Kyle Dion has been designing and building skateboard parks around the world for nearly 20 years, but perhaps his most special project lies in his own Maple Ridge, B.C., backyard.
The 7,200 square foot property on Stoney Avenue includes a full-size concrete skateboard bowl in the backyard, which has been used for decades by everyone from local teens to professionals of the sport.
Now the home is up for sale — skateboard bowl and all.
“Hopefully it stays and is used by the next family,” he said. “It would be a tragedy to have to take it out.”
Dion and his five brothers grew up in the home and turned to skateboarding as a way to keep busy in quiet suburbia.
Their introduction to the sport came thanks to their uncle, a long-distance truck driver who often drove through the skateboarding mecca of Southern California in the 1970s.
“When the trend really started picking up, he brought a bunch of skateboards back from California for the kids, so we were always playing around on them,” Dion said.
The boys quickly got some wooden ramps built in the backyard, attracting friends and neighbours until the home was a mainstay for the local skateboard community.
As Dion’s career progressed, so did his ambition. After starting the advocacy group Vancouver Skateboard Coalition two years earlier, in 2001 he founded New Line Skate Parks, which has built concrete parks from Australia to Sweden to South America.
In Metro Vancouver alone, Dion’s work can be seen everywhere from the Vancouver Skate Plaza under the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, to the Chuck Bailey Youth Park in Surrey and the Public Campus Skatepark at the University of British Columbia.
The increasingly busy schedule — not to mention having five kids of his own — made it harder for Dion to get out on the board himself. So in 2016, he and his crew built his dream backyard bowl.
“I thought, you know, for my two sons who skate and my three daughters who really want to get in and learn skateboarding, and for myself and my friends, it just made sense to build something in the backyard,” he said with a knowing laugh.
“It was a little easier for me to do this than it would be for most people.”
The bowl instantly became a hit, with skaters both professional and amateur flocking to the home from all across the Lower Mainland.
Among the bowl’s fans are Andy Anderson and Adam Hopkins, both of whom are hoping to qualify for the sport’s first-ever Olympics appearance at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games.
Dion’s sons Colby and Shea, meanwhile, have devoted as much time as they can to improving their skills in their own backyard.
“It’s pretty sick having this here,” Colby, 16, said. “Especially in the summer, I’m out here quite a bit, with friends over here too.”
While Colby has been skating since he was seven years old, his 22-year-old brother Shea started even earlier in life.
“I started skating as soon as I came out,” Shea laughed. “I’ve been skateboarding my whole life.”
That connection makes it hard for Shea and the rest of the kids to say goodbye to the home, which is being marketed with the skateboard bowl as a key selling feature.
“We’ve seen swimming pools, sometimes we’ve had a wooden ramp, but never anything quite like this,” said realtor Jeff Bright, who remembers childhood days at the home along with fellow agent Angela Stephen-Dewhurst.
Since the home hit the market on Thursday, Bright says he’s been overwhelmed by the requests for viewings.
Dion says his family has simply outgrown the home but isn’t saying no to the idea of building a new bowl wherever they end up next.
He’s also thankful that the sport he’s loved and fought for his whole life has been embraced to the point that the bowl would be a feature, not a bug.
“Now people and parents are fighting to get skate parks in their community, instead of fighting against them, because they want their kids closer to home,” he said.
“It was a labour of love back there … so hopefully a new family can take it on and enjoy it.”
—With files from Julia Foy