After Hours: What to read and do this February

REMOTE POSSIBILITY

Vancouver’s Backcountry Hut Co. supplied the concept house for last month’s Interior Design Show in Toronto. The 670-square-foot Great Lakes Cabin includes a sleeping loft and a great room, plus a glass end wall to connect the interior with nature. Inspired by Ikea‘s approach to affordable, well-designed products, outdoor enthusiast Wilson Edgar and architect Michael Leckie founded BHC in 2015 to produce flat-packed prefab structures that are easy to install in remote locations.

READ THIS

Emily Griffiths-Hamilton knows family firms. Her grandfather, veterinarian Dr. William Ballard, founded the pet-food company that bears his name. Her father, Frank Griffiths, built a media and sports empire that included the Canucks. A Vancouver chartered accountant, family enterprise adviser and conflict resolution coach herself, Griffiths-Hamilton draws on her personal and professional background to help families pass on their business. In Your Business, Your Family, Their Future: How to Ensure Your Family Enterprise Thrives for Generations, she addresses topics from whether or not to sell and why transitions fail to shared values, communication and conflict, and where to get advice.
Figure 1 Publishing 168 pages, hardcover, $25

TIME TRAVEL

Murder by Milkshake is more than the story of a colourful CKNW radio personality who poisoned his wife with arsenic in 1965. Relying on official documents, newspaper clippings and interviews with family members, friends and experts, author Eve Lazarus uses the true-crime tale to show how Vancouver changed from the conservative 1930s, when future murderer Rene Castellani lived one wood-frame house away from the under-construction Hotel Vancouver, to the turbulent 1960s, which (fortunately for Castellani) saw the end of the death penalty in Canada.
Arsenal Pulp Press 241 pages, paperback, $21.95