the younger members were, for a long time, mostly lawyers, but members now include professional athletes, actors, artists, and entrepreneurs — none of whom she can identify because of the club’s commitment to privacy.

King and Savege steer away from using the word “exclusive” to describe the club, but the reality is that every member has forked over a substantial wad of cash and has made it through the rigorous application process, which entails finding five members who like you enough to vouch for your worthiness.

Gillian Swann, director of sales and marketing at Sugar and Sugar — a swank Gastown space that puts on extravagant parties — says “exclusive” is not a word she wants people to associate with Sugar and Sugar.

“I’m 31 and I think people of my age group would be hesitant to be involved with something that was so exclusive — that seemed to not include everybody or maybe hurt people’s feelings or be deemed as racist or classist or agist or anything like that,” she said.

“Vancouver is really a city that focuses on being inclusive rather than exclusive.”

But if that were truly the case, the Terminal City Club and Vancouver Club would be long gone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Real Estate Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.