Vanished Strathcona home reproduced after a century
It was neither a renovation nor a restoration of an existing Vancouver heritage home. Rather, it was a complete rebuild. There was no other way. The original home at 517 Union Street in the historic Vancouver neigbourhood of Strathcona was long gone and lost to time.
George Henry and Rebecca Louise Bazley built the original Victorian-style home in 1891. The so-called Bazley House stood at the property until a fire is believed to have destroyed the property in 1917.
When Jonathan Greaves and wife Laurel Murray bought the address, what they got was an unsightly bungalow built in 1949.
As the Financial Times related in a story, the couple left London in 2015 for Vancouver in order to move closer to Murray’s parents.
Murray found a photo of the old Bazley house at the City of Vancouver archives. The couple hired architect Tony Robins to design them a new house. Robins suggested a modern interpretation of the Victorian house.
A website dedicated to the property notes that the original Bazley residence was “reenvisioned with every detail of the facade observed from the overall mass and proportions of the home”.
Features include a “tall gabled roof, generous verandah and trim details to the precise fretwork and shingles which were individually CNC-cut [computer] and installed to recreate the historic south elevation”.
“The project is the first of its kind in Vancouver in that it did not simply renovate a historic home but actually rebuilt what history had lost,” the site bazleyhouse.com states.
According to B.C. Assessment, 517 Union Street has a 2022 valuation of $1,507,000. The sum represents $1,059,000 for the lot (25 feet by 122 feet), and $448,000 for the two-storey residence with three bedrooms and four baths.
B.C. Assessment indicates that the modern home was built in 2020.
On February 22, 2022, Royalty Group Realty Inc. listed the home on behalf of the owners. The asking price was $2,278,000. Two days later, the property sold for $2.4 million. The February 24 sale was reported on March 1.
The selling price was $893,000 over its current assessment.