Feature Stories
Vancouver Special
By Jesse Spencer published Mar 1, 2009
Additional Images click to enlarge
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Too new to knock down but too ugly to love, Vancouver Specials pose a renovation dilemma. Solution: eliminate the awkward boxiness while finding ways to keep the DNA of the original
Take a developer with a fondness for contemporary design. Add a pair of architects schooled by a local legend. Turn them loose on a dowdy, 1960s house on a West Side street, and what do you get? A clever, soothing, contemporary 2,500-square-foot rebuild that's waking up the Dunbar neighbours.
The developer, Alan Askew, 47, worked in the music business with Sam Feldman before turning to construction and development. He met architects Chris Doray and Arno Matis a few years back when they all worked together on the ambitious reno of a high-end Bing Thom-designed residence in Southlands. That project got Askew thinking about how to apply contemporary architecture to the makeover of that most decidedly uncontemporary of houses, the Vancouver Special.
In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Vancouver Specials-practically designed but aesthetically dreary two-storey structures that maximized square footage, used the most inexpensive cuts of lumber, and allowed for easy conversion of the downstairs to a self-contained suite-sprouted like toadstools in East Van and elsewhere. Askew kept an eye out for one on a tree-lined street in a higher-end neighbourhood where the land was more valuable, the mix of homes more invigorating, and potential buyers more inclined to warm to the reinvention of a West Coast architectural cliché. He found what he was looking for on West 18th Avenue, near Lord Byng Secondary, and purchased it in early 2008. He engaged the architects (who by then had left Thom's firm to set out on their own); nine months (civic strike included) and a hefty $300 per square foot later, they unveiled the redone house.
