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The market timing might seem off, but the first luxury condos are arriving in Vancouver's working class Chinatown.

If all goes according to plan, by the summer of 2009, developer Cam Watt's vision for the high-end, $6-million restoration of the nearly 100-year-old Keefer Building will be realized.

Architects George Sharp and Charles Thompson built the Edwardian style building at 135 Keefer St. in 1910. The architects were most famous for designing Vancouver's landmark art deco Burrard Street Bridge. The warehouse originally built for the Vancouver Gas Company is currently undergoing a massive restoration that will combine its heritage façade with a sleek, contemporary wood-brick interior.

The four-storey building on the 25-foot-wide lot will be given an additional top floor and converted into four deluxe lofts, each occupying an entire floor. A large, pre-existing courtyard that runs up the east side of the building has made it possible to construct condos that are open to daylight, with optional patio access on each floor. On the bottom floor will be retail, including a small martini bar that will cater to the area's growing young condo market.

As to whether he's worried about the current real estate downturn, Mr. Watt — who plans to occupy the opulent penthouse of the Keefer Building — appears unfazed.

"We're only selling three units, and there's really no competition," he shrugs, seated in a Chinese bakery next to the site. "What I'm offering is really unique. So I'm not really competing with the other sellers in the city. No one else has done it."

The price range of the 2,400-sq.-ft. apartments is $1.69-million to $3.9-million, a price tag that reflects features such as private indoor/outdoor courtyards, a unique elevator car storage that operates by remote control, private elevators to the suites, and a penthouse unit that has a 40-foot-long, clear-bottom swimming pool. The roof-top pool was designed by the same Colorado company that made the water tank in which stunt artist David Blaine submerged himself for seven days a couple of years ago.

Inside the penthouse suite, the clear-bottom rooftop pool will operate like a massive overhead display, particularly when someone is swimming in it.

Mr. Watt, whose company is Two By Four Developments, got the idea for the pool from a friend. Architects, a structural engineer, and a local pool designer spent three months researching the possibility. The cost of the acrylic pool, including shipping, was $80,000. But that price tag was trifling compared with having to negotiate with the city for their plans for the first interior clear-bottom pool.

"There is nothing going across the pool to hold it up," explains project architect Chris Woodford. "There's a really big steel beam that runs down its sides and it kind of hangs there. For a residential application, this is not done often, or ever."

The cost of the two-level, four-car elevator was approximately $140,000, which isn't as expensive as underground parking, Mr. Watt points out. As well, says Mr. Woodford, it keeps extra cars off the crowded streets of Chinatown.

The Keefer is Mr. Watt's first condo development. He is a house developer and successful entrepreneur who co-founded the Canadian Springs bottled water company.

He commissioned architect Gair Williamson, who has spent most of his career in London, England, but earlier in his career designed Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre.

He has already worked on several heritage buildings in the area, but none of them, he says, are as high-end as The Keefer.

Mr. Williamson says the project is about saving a heritage building that had stood vacant, filled with pigeon feces, and rotting for the last decade. He says it's not about gentrifying an area that has long been filled with single-room occupants, which is an ongoing concern in the impoverished and struggling downtown eastside. (The project was undertaken with incentives from the city's Heritage Building Rehabilitation Program, such as bonus building density.)

"This project got through the heritage program because it was very clear it was not hurting any housing stock," he says. "There's nothing you could do with this project except for what Cam is doing.

"If it wasn't for someone stepping up and doing this sort of thing, it would have been knocked down."