A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE
If this old house could talk, you’d want to hear what it has to say.
That’s pretty much the thinking behind the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s 16th annual Heritage House Tour, which runs Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., showcasing nine historic homes built before 1940. The residences are scattered around the city from Grandview and Victoria, to West Point Grey and the West End.
Offering a walk down memory lane that leads directly to present, the tour includes everything from two luxury apartments in the West End’s historic Kensington Place building ( built in 1912) to a home previously owned by actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Also included is a historic East Vancouver home that has been updated with all the latest in energy-efficiency upgrades.
“The idea is really to give people an opportunity to get inside historic homes and buildings in the city and experience them first hand and learn about them too,” says Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s executive director Judith Mosley. “It’s proved a really popular way for people to experience some of the history and heritage places in our city.”
This year, the tour highlights the Arts and Crafts movement that was founded in Britain and spread throughout Europe and North American in the early 1900s, often associated with architect William Morris, Mosley says.
“It was a really important creative movement of the time,” she says, “and certainly reflected in what was being built in Vancouver as well.”
Mosley says one example included on the tour is Aberthau House, a historic west Point Grey home that was converted into the West Point Grey Community Centre in 1974.
In the early 1900s, there was a lot of development going on in Vancouver, Mosley says, with an economic boom in industries like fisheries and forestry that ended in 1913 just prior to the First World War. During the boom period, many neighbourhoods in Vancouver were developed.
Resident Linda Johnston, who bought her Kensington apartment in the early 1980s and sits on the strata council, knows much about the building ’s history. “Initially, I was told, it was built as summer residences for the management company of a large lumber company that was down in Coal Harbour, which was, of course, where the city started,” Johnston says.
What was most unusual about it at the time, Johnston says, is that it was built as multiple dwellings.
“They just weren’t building apartment buildings in those days here,” she says. “At that point, there seemed to be so much land that people built houses or hotels, but not (apartment-type) residences.”
The design of the building was also unique at the time, says Mosley, because of how large the rooms were and how little there was in terms of hallways.
As Kensington was built as summer residences for executives, the initial design included a small maid’s room built behind a small kitchen in each apartment, with a dumb waiter that travelled down to the basement, where there was a large kitchen for main meal preparation. Kensington Place is also significant in Vancouver’s history, says Johnston, in that it was bought by one of the tenants, and in the early Sixties was converted to strata, so it allowed tenants to become owners in the building.
“We are the second existing building that became condos, I think around 1962,” says Johnston. “Most of them were new buildings when the Strata Act came in. The first was Hycroft at 16th and Granville.”
Vancouver’s heritage homes are just as important to the city ’s present and future as they are to the city’s past, says Mosley, which is why she hopes the tour will show people how easy and comfortable they are to live in.
“There’s a lot of evidence that suggests retaining and updating an older building is much better in the long run than demolishing it and starting new from a sustainability point of view,” she says.
For tour and ticket information visit www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org or call 604-264-9642.