ne afternoon in 1950, writer E.B. White came upon a disturbing sight on New York’s 47th Street: piles of discarded furniture in front of the under-renovation Ritz-Carlton. It all looked shabby and rundown without the hotel’s forgiving candlelight. In the New Yorker, he bristled: “The Ritz should be capable of laying bare its interior to the noonday sun.”

In the next few years, it will. The Ritz-Carlton Vancouver, one of several new towers redefining the city’s Olympic-era skyline, will boast interiors by a pair of the world’s most coveted designers, Canadians George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg. Take their proposed concept for the showers: bathers will be surrounded by glass on all four sides—one of them an exterior wall of the hotel.

Interiors and exteriors are often blurred in the West and the building’s master architect, the legendary Arthur Erickson, has a particular genius for built environments that engage with their surroundings. It’s a marriage made in lotus land: West Coast naturalism with a distinctly metropolitan cheek. (And yes, the one-way glass will thwart peeping toms while allowing guests to study pedestrians as they lather.)

“We’re going for the ‘Wow’ factor,” said an immaculately dressed George Yabu, on a whirlwind pass through Vancouver this past spring. “Canada can be so conservative but when I come out West I feel I can breathe again—it’s all about the view.” Yet the team resists fixating on any one local sensibility. “Canadians do tend to think regionally,” said Glenn Pushelberg, yet what the Ritz and its attendant glamour calls for is a re-imagining of the region as a global player.

The world, after all, is Yabu Pushelberg’s design playground. They’ve already completed the Four Seasons in Tokyo and the W Hotel at Times Square in New York, along with the acclaimed Hazelton in Toronto. They have five other Manhattan hotel projects for various clients on the go. “If they want us,” Pushelberg quips, “they have to deal with sharing us.”

Erickson spotted their promise two decades ago, shopping at Vancouver boutique Leone, which was designed by the then-unknown team. From that point on, Erickson saw them as frontrunners in their field. The Ritz-Carlton collaboration is their first hotel project in Western Canada and signals a certain maturity in this market and a willingness to indulge in brave new styles.

There’s a sensuality to Erickson’s tower, which rises 60 stories in a helical, organic gesture. Because of the building’s twist, each floor offers a different view; each stay will reveal a new landscape through the glass. Yabu Pushelberg’s interiors will be fresh and light but still luxe, without succumbing to the austere modernism that works so well in advertisements and nowhere else.

The tag “world class” has been floating around our cities for years but the proof has now begun to arrive. While it’s unlikely “poor little rich girls” will host debutante parties at the new Ritz as they did in 1950s New York, this kingpin of hotels will fill with a distinctly Western and simultaneously global energy. Yabu, Pushelberg, and Erickson have laid the foundation.