A Cannabis Retail Build, Managed Tight
A licensed cannabis boutique at Meadowtown Centre in Pitt Meadows. Display millwork and warm finishes on the surface; underneath, the secure systems a regulated store has to carry — and the coordination to land all of it on one schedule.
From the floor it looks like any well-finished boutique — warm millwork, clean light, a service counter you'd want to lean on. What you don't see is the part that makes a cannabis store harder to build than most retail: it has to be secure, licensed and inspected before a single product ever reaches the shelf.
A boutique with a security spine
Seed & Stone came to us for the full tenant-improvement fit-out of a licensed cannabis store at Meadowtown Centre in Pitt Meadows. The design, by Cloudscape Architecture, set the tone: a retail space that reads as a calm, branded boutique rather than a locked box.
Our job, as general contractor, was to build that look and the regulated systems underneath it on one schedule — and to hand over a store the owner could open on day one.
The build paired the customer-facing finishes with everything a cannabis-retail licence demands behind them: cameras, secure access and locking hardware, the data and AV backbone, and the documentation to prove it was all installed and working.
Coordinating the trades that have to land together
A retail fit-out this size is really a stack of specialist scopes that all want the same square footage at the same time. The value of a general contractor is keeping them from colliding.
The face of the store
Custom display millwork and the signature service counter were built and installed to shop drawings we carried through to final approval. Retail flooring went in across the sales floor, with paint and wall finishes bringing the boutique up to brand standard before the storefront sign was switched over.
The systems behind it
Store-wide power and a tuned lighting package — including a point-of-sale strip-lighting addition added along the way — were closed out with Technical Safety BC and an emergency-lighting letter. HVAC and plumbing were coordinated around the mall's water-meter requirements. The security, AV and data package — cameras, a 360 camera, access control and locking hardware — went in as the secure layer the licence requires.
A cannabis store is retail on the surface and security underneath. The general contractor's job is to make those two builds finish as one.
Change tracked, close-out clean
No fit-out this layered finishes exactly as drawn. Added scope — the POS lighting strip, a storefront sign switch, an AV outlet — was handled as tracked change orders rather than loose verbal asks, so the owner always knew what each move cost and why.
That same discipline carried into handover. The job closed with a full package — electrical, AV and flooring close-out documents pulled together — so the store moved from tender to opening with its paperwork in order, not chased down afterward. For a regulated retailer, a clean close-out isn't admin; it's part of being allowed to trade.
It's the way we like to run a build: one contractor accountable for the whole scope, change kept visible, and a handover you don't have to clean up after. See how we build or browse more recent projects.