Hubert Savage, Architect (2)

 

 

The instinct for beauty 

 

 

Dove Cottage, once the home of poet William Wordsworth, Lake District, England

 

Many architects helped evolve British Arts and Crafts architecture, but there were a few recurring themes: building in ways typical of the locale, with locally derived materials, was one (timber or stone sourced on-site intensified this effect); tailouring a new house to the specific site, by drawing design leads from its topographic and scenic details, was another; integrated design of all building details, including interior finishes and decor, to unify the outcome, was a third. Construction of these design approaches by highly skilled craft-based labour was how new buildings were produced. These were not the only themes pursued by Arts and Crafts architects, but they were among the most regularly applied. Foremost among the people shaping this direction in the early twentieth century were Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin - architects working in a shared practice who were chosen to design the first-ever Garden City (at Letchworth, some thirty miles north of London). The ideas that galvanized the Garden Cities movement arose from the groundbreaking writings of Ebenezer Howard (Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1901). Parker and Unwin first came to public attention by authoring an influential book entitled The Art of Building A Home (1901) advocating techniques steeped in an Arts and Crafts perspective. The pair were later invited by Gustav Stickley, editor and convener of The Craftsman (an influential American Arts and Crafts magazine) to recast their book as a series of articles. Barry Parker, in one such article appearing in 1910, remarks that "every house should to a very large extent be thought out on its site". This continues a line of thinking he first elaborated in The Art of Building a Home: "The site is the most important factor to be considered, for it usually suggests both the internal arrangement and the external treatment." 

 

 

Parker & Unwin, master plan of Letchworth, the first-ever Garden City

 

It was a credo among Arts and Crafts architects that a pristine site could yield important design-cues that enabled a house to mate more intimately with its setting. This was a precept Savage undoubtedly knew, and one his particular situation (designing a dwelling for personal use, amid unspoiled nature) allowed him to implement. In the creative act of designing the bungalow, he was also blessed to have a picturesque setting with a defining ridge surrounded by old oaks. Parker goes on to suggest how to turn the unique qualities of the setting to account: "In fact, to produce a good plan, one should go to the site without any preconceived conventions, but with a quite open mind, prepared to think out each fresh problem on the spot from the beginning, and to receive all the suggestions the site can offer. I hope you will pardon me if I seem to insist unduly on the importance of so elementary a principle as that of building to suit each site." Building to suit the site was just what Savage had in mind for Grange Road, with the aim of raising a building that fit the immediate circumstances like a hand in a glove.

 

 

Picturesque English cottage in Selworthy, Somerset, photo circa 1888

 

Parker's article in The Craftsman continues: "the designer must go on to the site and let it dictate to him what shall be the interior arrangement of the house, and largely what shall be its exterior treatment. The site must suggest the interior arrangement because the contours and falls of the land must have their influence on the design, or the house can never be one which will look as if it had come there naturally, and were a pleasant part of its surroundings...". Parker's objective was to forge a bond between house and setting, so they were indissolubly linked and would seem to have been made each other. This was the naturalistic approach taken in laying out a traditional English village, or even individual cottages (c.f. the photo above, noting how the cottage steps down the site's contour). The technique used involves fitting a house artfully onto the site, by close observation of the natural features. Given that the Savage bungalow appears remarkably comfortably placed in its natural setting, it's likely that this approach was taken. Letting the site signal design was not something often done back in town, where development happened increasingly on narrow, uniform lots that were the industry norm. The process of 'tract development' was driven by consolidation of the building industry in the hands of contractors and developers who preferred working to standardized lot-widths, even if that meant blunter proximity to adjacent houses (because smaller lots allowed them to optimize real estate yields). The whole process tends towards sameness of design for neighbouring houses.

 

 

 

Vancouver, 1942: five of six new builds share identical features in their front facades

 

 

Many decades prior to Parker and Unwin extolling the advantages of a more naturalistic siting of houses, Uvedale Price, in his masterly Essays On The Picturesque (1842) had commented on the opportunity given an architect, in open countryside, to strengthen the connection between building and scenery by uniting the structure with "the general character of the scenery" and "with the particular spot and the objects immediately around it". Price felt that a building designed expressly for the countryside had unique potential to "do what has so seldom been done" by an architect: "accommodate his building to the scenery, not make that give way to his building". Achieving this outcome would require "an architect with a painter's eye, to have the planning of the whole". Should this condition be met, however, "many are the advantages, both with respect to the outside and to the inside, that might result from such a method...it is scarcely possible that a building formed on such a plan, should not be an ornament to the landscape, from whatever point it might be viewed". He contrasted the opportunity to build amid scenery with the buildings constructed in cities, which perforce had to be pretty much on top of each other, thus lacked opportunity to acknowledge immediate scenery. In this sense, an urban approach to building houses contradicts their potential charm by impairing the relationship they could enjoy with their natural surroundings, should enough of it be allowed to remain. The modern process of gridding landscapes in order to maximize real estate yields tends to transform natural contours and vegetation into unwelcome encumbrances - things that are better removed in order to ready land for development. An extreme example of this subdivision-style layout, on lots of severely truncated width, appears in the photo below of a restored section of Vancouver's old West End. 

 

 

No room left over for residual landscape here

 

Subdivision plan, circa 1912, Quadra-Cloverdale: note the uniformity of lots

 

 

As an Arts and Crafts architect designing a house for his own family's use, Savage could implement the opposite notion simply by allowing the site's contours and scenery to guide the design. The actual ordering of rooms into sequences had to do with both their function and frequency of use, modified by the amount of light that could be gathered by placing rooms in specific locations with different orientations. This prompted Savage to locate the bedrooms at the north end of the dwelling, while the more public spaces (living room, dining room, kitchen and rear porch) went in the south. Savage would have been comfortable too evolving his elevations (the building as viewed from outside) only after nailing down a prospective flow of rooms (or floor-plan). Foremost among the factors he would have considered was the opportunity to obtain views to scenery focused by windows. In the process of design Savage wasn't governed by a requirement for symmetry, so he could open windows wherever he felt they would optimize light and take in views (relying here again on his talent for 'informal grouping', as referenced in my first post in this series). Other architects in the Arts and Crafts tradition felt a similar freedom to open windows wherever they were beneficial: Harvey Ellis, for example, a talented architect and designer who wrote and designed houses for The Craftsman, regularly cited the maxim "not symmetry, but balance."

 

Parker and Unwin continue thus: "The position of each room in relation to the points of the compass and the outlook should be determined on the spot." This is key in an Arts and Crafts approach to design: the architect first familiarizes himself with the specifics of the site, which enables him to comprehend its essential character and to use this to design a sympathetic structure. Necessarily, he would allow for the possibility of view corridors informing both floor plan and the placing of windows. I believe that's just the approach Savage took to this pristine landscape. 

 

 

Bedrooms to the north (right) public rooms to the south (left): site-specific planning 

 

Long before the process of construction got under way, Savage would have been out on site, compass in hand for orientation, sketching prospective layouts and verifying potential placements and exposures. Looking around in sympathy with the stunning immediate and distant scenery, he would have considered how to minimize damage from construction while maximizing access to view corridors from inside. What a great problem for an Arts and Crafts architect to have! Parker and Unwin also declare: "...no sacrifice is too great which is necessary to enable us to bring plenty of sunshine into all the main living rooms." This statement, expressing a typically English sentiment, became obsessive once it was possible to fabricate larger areas of glass (Victoria has a similarly rainy winter climate to England's). But this is a universal sentiment felt by those living far enough from the equator to feel an ongoing need for exposure to sunlight (or at least it was, until comparatively recently, when people stopped seeking light inside homes and began paying obsessive attention to electronic devices). Savage was also in the enviable position of building on an upland site, on a ridge bathed in sunshine endowed with ample views. Parker and Unwin further elaborate on this topic of access to light and views: "But we do not today so much build shelters for people who live out of doors, as dwellings whence they may occasionally go forth. A primary consideration then must be, to so place the house as to afford its occupants the greatest possible enjoyment of such beauty of adjacent country or grandeur of distant view as the site can command. While doing this, however, we must place and design the house in such a way that it shall not stand out as a disturbing excrescence, but shall look at home in its site, in harmony with its surroundings." Or, as Price put it so incisively decades before, so the house was "an ornament to the landscape".

 

 

 Designed by an architect with a painter's eye, to ornament the landscape

 

Savage's half-acre gets more light than many others due to its substantial elevation (a fact of geography that modifies sun angles and allows light to reach further into rooms - especially in a house that runs south to north and that is not actually very deep). Also, the site comes with ample views to distant large-scale scenery (the 'grandeur of distant views') such as the Olympic mountains across the strait of Juan de Fuca, or closer by, glimpses of Portage Inlet, an inland waterway that's part of what today is known as the Salish Sea - atmospheric features that could be taken in at a glance from the principal windows of the bungalow. And when Savage first built, there were no other buildings standing nearby, so nothing impeded him from exploiting those views. Parker and Unwin continue: "This consideration of the house as a detail in a larger picture will bring us to a determination of its general form, its treatment and its colouring. Some positions demand a lofty building, while others seem to suggest that it be kept as low as possible. And in the country, certainly, the low house is more successful, more in harmony with the scenery."

 

 

Savage wanted his bungalow to connect intimately with its natural setting

Same windows, from outside, showing lively movement of the wall planes

 

 

Savage took advantage of the natural aspects of this exceptionally well-endowed site. Rising elevation from the road and the building's placement along the ridge gave a structure with long walls facing east and west, which optimized the light reaching into rooms. As noted above, Savage was free to place windows wherever they were advantageous, either for light or to open views or both, so he must have been intrigued by how this potential wall-porosity would shape the experience of the bungalow within. Using windows, in the form of singletons or in banks, to bring light into the interior, while capturing views to the scenery beyond, meant that the inhabitants were always directly connected to the immediate surroundings. Savage evidently shared Parker and Unwin's perspective on natural light, but didn't have to make sacrifices in design to bring it into the building. As a result, there are many different shapes, sizes, and treatments of windows in the Savage bungalow - some thirty-two of them in all, many substantial (the sash windows are five feet high) in a house whose footprint is a scant 1600 square feet! A number are hinged casements, but more are generous double-hung sash windows, which open and close easily due to presence of counterweights hidden behind their elegantly trimmed frames. Both panes of open, so they can exploit the 'stack effect' that optimizes cool air circulating through the building on hot days (and especially when the attic door is open, which offers hot air another floor to rush into). Cumulatively, these windows are generously distributed (except on the north face, where their presence is limited to two small panes of glass) working to provide effects pretty much as intended.   

 

 

Small picture window in the conservatory looking out to the rear garden

Even in December light, the view from the conservatory room is dramatic

The kitchen and other windows show a remarkable porosity of the walls

Kitchen windows as seen in May, with views to the protected back garden

Kitchen windows, rear door, conservatory windows seen from the garden

The charm of vista

In an authentic Arts and Crafts approach, the architect allows the sequence of interior spaces to develop out of the site itself, while exploring opportunities to open views to specific features (so as to exploit what Parker and Unwin term "the charm of vista"). They recommend that the living room, given its centrality, be placed optimally in order to garner the maximum of light: "The living room, as the most generally occupied, and therefore most important room, is placed at the south-east corner, having the double outlook to the south-east and south-west, and getting all available sunlight and the best of the prospect." As it transpired, this is pretty much where Savage placed his living room, with windows facing east (for morning light) and south (for afternoon light). Of course, the living room doesn't occupy the full width of the structure (after all, this is a small bungalow) sharing space with a dining room and the utility-room and rear porch, so it only receives indirect light from the west. But it is never dull in that room.

 

 

Living room oaks in fall, pictured through wavy 'old' glass windows

 

 

 

Main bedroom, views to an oak forest from a bank of windows set in a bay

Visible front window shows how thin the house is

 

One result of Savage's configuration of windows is the ample light in all rooms, bar none. His bungalow was, after all, ideally situated to take in light, not at all deep (see photo above chronicling the bungalow's thinness) but long and oriented to enable light to penetrate it from both east and west. Indeed, he gave it so many significant windows that this light-gathering function is effectually accomplished. What follows are a few pictures showing just how well he succeeded at bringing natural light into the bungalow.

 

Morning light blasting into the entry foyer

January mid-day light blasting into the living room: virtues of a ridge site

 

Warm light reaching deep into a central corridor

 

January light blasting into the small dining room

 

 

Savage presumably worked through a flow of rooms and only then developed elevations for the bungalow. We can't be sure of this however, as no drawings of elevations have surfaced to date, making it harder to know for sure whether they came after he decided on a floor plan (certainly, however, this was the way Arts and Crafts architects tended to approach design). And the elevations as built do feel organic, blending seamlessly with the immediate context of the building (the cross-gables on the frontage, for example, appear to mimic the overall shape of the fir boughs visible behind the structure in Marigold Park). We have to accept the possibility that there may only ever have been sketch-plans of the bungalow's exterior, the detailed design of which could have been worked out during construction (with the highly skilled carpenters Savage used to build his home). The woodwork inside the building is absolutely flawless, a tribute to the skill of carpenters working with hand tools who knew what they were doing. The same can be said of the bungalow's exterior, and the trio of cross-gables defining the main facade stands as a brilliant interpretation of bungalow form sitting cross-wise, on an upland ridge, in a truly picturesque landscape.

 

 

Brilliant articulation of bungalow form set cross-wise in a picturesque setting

 

Another view of the cross-gabled facade 

 

"We could" says Raymond Unwin, "if we really desired it, so arrange a new building site that it should not be an actual eye-sore, and might manage that it should have some little of the charm of the old village." One goal for Arts and Crafts architects was to fit new structures into existing landscape, in a way that wouldn't set of a competition for attention but actually embraced the landscape itself. The trick was to make the building feel so comfortable in its setting that it gave the impression of always having been there (rather than, say, remaking the landscape to fit an arbitrarily defined building lot, which is what we do today). The latter outcome, the by-product of town-development practices ("through not co-operating with the scene") treats the site without respect, as if all land were infinitely malleable, manipulable, and gradable. In a bona fide Arts and Crafts approach, the scenery is treated more respectfully, reverentially even, and as a result, the building comes to be "pleasing in the landscape".

 

 

A building fashioned consciously to appear 'pleasing in the landscape'

 

Elsewhere in Century Bungalow (in a post entitled The Romance of Possibility, August 2016) I commented on the charm and beauty of this site's natural contours, with its mature oaks front and back. It's an inherently picturesque landscape (an exceptional one too, despite being reduced from its original grandeur to the dimensions of an RS-6 lot) - one that's still magically protected by Savage's organic building placement. The architect with a painter's eye who first composed the scene took utmost care in handling the site, avoiding the re-contouring that excavation or grading would necessarily have involved. This was, after all, Savage's chance, as a professional architect, to build for himself in a fully authentic Arts and Crafts manner, and perhaps one of only two instances where he got to shepherd a beguiling natural landscape through a complex building process while ensuring the site remained substantially undisturbed (another instance of the quality of work Savage was capable of is perhaps Stranton Lodge, a small nearby English Arts and Crafts cottage designed for his friends Thomas and Maud Hall in 1934, a building I hope to canvass more extensively later in this series of posts).

 

 

Stranton Lodge, by Hubert Savage, 1934, seen here in February 2018

 

Intriguingly, on the topic of naturalistic siting of new buildings, Savage's choice of the ridge as his building site happened to align with Gustav Stickley's declared preferences for building placement, expressed in one of the essays in the compilation Craftsman Homes and Bungalows (1995 edition): "the hillside site, affording, as it does, well-nigh perfect drainage, makes it possible to put into effect a favourite Craftsman theory - that a house should be built without a cellar and should, as nearly as possible, rest directly on the ground with no visible foundation to separate it from the soil and turf in which it should almost appear to have taken root." This preference was akin to the way of siting English village churches, as shown below.

 

 

All Saints, Brockhampton, by William Lethaby: a building rising from the land

 

Ridge sites come with natural advantages, including excellent drainage

 

 

Whether or not Savage was aware of Stickley's oeuvre, his approach to house-building as demonstrated by the Grange Road bungalow is remarkably consistent with what Stickley called 'the Craftsman idea'. The house obviously benefits from its placement on the brow of a hill, and running it along the length of the ridge does indeed offer possibilities of, if not 'perfect', then at least very good, natural drainage. This results in a dwelling that seems to absorb the foundational ridge into its very being.

 

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other."  Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect, in An Autobiography, 1932

 

 

Rainfall tends to run away from a building built on a ridge, in patterns that are readily discernible if an architect takes the time to observe them (this would mean that the site is visited and absorbed into consciousness long before construction begins). If a house is well-contrived to disperse rainfall to ground (and many are not) good drainage is thereby assured. However, the Savage bungalow was also contrived to look 'settled into' its natural landscape, taking full advantage of the lay of the land (its 'contours and falls' in Barry Parker's poetic phrasing). On the west side, along the rear of the building, the house (borrowing again from Stickley) "sits upon a foundation of field stone that is sunk so low as to be hardly perceptible, so that the house, while perfectly sanitary and well-drained, seems very close to the ground". Barry Parker, commenting on the layout of a traditional older building remarks "does not the old building seem almost to grow out of the ground on which it stands?" And that is just the way Savage designed his then-modern bungalow to appear.

 

 

The west and north facades appear to be sitting directly on the ground

 

Gustav Stickley, in various articles in The Craftsman, declared how enamoured he was of the exact building placement - near or directly sitting on the ground - that Savage evidently was aiming for at Grange Road. Of one such rural building, Stickley remarks: "as the general effect of the house is broad and low, it is fitting that very little of the foundation should be visible. A far better effect is given if no attempt is made to establish too strict a grade line, as the house seems to fit the ground much better if the foundation is accommodated to the natural irregularities..." Not emphasizing the presence of a stone foundation, except along the south wall where the contour of the land makes this necessary, results in a building that feels well "accommodated to the natural irregularities" and as a result, seems to rise directly from the land (c.f. photos above and below). Even along the south wall, where the stone foundation is at its deepest, a rock outcrop that forms part of the protruding bedrock was made an integral part of the foundation.

 

"The point of the California bungalow was to get almost everything on one floor. Its exterior charm...was at least partly the result of the closeness of that floor to the ground. Good drainage of the soil...made it possible to put the little house on a very low foundation, thus emphasizing its mainly horizontal lines...The California bungalow seemed to hug the earth." Robert Winter, The California Bungalow

 

 

The front path follows the 'line of least resistance'

 

Bedrock incorporated into the foundation wall

 

In another of the essays in Craftsman Homes and Bungalows, Stickley promotes an idea for building placement that simultaneously functions as an approach to the gardening of intact natural landscapes, one that involves modifying the natural context minimally (so more or less the opposite of the British form of estate gardening, which is, to put it mildly, more systematic). "Most fortunate is the home builder who can set his house out in the open where there is plenty of meadow land around it and an abundance of trees. If the ground happens to be uneven and hilly, so much the better, for the gardener then has the best of all possible foundations to start from and, if he be wise, he will leave it much as it is, clearing out a little here and there, planting such flowers and shrubs as seem to belong to the picture and allowing the paths to take the directions that would naturally be given to footpaths across the meadows or through the woods - paths which invariably follow the line of least resistance and so adapt themselves perfectly to the contour of the ground". Stickley's method here is consistent with a North American Arts and Crafts approach to the  gardening of natural landscapes (something few Europeans could have experienced in the old world, because it was long-inhabited and accordingly much-modified). I'm convinced the Savages took this approach to evolving their little patch of heaven during their long tenure there. The course of the front path evidently does follow Stickley's 'line of least resistance' through the landscape (see top photo, above) and as a result, feels snugly fitted to the land's natural contours. This approach gives us an entry path that traverses the entire front facade before accessing a switchback path, followed by a flight of steps, that finally arrives at a sheltered verandah. From the outset, and for many years thereafter, the final steps to the verandah were made of wood (c.f. 1933 floor plan, where the steps are still identified as being wooden); however, by the time Savage drew up a second floor plan, back in 1951, the switchback and the steps to the verandah had been rebuilt as broad, curving stone stairs, appearing today pretty much as they do in the photo below. The stone steps have a decidedly more impressive effect than the wooden steps would have had.

 

 

Curving stone stairs complete the switchback path

 

Books for looks:

The Art of Designing A Home, Robert Parker and Raymond Unwin, 1901. 

The English Vision, The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design, David Watkin, 1982. Watkin makes a strong case for the convergence of picturesque notions of landscape with Arts and Crafts architecture, especially in chapter 5, The Picturesque House: Vanbrugh to Soane; and chapter 6, The Picturesque House: Salvin to Lutyens. Of Edward Lutyens he says: "Lutyens was the last and perhaps the greatest exponent of the Picturesque. Whether he would have immediately recognized himself in that description is unclear, but there can be no doubt that his sensitivity to local materials, his love of irregular massing, and his concern to relate the plan and the form of a house to its setting both natural and man-made, were deeply part of everything we have described as picturesque." (147). Lutyens was perhaps the greatest Arts and Crafts architect to practice in Britain, and he enjoyed a long-standing partnership with Gertrude Jekyll, an Arts and Crafts garden designer.

Essays on the Picturesque, Uvedale Price, 1842.

Craftsman Homes and Bungalows, Gustav Stickley, 1996 edition.

The California Bungalow, Robert Winter, 1980. 

The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, by Christopher Hussey, 1967 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hubert Savage, Architect (1)

 

Eventfulness of form

 

 

December 2008: cross-gabling makes for an impressive frontage

 

When architect Hubert Savage designed a bungalow for his own use back in 1913, he was following an Arts and Crafts instinct by building it over a shallow crawl space. This also allowed him to sidestep damaging the site's natural contours, making them instead into a part of the building itself. As a result, the house feels like it grows directly from the site it's built on. His decision to minimize the depth of this crawl space also made for a structure fitted to its surroundings in a way that houses back in town - laid out in arbitrarily defined subdivisions, on typically narrow lots - couldn't. It's true that Savage's choice also trimmed the considerable costs of a concrete basement from his bottom line (typically, ten percent of total costs at the time; more if, in order to excavate a basement, bedrock needed to be blasted and hauled away). But Savage's choice was consequential beyond the sparing of expenses: it allowed him, for example, on the garden (or west-facing) side of the house, to design a building sitting more or less directly at ground level. In Savage's eyes that would have been a serious positive, something to be aimed for.

 

Bungalow crawlspace under construction, USA somewhere, undated 

 

 

The photo above shows a bungalow crawlspace under construction (photo from Old Craftsman Style Homes, a social media group). It reveals how simple this method of construction was relative to excavating a basement and pouring concrete foundations (just think of the equipment and material complexities that go with developing a basement on a rocky site like this). The photo above shows how brick piers were used to support the sills and joists of the house. If this all appears somewhat rudimentary now, that's because it was a technique that was under-conceptualized at the time (its purpose was to expedite getting on with constructing the dwelling). Certainly it made for quicker and cheaper construction, but this sometimes came at the cost of convenient access to the building's underside, as well as to more-thorough proofing against undesirable environmental effects, like rodents. Note, for example, how the brick piers shown above appear to rest directly on ground, either with only skimpy footings or with none at all. Any moisture penetrating the crawlspace due to drainage issues would tend to be wicked up by bricks sitting in direct contact with ground - causing them, over time, to shift and spall. Savage's builders employed a similar technique in making the crawlspace on Grange Road: brick piers supporting joists and sills, coupled with curtain walls of stone to close up the perimeter. At some point, a number of additional posts were added, resting on precast cement footings, which served to reinforce vertical support for the building.

 

 

Bungalow being renovated, built over a low crawlspace, in the USA  

Reverend J. F. Cole's bungalow, on a low plinth, with liveried servants

The shallow depth of the crawlspace certainly reinforced a horizontal aesthetic, resulting in a building sitting near the ground in true bungalow fashion (c.f. photo above). Traditional Indian bungalows, which the British 'borrowed' from the rural suburbs lying beyond India's teeming cities and gradually modernized, invariably came set on a low plinth, which imparted strong horizontal lines. As a result, bungalows still appear most natural when sited close to the ground. And Savage was obviously after just this look: a low building under a sheltering roof that's projected well out over its walls, designed in that way to emphasize proximity to ground. It was both fashionable, and rather exotic, to design in this manner in 1913 - a method perhaps of differentiating the contemporary bungalow from houses that were more markedly Victorian - houses that tended to be taller (multi-storey homes with ceilings reaching as high as twelve or even fourteen feet, versus eight feet and a few inches of ceiling height in many bungalows).

 

1911 ad for Garden City: note the price-creep in the subsequent ad 

 

Garden City backers hoped a new rail line would trigger rapid development

 

But whatever led the Savages to build a house way out in what was then still part of the boonies? Certainly it didn't hurt that parcels on quarter acre lots were being advertised as coming with city water and electric lighting, as well as the promise of sidewalks and graded streets (see first ad, above, but note that such claims have disappeared from the 1912 version). The real answer to this question undoubtedly had to do with the cheapness of quarter-acre parcels in Garden City, a suburban enclave comprised of cleared land with some choice upland parcels (such as the holding acquired by the Savages). The investors backing this real estate development play hoped that Garden City would develop rapidly, courtesy of a new electric rail line (c.f. the ads above, picturing an Interurban Railway line that became operational in 1913). The Savages' land purchase allowed them to build a new home within walking distance of a stop along this new Interurban line. A location within walking distance of Marigold Junction made commuting downtown, where Savage's architectural office was located, entirely feasible. It also meant that the Savages could inhabit a ridge-site dotted with mature oaks, at a comparatively short distance from downtown (roughly five kilometres). The opportunity cost of their purchase was unbelievably cheap relative to today's inflated land prices - if we assume the Savages acquired two premium upland parcels, which they could have done for no more than $1200 (ultimately, there was enough land to subdivide into three generous parcels, plus a leftover chunk that was ultimately added to Marigold Park). The cost of purchase, rendered in 2024 dollars, would have been just under $38,000 (if they paid full price based on the ads). Now that a single RS-6 lot nearby sells for as much as $800,000 made this a bargain!

 

 

Garden City Hall, built in expectation of rapid development, circa 1921

 

As a credentialed British architect with Arts and Crafts values, Savage was determined that his new bungalow do minimal damage to the natural landscape (he knew how rare the opportunity before him actually was). This was in sharp contrast to the way things were done back in town, where the natural context wasn't allowed to suggest the orientation or design of new houses. The principal facts for consideration there were the adjacent homes, sitting on streets of uniformly platted lots. But out in the pristine countryside in Saanich, on a large lot with abundant natural features, nature could be allowed to play a more formative, even a defining, role. Working in concert with the scenic possibilities, rather than disregarding them in favour of houses packed onto long thin lots like tinned sardines, presented Savage with the opportunity to design a structure that was compatible with its surroundings, which meant getting a worthier outcome. Savage's interest in building unobtrusively in the landscape, and making the existing scenery and natural contours serve as context for his new building, just happened to align with the natural hollow paralleling the ridge on which the bungalow came to be built. This physical feature, coupled with Savage's preference for benign construction, led him to utilize the natural hollow as a crawl space.

 

 

Modern building site: cleared and levelled, emphasizing convenience 

 

Following the design-lead offered by the hollow also enabled him to orient the building optimally for light-capture while taking advantage of the views. All Savage had to do, given the physical structure of the site, was limit the length of his building to the extent of the natural hollow. Given that he was aiming to design a small, artistic bungalow anyway (a structure of less than 1600 square feet, all in) the limitation on building length did not involve major sacrifice. Of course, there were knock-on consequences to siting a building so organically, among them a remarkable proximity to ground along the western and northern edges. But as we shall see from interpreting the outcome, there were many other advantages to this method of siting a structure - all turned to account by an aspiring young Arts and Crafts architect.

 

 

Tiny crawlspace door that inhibits easy access

 

While the shallowness of the crawlspace was arguably aesthetically desirable for the overall look of the bungalow, Savage's choice of location for the access to it made actually getting under the building a chore (c.f. photo above, noting how small the opening actually is). Placing it in a cramped location between the building and rising bedrock, and right against one of those supporting brick piers (to the right, photo above) complicates both getting in and getting out. Some bungalows built over crawlspaces dealt with this problem by providing for entry from within the building, by means of a panel of flooring that could be lifted, placed in a corridor or even in a substantial closet. Savage however, for reasons that remain unclear, preferred exterior entry, yet shied away from locating the door where the stone foundation was deepest - towards the southeast corner - a location where the entrance might have been larger, thus simplifying getting under the building; clearly, Savage the architect was keen to diminish the appearance of the access point, which he succeeded brilliantly in doing! As a result, the opening he left is barely large enough for a full-sized adult. Worse still, because the door is located where bedrock rises towards the sill plate, one has to enter feet first, on one's stomach, in order to be properly oriented inside (the crawlspace floor deepens out quickly once you are fully in, but as the ground falls away sharply, backing-in is mandated; plus, matters have been further complicated by the recent addition of a cast-iron drain pipe near the portal, which has the effect of further constraining getting in and out). It's almost as if Savage believed he would never have to actually go down there himself! But of course, one does indeed have to get under the building, if only for access to the plumbing and electrical systems! I cursed that small, awkward entry point (door-less when I moved first moved in) through three-and-a-half decades of living otherwise quite comfortably in the Savage bungalow, because it made access to the building's underside a chore. And not least of all in emergency situations, such as when, in the dead of winter, in the middle of the night, a pipe under the building bursts due to a cold snap, and then has to be shut off, manually  - something that actually happened during my first winter of occupancy there! Of course, I subsequently had the plumbing system under the building reconfigured so there were shut-off valves within easy reach of the crawlspace door!

 

Accessible Remoteness 

Alan Gowans, who wrote The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890 - 1930, notes that houses designed expressly to provide greater human comfort first arose in the new middle-class suburbs made possible by reliable forms of long distance transit (in the first instance, steam railroads in America). Later, electric streetcar networks, and then the longer electric Interurban rail-lines that linked dispersed regional centres into networks, began distributing these residential enclaves as suburbs on the periphery of urban regions across North America. In addition to homes suddenly incorporating novel provisions for enhanced creature comforts (like electric wiring, telephones, indoor plumbing, bathrooms, hot water, etc, all of which arrived in the blink of an eye) Gowans says that the existence of these rural enclaves also saw the birth of a new type of dwelling - one designed expressly for these more-rural locales, with their more-generous natural landscapes. In the Grange Road bungalow, I believe we can see an example of this new dwelling-type emerging, built well out in pristine countryside, with access to its relative remoteness enabled by a novel form of electric rapid transit.

 

 

Tod Inlet Station, a stop along the Saanich Interurban Line, ca 1919

 

Scale model, interior of an Interurban Line car, courtesy Aaron Lypkie

Downtown Interurban platform, across the road from Victoria City Hall

 

"The idea of a location far enough from the city to have rural qualities – open fields nearby, good-sized garden behind, and set off from the street by a front lawn – yet close enough for people to commute to the city to earn their living, was new." The rural lands opened to development by rail access prompted creation of a novel house-type, a hybrid Gowans calls "a combination of country and city home," one with "a basically horizontal look...with the long facade facing the street". In this sense, Savage's picturesque intentions for his own bungalow just happened to mirror the fashion then occurring in rural suburbs right across North America. But being an architect who was designing a home for his own family's use, he could endow his version of the bungalow with bona fide Arts and Crafts attributes (for example, organic building placement, see first section above).

 

Artistic bungalow, gable-end facing the road, in Victoria (now stuccoed)

 

Savage bungalow, length turned towards Grange Road, rural suburb style

 

 

Not only did the length of the new house-type face the road (in what would soon become typical of suburban layout) but this novel form of placement stood in sharp contrast to similar buildings found in town, which were increasingly built with their gable ends facing the road, on more standardized and narrower lots (see photo one, above). Having the length of the building turned towards the street in 1913 constituted an entirely novel look in domestic architecture, one that derived ultimately from the relative cheapness of the rural lands now conveniently connected by rail corridors to the urban core. "Neither city nor country houses, they represented a really new kind of dwelling, designed for a new, suburban kind of place." I would contend that this is precisely the sort of dwelling Savage imagined building out in the back of beyond in Garden City: an Arts and Crafts bungalow with all the modern conveniences, a building on a single level with a sheltering roof form and emphatically horizontal lines, a long cross-gabled facade facing the road, perched remarkably comfortably in a minimally altered natural landscape.

 

 

The cover of Garden Cities Of Tomorrow (1901)

 

The Garden City idea, as elaborated by Ebenezer Howard in his Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1901) didn't quite fit the local vision for Saanich's Garden City, which might more accurately have been called a 'garden suburb' rather than a city. It was from the outset envisaged as a place of residence primarily, and in no sense was it ever an effort to foster a complete community, with industries and farms integral to its makeup (Howard's actual vision for Garden Cities). The people who lived in Saanich's version of Garden City were expected to commute daily to downtown in order to earn their living, retreating to this residential suburb at night. Which is exactly how the Savages were using their new dwelling.

 

Government St. back in the day: note gable ends facing the road

 

 

 

Vancouver, West End, houses with gables facing the road, on narrow lots

 

The differentiation of suburban-style buildings  located in open countryside from their in-town counterparts was often further accentuated, Gowans says, by the practice of designing markedly different facades for the front, sides, and rear of the house - an approach that further individualized these buildings, adding considerably to their visual appeal (usually these houses came with enhanced linking environments as well, such as paths, verandahs and sleeping porches). Houses in town, built on narrower, more standardized lots, tended to come with their sidewalls designed similarly, with fewer windows in them because of the closeness of neighbouring residences. The Savage bungalow differed in every way from such houses, but in this instance the process of differentiating facades was taken a step further, Savage ultimately creating a house with four unique facades (in this, whether he was conscious of it or not, he was in effect doing what Philip Webb (the first British Arts and Crafts architect) habitually did. Of course, back when the Savages built their bungalow, there were no other neighbouring dwellings at all - all of that was yet to come, but certainly they expected it to happen, because the people moving into Garden City believed that the new rail link would trigger rapid settlement (as did the entrepreneurs who invested  handsomely in building the Interurban line). That's not the way things would play out ultimately, however: the new rail line became so starved for customers that it had to be shut down in 1923, a victim of the profound economic slump that started in 1913 and presaged the effects of the First World War, and unregulated competition from the jitney cabs that quickly appeared in droves (see picture two below). Suddenly, over 50 such jitneys were active in the Victoria region alone (they set up an association for lobby against regulation) cutting dramatically into the electric railway's passenger market. Ultimately however, the new reality may not have mattered all that much to the Savages, who got to enjoy a luxurious scenic hillside and design a unique bungalow as their own home.

 

Opening day, 1913 on the Saanich Interurban line, Sluggett family photo

  

Lake Hill 'jitney' bus in the 1916 snowstorm: unregulated competition

Cross-gabled east-facing front facade, emphasizing horizontal lines

 

Savage opted to run his bungalow along the ridge defining the site (running south-to-north) which, among other things, allowed him to impart feelings of grandeur to the building as viewed from the approach path (the plain quality of the main gable roof form is on this facade relieved by a trio of cross-gabled bays stepping the building dramatically out into the landscape). The house (photo above) is evidently designed to emphasize horizontal lines and proximity to ground, thus standing in marked contrast to the more vertical, Victorian-era buildings characteristic of town (c.f. next photo).

 

 

Bungalow beside a taller Victorian-era house: horizontal vs vertical emphasis

 

 

Savage took full advantage of the upland site to generate long front and rear facades for his new  bungalow. Fitting the house intimately onto the site, he contrived a shallow oblong - just two compact rooms and a tiny circulation corridor for the back (northern) half of the building, which he deepened somewhat at the southern end, so as to accommodate a 'summer tea room' that functioned as a porch with a garden door. This addition to the building width is gained by jogging the building's footprint outwards and slightly lifting the roof-line. The cross-gabled frontage is consistent with traditional Tudor-era buildings common in Savage's native England, an attribute he transformed masterfully into two roofed bays book-ending a welcoming verandah (see second photo below). This verandah, its substantial roof resting comfortably on top of two tall tapered stone pillars  crowned by trios of short, chunky timber posts, impressively dresses the ridge.

Fords Hospital, Coventry, England, built in 1509, cross-gabled roof form

 

Cross-gabled roof, dramatically advancing verandah flanked by roofed bays

The bungalow's south wall (its true gable end) differs totally from the street facade in treatment, comprising an asymmetric assembly of window shapes, types, sizes and formats integrated into a coherent whole (as shown in the photos below: balanced overall, window placement dictated by the floor plan). On this wall Savage delivers a facade that displays what Nicholas Pevsner once characterized as the English genius for 'informal grouping' (c.f., The Englishness Of English Art).

South facade: an asymmetrical collage of shapes set in a horizontal matrix

South wall pictured in more wan end-of-day light, in December 2017

 

Along this wall, two projecting bays sport unusual fixed-pane leaded-glass windows, one (to the left, photo above) a transom placed above two leaded-glass casements, the other a standalone window composed of honeycomb-shaped (hexagonal) panes. Untypically for this house, the roofed bays on the south wall also sport exposed rafter tails - a touch of Craftsman-type styling - whereas the main soffits are enclosed, hiding the rafters in a manner consistent with many local Arts and Crafts-style buildings. The south wall impresses the viewer as dramatically as the street facade, while exhibiting entirely different features (continuing Savage's pattern of jogging exterior wall planes to achieve livelier movement). Due to the way the land falls away at the south-east corner, which necessitates a much-deeper stone foundation there, the south facade appears dramatically taller than the opposite, north-facing, gable end (photo below) where the building appears to rest directly on the ground, without visible foundation, and is clearly just one storey high. 

 

The west wall differs dramatically from those facing east and south

 

The west wall roof lifts slightly to accommodate the back door and porch

 

Porch roof that lifts slightly in order to incorporate the array of utilities

The long west wall also steps outwards at the building's south-west end (to the right, middle photo above) with the roof lifted slightly in order to accommodate a rear door and what on our watch became a conservatory room with a window seat and views to the garden. You can make out the slightly lifted roof in the photo immediately above, enabling just enough height-gain with a barrel-vaulted ceiling to accommodate the enclosed porch and rear door. Note also how, on this facade especially (middle picture above) the bungalow sits remarkably near to ground, literally resting on it along the northern edge (to the left, top picture above). This facade, again differentiated from the one that faces the road, is however no less visually appealing. Here the architect explores the opposite impression given by the design of the street facade, exposing the main gable roof with its two chimneys, on a building that, because it sits virtually at ground level, declares itself to be only one storey high (photos below). In contrast, the main gable roof is largely masked from view on the front facade, due to the land's elevation and the prominence of the cross gables. Here on the west side, one steps out through a back door that feels remarkably close to ground, then walks out into a protected garden set in an oak meadow.

 

 

Front facade with prominent cross-gables masking the main roof form

The west wall sits at ground level, leading out into an oak meadow

 

The photo below shows the north facade of the house, which is architecturally similar to the south end, but with less drama deriving from height and unique detailing. Fewer windows appear on this facade too, obviously by design. At the north end, the natural hollow under the bungalow is very shallow, so this part of the crawlspace is difficult to access. This feature does however reinforce the remarkable proximity to ground, making it feel as though the bungalow is fused with it. At some point early on, Savage decided to add a walk-in closet beyond the bedrooms located at the north end of the house. This addition explains the small shed-roofed structure nestled against the north-facing gable end (c.f. photo below) a fact that Savage uses to further differentiate this facade from the other three. You can also see that Savage designed the walk-in closet to work with the site's natural contours, preferring to step the bungalow up the land-form rather than excavate the rock outcrop in order to keep things at one level (the modern building culture's reflexive choice these days would be to level the rock outcrop). This had beneficial consequences inside too, in creating a second level for the building's footprint necessitating a substantial step-up in order to access the walk-in closet. The walk-in closet is shown as already existing by the time Savage drafted a floor plan, in 1933 (ergo, the addition had to have been done prior to that date) - making a seamless addition to an already complex small house! Heritage consultant Stuart Stark remarked that the walk-in closet has some art-deco features that make it slightly inconsistent with the design of the main building, but still congruent with the overall design. Perhaps this was Savage's way of demonstrating that buildings do grow over time, and that he was not afraid of demarcating a new building era? The idea was not unprecedented among Arts and Crafts architects (c.f. Edward Lutyens)

 

 

North gable rising from ground, walk-in closet stepped up the landform

 

 

 

 

Step-up to the walk-in closet added later on

 

Books For Looks:

Alan Gowans, The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture, 1890 to 1930. 

Nicholas Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art.

Ebeneezer Howard, Garden Cities Of Tomorrow, 1901.