Taking laneway housing to a whole other level
Innovative prototype: Vancouver architect’s ‘ Glass Brick House’ offers an opportunity to break from design norms
Vancouver’s laneway houses now number more than 1,000, with some still under construction. Few stand as examples of outstanding architecture. But that is about to change.
Most of the laneway houses that have been built to date in Vancouver have been built along with a new primary dwelling as part of the redevelopment of an existing single- family lot. A smaller number have been built as new in- fill development, usually replacing a garage, while retaining the existing single- family home.
A number of key principles were defined when Vancouver originally permitted laneway homes. Chief among those principles is maintaining backyard open space and limiting the impacts on neighbours. Design is constrained by regulations that limit massing, height, placement and exposures. The overall size of the laneway house is also limited a maximum of 644 square feet on standard 33- footwide lots and 900 square feet on typical 50- foot- wide lots. The challenge has been to make very small space very functional.
Designing a laneway house became an exercise not unlike drawing a picture within a small checkbox. Moreover, that checkbox is exactly like every other checkbox on the page but the drawing also has to be unique because the checkbox is squeezed between a bunch of circles that are also on the page.
The result is predictable. Most of the laneway homes have been conceived as an accessory building constrained by the conditions of the main building on the lot or they have been conceived in the tradition of the mews, where stables in the backyard once opened on to a small back street, and orientation to the lane becomes the big design concern.
The typical architectural vocabulary for Vancouver’s laneway houses has been one that speaks to the city’s ubiquitous generic Craftsman style or bland post- modernism that defines the houses that line most Vancouver neighbourhood streets. A few exhibit a more thoughtful modernism that pays attention, mainly through materials, to our West Coast environment.
Vancouver architect Gair Williamson has conceived the laneway house differently. His design approach to the laneway house hasn’t focused on solving a problem that merely requires the designer to stay within the constraints of the location of these dwellings and within the regulatory constraints.
Instead, Williamson sees the challenge as one of designing a building that is a livable home that addresses the issues of privacy and densification within our contemporary conservative and, what he describes as, “inward looking culture”.
Williamson has a small Vancouver architectural practice that has pioneered a range of new innovative housing forms, among them a number of multi- family developments on small sites in the Downtown Eastside and the first non- market housing building now under construction as part of the Little Mountain redevelopment off Main Street.
Williamson collaborated with Smallworks — a pioneer in laneway housing in Vancouver — to develop a new prototype for a laneway house that responds uniquely to the challenges of infilling suburban single- family lots with “invisible density”.
The result is the “Glass Brick House,” a single- storey 470- squarefoot house that is built with insulated Japanese- designed glass brick walls that offer both privacy and light. The flat roof structure responds to city hall’s 12- foot height limit for singlestorey laneway houses with a simple and elegant split- level design that offers a living area with 14- foot ceilings by creating a plan where the main living area is recessed into the site. The sleeping area — with a 12- by- 11.5- foot bedroom — become a mezzanine three steps higher at ground level.
The split- level design provides additional storage space built into the under- floor cavities.
The interior — the 470 square foot space can be designed to expand to about 650 square feet — is conceived with an open- space layout using sliding screens to subdivide space functionally and flexibly. Natural ambient daylight bathes the entire interior and the building glows softly on the exterior, symbolizing to the neighbourhood active habitation, rather than just space occupancy.
High windows and skylights can be added to strategically capture long views of any surrounding tree canopies, connecting the interior to the exterior environment. Privacy is maintained with a system of motorized blinds on the glass brick walls.
This prototype laneway house design offers an opportunity to move this housing typology to a new level — one where this form of in- fill density doesn’t just accessorize the singlefamily lot as a symbol of maximum monetary lot value or stand as a forward facing afterthought on the lane. The laneway house can be a housing form of its own that contributes to the architectural fabric of the neighbourhood.