The Okanagan’s Open Secret
For Manuel Bernaschek, the drive from Vancouver to West Kelowna was one he had never made before. But as owner of Showcase Pianos and the man behind the first Fazioli delivery in the Central Okanagan, it confirmed something he had known for years — that the Okanagan has been quietly cultivating a standard of living that the rest of the country is only beginning to understand.
Bernaschek is the owner of Showcase Pianos, Vancouver’s destination for the world’s most exceptional instruments. When he arranged to place a Fazioli grand piano in the West Kelowna home of Brian Paradis this past April, it was not simply a transaction. It was the first Fazioli to land in the Central Okanagan — a $320,000 instrument handcrafted in Italy, produced at a rate of no more than 150 pianos annually, and played exclusively by some of the most accomplished pianists alive. Herbie Hancock plays one. So do Angela Hewitt, Louis Lortie, and Marc-André Hamelin. The Juilliard School, after eighty years with Steinway, made the switch to Fazioli a decade ago.
“Fazioli wasn’t satisfied with what people were saying were the world’s best pianos,” Bernaschek explains. “He figured he could combine his knowledge of engineering with his love of pianos and make the world’s best pianos.”
That origin story — a pianist and engineer named Paolo Fazioli who refused to accept second best — resonates differently when the destination is a sun-soaked hillside home overlooking Okanagan Lake. The acquisition signals something. It speaks to buyers who have moved beyond the obvious luxury markets, who have built extraordinary lives in places the cultural gatekeepers have yet to fully map.
“By the mid-80s, people were starting to talk about some crazy guy in Italy who’s making the world’s best pianos,” Bernaschek says, with the measured pleasure of someone who recognized the story early.
Paradis’s Fazioli has a nickname — the Ferrari of pianos — and this is not an idle comparison. Both marques operate at the furthest edge of what is technically possible in their respective fields. Both reward the person who knows exactly what they are holding. And both have found their way into the Okanagan, where the lifestyle has long outpaced the reputation.
Bernaschek and Paradis met in person for the first time just two weeks before the piano arrived — a spontaneous introduction when Paradis, in Vancouver for surgery on a finger, arrived early and walked through the Showcase Pianos showroom door. What followed was the kind of agreement that only happens when two people immediately understand each other’s seriousness.
The arrangement also involves Paradis hosting intimate gatherings at his home to introduce the instrument to prospective buyers — a private salon model that feels entirely in keeping with how the Okanagan operates. The best of it has always happened behind the right doors.
For Bernaschek, placing the valley’s first Fazioli is less an endpoint than an opening note. The Okanagan, it turns out, has been ready for this for quite some time.