Century Bungalow Redux

Restoration is never really over when a house is over the 100 year mark, but back in 2013 it looks renewed

I launched Century Bungalow in late 2012 as a way of celebrating a wooden house making it through its first century of use intact. I intended it as a record of the house and its designers, Hubert and Alys Savage, that would capture some of its original context that isn't obvious to the eye. The posts are rather speculative in nature, there being so little pictorial evidence of the Savages’ occupancy - the artifact is really all there is to work from, the house in its landscape setting. No photographs of home or owners that I'm aware of. No images indicating the social life of the house. 

No turned wood in view

Century Bungalow also looks at broader issues of stewardship that arise with custody of an older building whose character one wishes to respect and that has significance for the community. It considers the challenges and choices of restoration, and the difficulty and necessity of finding appropriate skills for the interventions needed to return the building to a state of sound repair. Heritage stewardship inevitably involves some enrichment of our understanding of the structure – what it is, inherently, and the tradition of which it is part.Without that understanding, it's hard to guide the hands doing the work towards the best choices.

Tall piers for a sense of entry

The Savage house is a bungalow, making it part of a larger phenomenon of its time – the first fully modern house type to be supplied in market quantities, offered to city dwellers wanting to reside in attractive homes with all mod cons. A type that spread quickly in cities across North America, and far beyond. A home that was affordable to people who'd never owned one before, because the economics of land and materials made them fantastically cheap for a time. An amount of land that was lavish relative to current building lots, and that would have taken work to keep looking kempt. A quality of design that was often architectural, even when supplied in subdivision quantities. The Savage bungalow however is also one of a kind, an eclectic blend of British, North American and regional arts-and-crafts influences. And I believe we can even discern Gustav Stickley's influence in its layout and details.

British adapted the Bengali bungalow to colonial needs

The bungalow itself enjoys a rich history as a building form (originally a house on one floor, like a cottage, with all the principal rooms under a single massive roof form) travelling far from its origins in Bengal after many regional reworkings as housing stock for imperial administrators; in turn, it was widely dispersed throughout the Commonwealth, further romanticized and evolved, before being recast into the forms we recognize today, in the busy workshop called Los Angeles. LA is where it was minted as America’s first 'dream' home and supplied in subdivision quantities on spec to the masses - for the first time anywhere in history. The Savage bungalow has a lot of California influence in it, but its roots are more mixed than many. For example, the tapered rock pillars supporting the entry verandah are California-style, the enclosed soffits are regional arts-and-crafts, while the fusing of building with landscape reflects British arts-and-crafts thinking. It is a very eclectic house, even for a bungalow!

Bungalow with enclosed soffits: a regional feature

One thing I didn’t do is place this house conclusively in relation to the North American phenomenon of the bungalow, which went through phases as camp, park and recreational housing before evolving into a subdivision type supplied in larger quantities in planned developments. That’s partly due to its complexity, which makes it part of the phenomenon, yet exotic. It may be correct to say that its type is actually transitional, and that it offers a glimpse of the bungalow form as it migrates from rural-recreational housing to something more suburban yet still retaining a strong rustic feeling. This house was built as an outlier with no other homes nearby. It draws on both rural and urban bungalow forms and incorporates regional design touches and local materials, yet the product would not exert a design influence on the trends in suburban housing types being supplied on the LA model. As elsewhere, in Victoria the bungalow came finally to be supplied cheek by jowl, gable ends typically facing the road, on streets that were equipped with sidewalks. For a time the stone or brick piers and timbers holding up an emphatically presented verandah roof continued to define a vital look, lending variety to the closely packed structures. And then, all that went the way of the dodo beginning in the great depression.

St. Francis Court, by Sylvanus Marston: note the emblematic stone piers to the right

The Savage bungalow would have made an unlikely prototype for subdivision housing on this new model: set cross-wise on its lot, built over a low crawl space (thus lacking a basement), making extensive use of timbering, wood panelling, decoratively styled built-ins, and many other artistic touches. Clearly it is part of the artistic small-house movement, a progressive-era direction favouring quality and detailing of space over volume and extent.  Ultimately it represents one couple’s vision of an arts-and-crafts dwelling, set apart by the fact that one of them actually trained to design just such buildings. The outcome was sufficiently compelling that the couple occupied it happily for a lifetime.

What follows is commentary on the nine posts comprising Century Bungalow. It aims to convey some of the things learned via the researching and writing of the blog, and points to issues that have evolved or changed over the course of a year.

1. An arts-and-crafts bungalow at the century mark

Century Bungalow begins in late 2012 with a post commenting on the improbability of wooden houses making it intact through a hundred years today. Chief among the many threats to survival of smaller buildings especially is our own desire to replace the old with the new, to remove the hand of the past and the marks of time and start with a clean slate.

Excavator and dumpster = house be gone

Today the development potential – read as buildable square footage – of even a modest lot is so great that any older home, depreciated in monetary ‘value’ due to its longevity, is a sitting duck for the wrecking ball. Or less hyperbolically, for the excavator, because that’s the machine being deployed to get the job done. A day and a half at most, several large waste bins hauled to the landfill, maybe $5,000 out of pocket – and presto, as heritage advocate Michael Kluckner puts it, the clock is reset to zero.

Heigh ho, to the landfill it's going to go

Evidently we like resetting the clock to zero. In the course of 2013 I joined a Facebook group called Vancouver Vanishes, which put me in touch with the excavators chewing relentlessly across Kitsilano and other historic city neighbourhoods. This site documents the steady disappearance of quality homes, and a quick tally showed at least 14 homes demolished in the first six weeks of 2014, none them dilapidated or really even run down.  Vancouver is passively overseeing the liquidation of its domestic past on a truly vast scale.

 

Context smashed to bits

On average Vancouver sees 750 houses a year smashed up and dumped in the landfill, according to a 2011city report: “Considering the relative ease in obtaining a demolition permit and building new, it’s small wonder that so many Vancouver homeowners forgo the preservation of an existing house, even one that is in good shape.” By 2012, the number of annual demolitions had risen to 940! Vancouver is simply erasing its past willy nilly, and the same forces are beginning to chew away at Victoria.


Oddly, while my post canvassed the many factors that limit the lifespan of houses, I neglected to mention fire – a deadly enemy of wood frame buildings. This is a surprising oversight, given that I live in a wooden building on a treed site with heavy fuel loading. 

Fuel loading: an ongoing problem in Arcadia

It's doubly surprising inasmuch as I'm well aware of the history of places like San Francisco, hosting enclaves of bungalows in woody surroundings, where sudden fires have devastated whole swaths of historic buildings.

An early outcome of the Centennial Bungalow project was the fact the Saanich heritage committee took seriously the idea that a huge number of homes on the registry would turn one hundred in 2013. 1913 was the crescendo of a long building boom that had lasted most of a quarter century. Ken Johnson and the committee members drew up a list of centenarian houses, and made plans to commemorate the occasion with specially cast heritage plaques for each of the century homes. Good job Saanich heritage! Another outcome was that my restoration project received a Hallmark Society award of merit for the quality of work undertaken. The recognition is much appreciated

Sharing our place with the annual Saanich Heritage Tour

and in my fifth post, Sourcing Craft Skills, I tried to share some of the credit with the skilled craftsmen who have worked on the building over the years. We responded to our award by agreeing to open the house for the annual heritage tour on a Sunday in September, when nearly sixty people arrived by bus for a guided walk-through.

   

2. Town and Country

This post challenged me to figure out what Hubert and Alys Savage were doing locating five kilometers out of town on a lonely track at the edge of a cow pasture. The simple answer is that a new interurban railway opened the door to a novel way of occupying rural land. It enabled picturesque living far beyond the pale of civilization by providing a convenient means of access to services and work downtown. But that led me to further wonder what such an expensive infrastructure was doing way out there in the boonies, and from there, what forces brought about its sudden demise so soon after its construction?

Electric railways expanded suburbia into the countryside

These questions reached back to the first appearance of the automobile and the particular way in which its distribution affected the shape of North American cities, which did not initially take the form of mass individual ownership, as one might imagine. When the car first appeared on city streets, the city of the day was fully engaged in extending itself via suburban enclaves clustered along electric streetcar lines. 

Saanich Interurban line, Prospect Station

Interurban railways vastly amplified the dispersal of such suburban pods regionally and had just come on stream when use of the automobile reached a first critical juncture. This took the shape of the jitney bus, emerging as a business opportunity in transport that allowed enterprising individuals to compete directly with urban railways for clientele. Jitneys were the common precursor to both the modern taxi and the bus. 

A jitney bus from the bungalow era

No one saw that particular development coming, least of all the backers of interurban passenger railways. Its impact was devastating given the scale of investment in bringing these advanced electric lines to life. To make economic sense at all, electric interurban railways needed rapidly expanding residential development that was based on their transit service, which if they had it would grow both passenger demand and domestic electrical consumption. What they got instead was cut-throat competition for any new passengers, coupled with an utterly unforeseen bust in overall economic growth. And lacking regulation to restrict their appeal, jitneys could simply cruise station stops plucking passengers by offering cheap fares (a nickel) and the advantage of delivery right to the doorstep (a first appearance of the 'convenience' attributable to the automobile).

City growing out of surrounding country using streetcars

Even in a small city like Victoria, the appearance of jitneys, followed closely by the rise of the private automobile on an expanding scale, completely destabilized the economics of electric rail-based transit. It would take another thirty years before the tracks of town streetcars were ripped out and the electric option purged. But starting with jitney cabs, the automobile began dominantly modifying the urban form through its potential to open up dispersed suburbs anywhere roads ran, wherever there was unbuilt land available for development. 

Ford motor plant, components ready for assembly

The loss of economic dynamism was especially severe in little Victoria, coming along with the advent of war in 1914. This receding economic tide left Hubert and Alys marooned way out in the boonies and, after 1924, without any rail passenger service to downtown. The boom times wouldn't return on anything approaching the pre-war scale until the post-WW2 housing boom again swelled settlement of the suburban city-region. By then Hubert and Alys were reaching the end of their time on Grange Road, but they had managed to stay put on their remote hillside for nearly an entire lifetime. Savage apparently suffered the loss of most of his architectural practice in the immediate post-war doldrums. In the end they too must have adopted the car in order to access their paradisial enclave conveniently, a minor relic of which is a letter from Hubert Savage complaining to Saanich Council that the road was becoming impassable due to potholes (a byproduct of the car)!

3. Outside In: Designing With Nature

Sense of prospect from being removed, above the street

I still recall seeing the Savage bungalow for the first time and feeling struck by the novelty of a house in such a distinctive landscape setting. Its 'curb appeal' lay in the fact that enough of its original wooded lot remained intact that it continued to appear as pictorial composition, which appealed to me exceptionally as a gardener. At the time I didn’t know anything about picturesque landscape theory or the arts-and-crafts approach of placing and shaping a building to suit its setting – I only knew that this house seemed different from any place I’d ever seen in suburbia.

A sense of refuge as well

Outside In is about the conscious connecting of building to surroundings, and how a particular architect, by design, sought to unify structure and landscape in his own residence. And how, by skillfully exploiting both prospect and aspect on his sloping site, he managed to capture a sense of refuge that makes the building special to inhabit to this day. It feels both secure and removed up here, yet at the same time intimately linked to the surroundings. House and setting feel as one, giving rise to a distinct sense of place.

Designed to admit light, frame views, connect occupants to nature

Writing now in February 2014, with spring hinted-at by the flowering of aconites and snowdrops, I continue to marvel at the way the changing daylight reaches into the core of this bungalow. Living here comes with certain constraints, like the lack of adequate storage space, but one inevitably finds it uplifting and cozy due to the light brought in from outside by design. I am aware that the openness of this house to its immediate surroundings assumes a settled and peaceful society around it.

All mod cons in a romanticized setting

The threat of war may have been stalking the globe when this house was built in 1913, but even so it wasn’t coming directly to North America, and certainly not to what was by then the staid and genteel small city of Victoria, with rustic edges. Life in the mainstream was peaceful and well on its way to becoming convenient. The entire kit of modern appliances, from toasters and telephones to stoves and hot water heaters had suddenly appeared and made for civilized living wherever a house might be placed, given the readily available magic of electricity. I think the design and placing of this house out on a rural hillside reflects the era’s romantic optimism about a life where connections to nature are sufficiently mediated that people can enjoy proximity to them while controlling for any type of discomfort. One exception may have been heating system here in the coldest parts of winter, as the house once depended upon several inefficient fireplaces in the central rooms and a small oil heater for the bedrooms and bathroom. Hubert Savage ultimately corrected that problem, however, by installing powerful Wesix electric space heaters in all of rooms in the early 1950s.

4. A Printed Frieze By Lawson Wood

This post is about an unusual ‘art’ frieze by English graphic artist Lawson Wood that bands the living room of the house. It speculates about its meaning and placement. Since writing it, as intimated in the earlier post, I've actually found a conservator to repair several damaged areas of the original work.


Simone Vogel-Horridge was recommended to me by heritage consultant Stuart Stark. She has now done close analysis of the condition of the art work, and drawn some conclusions about its genesis. Likely it's a chromolithograph or a 'chromo' as they were known in the day (therefore not a watercolour process as I wrongly surmised at first writing) so a paint-on-stone print. It's unusual insofar as bungalow friezes are often repeating patterns rather than scenic depictions with people and animals. Lawson Wood’s signature block is also a printed device. Another blog reader with an art school background suggested that the frieze might have been made with a technique known as 'pochoir', a printing process using stencils. Further research is needed to tie down the exact process used to make the art object.

Soon Simone will return to repair areas of the frieze that are damaged or have discoloured in reaction to daylight or because of acids leeching from an earlier wallpaper under the frieze.This intervention is intended to stabilize the artifact, not to attempt its restoration (which would involve wet-cleaning it to remove a layer of wood smoke and tobacco residues).  Interestingly, Simone called a few weeks ago to relay that she had come across a couple of similarly signed Lawson Wood prints at a local auction house – and that they were versions of the same details on the frieze in our living room, but coloured rather less vividly.

While I had no idea what I’d do with these quite bulky prints in a house with so little wallspace for display, I allowed myself to put in a reserve bid at the last moment and then was surprised to learn I’d acquired them for next to nothing. It appears there's not much traction for Lawson Wood in 2014 Victoria! But, it seems I do have a knack for complicating matters, and that I am a bit of a collector too. But perhaps these prints are better off with someone who appreciates them and has an understanding of how they came about?
  

5. Sourcing Craft Skills for Heritage Restoration

The oldest wooden building in North America: 1642

In June I wrote about the craft skills needed to undertake restoration of buildings like ours. Reading Steven Semes’ The Future of the Past as part of my centennial project only reinforced the value of keeping historic buildings in good nick, rather than having to intervene radically in order to rescue them from neglect. Morris, following Ruskin, counseled that we should carefully tend our monuments, watching for signs of deterioration and moving promptly to fix them as they appear. If repair is executed with the skill and caring of traditional craft knowledge, even wooden buildings can live for a very long time. The Fairbanks house (right) built in 1642 and thought to be the oldest in North America, is just 28 years shy of four hundred years and still going strong. The de Gannes house in Nova Scotia (below) has been continuously inhabited and maintained since 1708.

One of the oldest wooden houses in Canada: 1708

But actually finding the person with the skills to do the work remains the challenge. My friend and ally Vern Krahn is now semi-retired from carpentry, and there really isn’t a viable replacement in sight. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to talk Vern into one or two more projects here – recently he put a couple of hours into restringing the weights in one of my double-hung sash windows. Typically, he minimized the difficulty of the job, but in fact it’s incredibly finicky and if you don’t know the tricks, your chances of getting it right are between slim and none. I’m left feeling that those of us who care about heritage need to do more to cultivate and assure the passing on of these old woodworking skills, else we risk enduring a period of unacceptable options. The picture below shows Vern and I with a gate he's copied exactly from a deteriorated original from the vegetable garden on the Savage property.

Vern Krahn and a reproduction gate he's installed

6.  A Shed of My Own

A friend who read this essay about the unusual genesis of my eye-catching shed wondered, over beer one day, if I may not have an obsessive-compulsive disorder or some other form of mental illness. No one, he said very deliberately, goes that far just to create a small amount of storage capacity. Clearly he found my interest in the details if not outright obsessive, then at least excessive and absolutely beside the point (which is spatial gain).

I accept that the exercise I involved myself in isn't a template for

Seen in between winter and spring

building an everyday garden shed, but I would insist that such an investment of time, money and engagement in design made for a fascinating learning opportunity, and that aesthetically, at least to my own eye, the juice was well worth the squeeze. I lamely offered to lend my friend my copy of Michael Pollan’s autobiographical A Place Of My Own, to inspire his own thinking about small buildings. But he just muttered darkly about renovations being the bane of the middle class, and allowed that he’d had enough of home improvement, and if anything absolutely had to be done, it would now be nothing more than the line of least resistance. After that the conversation quickly reverted to sports: how about those Canucks, anyway?

A cottage designed for the Halls by Hubert Savage

Hubert Savage expressed a lifelong interest in smaller houses, creating a number of them in the vicinity of his own home, both for the  market and for close friends. Several of these remain intact in Strawberry Vale today. The one pictured at left, Stranton Lodge, is now a protected heritage structure within Knockan Hill park - it was saved by citizen initiative from demolition to make way for a parking lot, which was not itself wanted by actual park users. I was fortunate to play a minor role, as a fledgling Saanich Councilor, in helping to get it protected. A little gem of an English arts-and-crafts cottage - a trademark 'S' for Savage visible on its chimney - it's now well-tenanted and kept up. We were told, by the way, by parks staff that there was simply no precedent for keeping a residence within a park. But a little searching around BC soon turned up examples in North Vancouver of heritage houses being maintained in parks, in one case for use as park-keepers housing. Oops! 

 

 

7. Finishing Touches

Sanding a south wall before painting

Ambrose Bierce once amusingly characterized house painting as the art of protecting flat surfaces while exposing them to insults of the critic. Paint choices often do elicit criticism beyond any statement we were consciously trying to make, perhaps never more so than when, as I did in Century Bungalow, you suggest there are better ways to make those choices when dealing with a heritage building. Some thought it more virtuous to repaint a house oneself as needed, rather than working through other, more expensive, hands. I respect DIY, am involved in loads of it, but it doesn't extend to exterior paint jobs. I no longer have the time, agility or inclination to tackle prep work perched on a ladder. It's a massive undertaking in sometimes precarious positions and it has to be done in dry times (here, during summer heat). Also, considerable skill goes into a job that's to last and look good for a more than a year. Skip or cheap out on the prep and your coat of paint will be splitting and blistering immediately. Most saving on the costs of building and maintaining today (including painting) comes at the expense of quality and longevity of finish, and with a heritage building I feel that's definitely the wrong path. The fact that people now move as often as they do perhaps means that cheap and nasty has fewer implications for the owner than is desirable. I am satisfied with

Caulking and undercoating with primer

having adopted a colour scheme that I think works for the design details of the house, subtly differentiating the main elements of exterior woodwork. To my eye at least, the results are tasteful. I’m grateful for the advice that got me to this outcome, and for the skilled hands that turned it so deftly from concept to reality. The modern tendency is often to wind up painting an older house white, almost by default, perhaps thinking that white-painting is innocuous enough to sidestep the critics Bierce invokes. But white paint looks, to my eye at least, as though the building has just been undercoated and is perpetually awaiting delivery of its true colour scheme. The details of a wooden house simply disappear when the building is neutral white, although paradoxically white objects compete aggressively for the eye's attention in scenery. The yellow-and-black colour scheme we opted for echoes a regional variant of Tudor colorations in the English past – thus is to some extent consistent with the Tudor design elements that I referenced in my next post, and with the Englishness of its designer. 

8. Allusive Architecture

Proportioning and presentation of materials mainly allowed to speak for themselves

In October I speculated about a turn-of-the-century direction in house design, involving the expressive use of natural materials coupled with detailing drawn from styles of other eras and places. Writing this piece led me to feel there’s more to be said about what could be termed ‘progressive’ design, as contrasted with Victorian design (busily eclectic) and modern design (where any ornament is considered a sin).

In broad terms, progressive design involved a rejection of Victorian excess in favour of more elegant proportioning and greater emphasis on the inherent qualities of natural materials. It was also Stickley's

Extending the building harmoniously

approach to design - removing everything that wasn't essential, exploring the inherent qualities of the building materials themselves, exposing structure frankly in order to gain effect. Stickley distributed home plans in his Craftsman magazine that relied on expressed structure, refined proportions, and the texturing of space with natural materials. Mindful of the Ruskinian precept that one should only ever ornament construction, never construct ornament, Stickley's approach to making his architectural sleight of hand work visually was by exposing the structure (real or apparent) of the building.

I’ve come to see the bungalow in the arts-and-crafts period as the high-point of the progressive design era, in effect its halcyon days, which could profitably be studied for insights as to how we might rescue house design from the barrenness of modernism, the caricatures of post-modernism, or the doodads of Victorian times. Expressive use of the materials of construction and fine proportioning of components is an endlessly fruitful direction that sadly is not much explored today. A look at the addition to the colonial bungalow pictured above shows how, by speaking the language of the original, the building can be extended without jarring results.

9. Shelter and Comfort

My last piece of 2014 ramped it up on the topic of water management and comfort, serving as a pretext to skewer starchitects Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier for their modernist excesses and ego-maniacal lapses. Researching it enriched my understanding of how modernist thinking altered the way the basic units of suburbia have evolved, both good and bad.

 

Epic fail: carton on end, zero landscape

It also sharpened my sense of grievance over modernism’s arrogant refusal to insist on both function and beauty in its creations. Wright, it must be said, accepted both beauty and function as goals, even though he could miss the mark in both realms at times. But to ideologically reject beauty and then show complete indifference to functionality, as Le Corbusier did, and to refuse to acknowledge the failure but instead just blow it off as creativity – that is monstrous and unforgiveable architectural ego-mania. Especially if you reject the idea that buildings should delight our sense of sight, functional worthiness is all that remains. Reject that and what is left is absolutely nothing at all. As pictured beside, modernism is possibly doing okay with function but still a bit of a dead-end when it comes to form.

Keeping moisture out – of rooms, of walls – has been a primary functional objective since Adam’s first house roofed out the sky. Leaking roofs, damp walls, uncomfortable and unhealthy living environments are unacceptable and unnecessary byproducts of a superficial design-arrogance.

Lo-maintenance plastic hedge adds class to the cartons

Perhaps certain egos are simply 
thumbing their noses at the common run of humans – Le Corbusier certainly was. Today the problems we face derive from modern materials used in such a way as to minimize costs to the builder – so long as that drives development economics, we’ll continue to see damp walls that spore moulds that damage our health. On the other hand, buildings like the one above (complete with lo-maintenance plastic - kid you not - hedging) continue to be chosen by a portion of the well-heeled middle class, indicating that the modernist preference for structures that look like cartons still has cachet. Perhaps you feel very 'now' if you have one?

10. What’s  Next?

Apart from this post, I haven't any more articles for Century Bungalow in planning. I've already focused an awful lot of attention on a small and ultimately obscure bungalow built out in what was once the deep boonies. Certainly there are other topics – like House and Garden – that interest me and may yet evoke posts. But the centennial year ran its course and the rationale for celebrating it with a blog has to some extent too. It's been a full and rich year in the life of the house, and for me personally too, and the blog certainly contributed to that outcome for both of us. Bottom line, I found it highly rewarding as a project and satisfying as the building's current steward to create a bit of a record. It certainly refined my own thinking about heritage, and was a creative process in its own right. Maybe, in the end, that’s all that needs to be said.

 

Note: this blog post was edited and updated in February 2016. A further post - Homage To The Craftsman - was added to celebrate the life of my departed friend and master carpenter, Vern Krahn. An introduction to Pat Brown, a former owner of the Savage bungalow, and the ensuing correspondence between us led to a further post in 2016 entitled The Romance of Possibility. There have been other posts since then.