Hubert Savage, Architect (1)

 

Eventfulness of form

 

 

December 2008: the cross-gabling makes for an impressive frontage

 

When architect Hubert Savage designed a bungalow for his own use back in 1913, he was following Arts and Crafts instincts by building it over a shallow crawl space. This allowed him to avoid damage to the site's natural contours, instead making them into a part of the building itself. As a result, the house feels that it grows directly out of the site it stands on. His decision to minimize the depth of the crawl space also fitted the structure to the ground in a way that houses back in town - laid out in arbitrarily defined subdivisions, on typically narrower lots - normally didn't. It's true that his choice also trimmed the considerable costs of a concrete basement from the bottom line (typically, ten percent of the total at the time; more if, in order to excavate a basement, bedrock had to be blasted out and hauled away). But Savage's choice was consequential beyond just sparing expenses: it allowed him, for example, on the garden side of the house, to design a building sitting more or less at ground level. In Savage's eyes that was a positive outcome, something he was clearly aiming to do.

 

Bungalow crawlspace under construction, USA somewhere, undated 

 

 

The photo above shows a bungalow crawlspace under construction (photo taken from Old Craftsman Style Homes, a social media group). It reveals how simple this method of construction was relative to excavating a basement space and pouring concrete foundations (just think of the equipment and material complexities that go into a basement on a rocky site like Savage's). The photo above shows how brick piers were used to carry beams supporting the sills, and ultimately the floor joists, of the house. If this all appears somewhat rudimentary today, that's because it was a technique that was rather under-conceptualized at the time (its purpose was to enable getting on with construction while saving money). Certainly it made for quicker and cheaper building, but this could come at the price of convenient access to the underside of the building, as well as to a more-thorough proofing against undesirable environmental factors, like rodents. Note, for example, how the brick piers shown above appear to be resting directly on the ground, either with only skimpy footings or with none at all. Moisture penetrating the crawlspace due to drainage issues would tend to be wicked up by bricks sitting in direct contact with the ground - causing them, over time, to shift and spall. Savage's builders employed a similar technique for his crawlspace: brick piers supporting sills and floor joists, coupled with curtain walls of stone to close up the perimeter. At some point, more posts had to be added to the underside, resting on precast cement footings, in order to better support the building vertically.

 

 

Bungalow under renovation, built over a low crawlspace, USA somewhere 

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 close to the ground in true bungalow fashion (see photo above). Traditional Indian bungalows, which the British 'borrowed' from the rural suburbs lying beyond India's teeming cities and gradually modified, invariably came on a low plinth that imparted a distinctive horizontal look. As a result, bungalows still appear most natural when sited near the ground. And Savage obviously wanted just this look for his own bungalow: a low structure, beneath a sheltering roof that projects well out over the walls, designed to that way to emphasize proximity to ground. It was both fashionable, and rather exotic, to design such a home back in 1913 - a method 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 thirteen feet, versus eight feet four inches for bungalow ceilings).

 

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

 

Garden City backers hoped the new electric railway would trigger growth

 

But whatever led the Savages to build their house way out in what was then still a part of the boonies? Certainly it didn't hurt that quarter acre lots were being advertised with city water and electric lights, as well as the promise of sidewalks and graded streets (see first ad, above, but note that these claims have disappeared in 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 of mostly cleared land with a smattering of choice upland parcels (like the holdings the Savages acquired). The investors backing this real estate development play hoped that Garden City would build out rapidly, courtesy of a new electric railway (see the ads above, which depict an electric Interurban railway line that was to open in 1913). The Savages' land purchase allowed them to build a new home within walking distance of a stop along the line. A location within walking distance of Marigold Junction made commuting downtown, where Savage's office was located, entirely feasible. And it also meant that the Savages could inhabit a ridge-site dotted with mature oaks, at a comparatively short distance from downtown (three miles, or roughly five kilometres). The opportunity cost of their purchase was unbelievably cheap relative to today's inflated land prices - if we assume the Savages bought two premium upland parcels, which they could have done for no more than $1200 (ultimately, sufficient land to subdivide into three generous parcels, plus a leftover piece added to Marigold Park). Their 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, featured RS-6 lot nearby sells for $800,000 (in 2023) their purchase price was a real bargain.

 

 

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

 

As a credentialed British architect with Arts and Crafts sensibilities, 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 happened back in town, where the 'natural' context wasn't permitted to suggest the orientation or design of a new house. The principal facts for consideration in town were the adjacent houses sitting on streets of uniformly platted lots. But out in pristine countryside, in the newly minted Municipality of Saanich, on a large lot with abundant features, nature could be allowed to play a more formative, even a defining, role. Working in concert with the scenery, rather than disregarding it in favour of houses packed onto long thin lots like tinned sardines, gave Savage an opportunity to design a structure that was compatible with its surroundings, making for a better outcome. Savage's interest in building unobtrusively in the landscape, and turning existing scenery and natural contours into context for his new building, just happened to align with the natural hollow that paralleled the ridge on which the bungalow came to be built. This physical feature, coupled with Savage's preference for a benign method of construction, led him to utilize the natural hollow as his 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 as regards light and views. All Savage had to do, given the physical structure of the site, was limit the length of his building to the hollow's extent. Given that he was aiming to design a small, artistic bungalow anyway (a structure of less than 1600 square feet, all on one floor) the limitation on length did not involve major sacrifice. Of course, there was a significant outcome from siting a building this organically, which is its remarkable proximity to ground along the western and northern edges. But as we will see, there were also other advantages that flowed from his way of orienting the building.

 

 

Small crawlspace door, inhibiting easy access

 

 

While the shallowness of the crawlspace was aesthetically desirable for the look of the bungalow, Savage's choice of location for the access made getting under the building a chore (see photo above, noting how small the crawlspace door actually is). Placing it in a cramped location, between the building and the bedrock that rises, right up against one of the supporting brick piers (to the right, photo above) complicates acts of entry and exit. Some bungalows on crawlspaces dealt with this problem by providing for access from within (using a panel in the floor that could be lifted, and which was placed in a corridor or even 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 and where the access could have been larger, which would have simplified getting under the building. Clearly, Savage the architect was keen to minimize the size of the access, which he succeeded brilliantly in doing. As a result, the opening is scarcely big enough for a full-sized adult to get through. Worse still, because the door is located where bedrock is rising towards the sill plate, one has to enter this crawlspace feet first, on the stomach, in order to be able to orient oneself inside (the crawlspace floor deepens quickly once you are fully in, but as the ground falls away sharply, backing-in is a necessity. As well, these problems have been further complicated by the more-recent addition of a cast-iron sewer pipe, which further constrains entry. It's almost as if Savage felt he wouldn't have to ever go down there himself. But of course, one does have to get under the building in order to access the plumbing and electrical systems. I cursed that small, awkward entry point (door-less when I first moved in) through three-and-a-half decades of otherwise living comfortably in the Savage bungalow, because it made getting under the building a big chore. And not least in an emergency situation, such as when, in the dead of winter, in the middle of the night, a pipe under the building bursts due to  cold weather, and then has to be shut off manually - something that actually happened during my first winter there. I subsequently had the plumbing system reconfigured so there were shut-offs within easy reach of the crawlspace door, in case something bad ever happened at night again.

 

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 new middle-class suburbs made possible by reliable forms of long distance transit (first, by steam railroads in America). Later, electric streetcar networks were built, then followed closely by the longer electric Interurban railway lines linking dispersed regional centres into networks. Streetcar and railway networks began distributing residential enclaves as exclusive suburbs on the periphery of urban regions right across North America. In addition to homes now incorporating novel arrangements to enhance creature comforts (like electric wiring, telephones, indoor plumbing, bathrooms, hot water, etc, all of which arrived in what seems like the blink of an eye) Gowans says that these rural enclaves also sponsored an entirely new form of dwelling - one designed expressly for more-rural locales, with more-generous natural landscapes than was standard on city lots. In the Grange Road bungalow, I think we 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 rail 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 up to development by rail access lies behind the novel house-type, a hybrid form that 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 what was happening in rural suburbs right across North America. But being an architect 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 become typical of suburban layouts) but this novel form of placement stood in sharp contrast to similar buildings found in town, which were increasingly built with their main gable ends facing the road, on more standardized and narrower lots (see the top photo above). Having the length of the building turned towards the road in 1913 constituted a 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 out in the back of beyond in Garden City: an Arts and Crafts bungalow with all the modern conveniences of the day, a building on a single level with a sheltering roof form and emphatically horizontal lines, its 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 envisaged as a place of residence primarily, and in no sense was it ever intended to foster a complete community with industries and farms as part of its makeup (Howard's actual vision for Garden Cities). The people who lived in Saanich's Garden City were expected to commute daily to downtown in order to earn a living, retreating at night to their residential enclave. Which is precisely how the Savages used 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 the building, adding considerably to its visual appeal (usually these houses also came with enhanced linking environments, such as paths, verandahs and sleeping porches). Houses in town, built on narrower, more standardized lots, tended towards sidewalls that looked the same, with fewer windows in them due to proximity of neighbouring residences. The Savage bungalow differs in every way from houses with sidewalls designed alike, but here the process of differentiating facades was taken one step further, Savage ultimately creating a house with four unique walls. Of course, back when the Savages built their bungalow, there were no other neighbouring dwellings standing nearby - all of that was yet to come, but certainly they expected it would happen, because the people moving to Garden City believed that the new rail link would trigger rapid settlement (as did the entrepreneurs who invested so handsomely in building the Interurban line). That's not the way things played out ultimately, however: the new rail line came to be so starved for customers that by 1923 it had to be shut down, a victim both of the profound economic slump that began in late 1913, the effects on ridership of WWI, and unregulated competition from the jitney cabs that appeared in droves (see picture two below). Over 150 such jitneys were active in the Victoria region alone (they set up an association to lobby against regulation) which cut dramatically into the electric railway's passenger business. Ultimately however, the new reality may not have mattered too much to the Savages, who got to enjoy a luxurious scenic hillside and design a unique bungalow to live in.

 

 

Opening day in 1913, 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 (from south-to-north) which, among other things, allowed him to impart a feeling of grandeur to the building from the approach path (the plain quality of the main gable roof form is on this facade relieved by a trio of cross-gables 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 (see next photo).

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

The bungalow's south wall (its actual gable end) differs totally from the street facade in its treatment, comprising an asymmetric assemblage of window shapes, types, sizes and formats integrated into a consistent whole (as shown below: balanced overall, window placements dictated by the floor plan). On this wall Savage delivers a facade displaying what author Nicholaus Pevsner characterized as the English genius for "informal grouping" (see The Englishness Of English Art).

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

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

 

Along this wall, a pair of projecting bays sport unusual fixed-pane leaded-glass windows, one (to the left, photo above) a transom above leaded-glass casements, the other a standalone window composed of hexagonal panes. Untypically for this house, the roofed bays on the south wall also show exposed rafter tails - a touch of Craftsman-type styling - whereas the main soffits are enclosed, hiding the rafters in a manner consistent with local Arts and Crafts styling. The south wall impresses the viewer as dramatically as the street facade, while exhibiting entirely different features (yet continuing Savage's pattern of jogging of exterior wall planes to achieve lively movement). Due to the way the land falls away in the south-east corner, necessitating a much-deeper stone foundation there, the south facade seems dramatically taller than the north-facing gable end (photo below) where the building appears to rest directly on the ground, without visible foundation, and is clearly only 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 lifted slightly in order to accommodate an array of functions

 

The long west wall steps outwards at the southern end (to the right, middle photo above) with the roof lifted slightly to accommodate the rear porch and a garden door (which on our watch became a conservatory room with a window seat). You can make out the slightly lifted roof in the photo immediately above, enabling just enough height-gain for the back porch and a utility hub. Note also how, on this facade especially (middle picture above) the bungalow sits remarkably close to the ground, literally resting on it along the north wall (to the left, top picture above). This facade has its own visual appeal, but here the architect reveals the main gable roof with its two chimneys. Here too the bungalow declares that it is 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. But 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 sitting 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 of the drama attributable to height and unique detailing. Few windows appear on this facade, by design (I believe Savage knew that one day another house would be built on the north side). At the north end, the natural hollow beneath the bungalow is very shallow, making this part of the crawlspace hard to reach. This fact does however reinforce the bungalow's remarkable proximity to ground, making it feel like it fuses with it. At some point early on, Savage decided to add a walk-in closet beyond the bedrooms situated at the north end. This addition explains the small shed-roofed structure nestled against the gable-end (photo below) - which Savage turns to account in order to further differentiate this facade. You can also see that Savage designed the walk-in closet to reflect the site's natural contours, preferring to step the bungalow up the land-form rather than excavate the rocky outcrop (the modern building culture's instinctive choice would have been to level the outcrop). This was made to benefit the interior too, by creating a second level for the building footprint that entailed a substantial step-up in order to access the closet. The walk-in closet is shown as existing by the time Savage annotated a version of the floor plan in 1933 (so the work was done prior to that date). The walk-in closet made a seamless addition to an already complex small building. Heritage consultant Stuart Stark remarked that the walk-in closet, from outside the bungalow, has vaguely art-deco features, making for a slight design-inconsistency with the main building, but done so as to be 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 to demarcate a new building era? 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Step-up to the walk-in closet means an added level

 

Books For Looks:

Alan Gowans, The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture, 1890 to 1930, 1986. 

Nicholaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, 1956.

Ebeneezer Howard, Garden Cities Of Tomorrow, 1901.