A Printed Frieze By British Illustrator Lawson Wood

 

My first encounter with artist Lawson Wood came unexpectedly when I discovered that a piece of his handiwork was affixed to my living room walls. It was spring 1988, I had just bought a 1913 'character home' that would turn out to be a bungalow, and I was still canvassing its unique details when I happened to notice that the frieze in the living room was actually signed 'Lawson Wood. 1921'. It’s not uncommon for bungalows to sport a frieze panel of some sort in the living room (a frieze is a horizontal band carrying a unique surface treatment, often a distinctive wallpaper or a textured surface) but it is less usual for it to be signed artwork.

 

I had assumed that the series of agrarian scenes adorning my new living room was a print of some sort, an eye-catching copy perhaps of an original illustration. Charming and unusual depictions of people and animals at work on farmsteads ran half way around the room just beneath the beamed ceiling, punctuated into distinct panels by windows and bays rising high in the walls. It was while perusing a pastoral scene of sheep grazing near an old-fashioned windmill that I came upon the distinctive signature block shown above, making the frieze - like the house itself - potentially one of a kind.

 

 

The frieze band, though occupying only a thin strip in a room endowed with numerous wooden features, caught my eye the moment I entered it. I happened to be among a crowd of prospective buyers at a realtor's open house, all of us busily tallying the place's assets and liabilities according to our various priorities. The frieze's unusual colour scheme and variety of farm scenes added to the uniqueness of a room whose complex character was one of the reasons I would find myself making an offer to purchase later that afternoon. Habituated to modern rooms with unadorned walls and unrelieved volumes, I found one so loaded with wooden wainscotting, beamed ceilings and a colourful frieze to be irresistibly atmospheric.

 

 

The friezes decorating bungalow living rooms tend to be horizontal bands of printed wallpaper with some sort of repeating pattern. This in turn is framed by a wooden rail or ledge, so it feels built into the room's woodwork. Friezes were in use prior to the bungalow era (which ran from roughly 1905 - 25) but those in bungalows tend towards motifs that are typically more spare than their Victorian precursors. Some bungalow friezes are simply comprised of textured materials, like grass matting or even burlap, applied directly to a backing panel. These decorative touches hark back to the bungalow's early use as a lodge or cottage-like structure in remote locations.

 

Wallpaper friezes serve to soften the extensive but decoratively chaste use of wood characteristic in the principal rooms of bungalows (almost as if the walls were being treated like furniture, a la Gustav Stickley). Less often, a frieze will come with an element of original work, like hand-stencilling, but only rarely is one a continuous, non-repeating illustration. I couldn't help but wonder how the art had come to be on these walls, apparently fitted to the size of the room? Could it have been developed as an actual mural on site, I wondered early on? But that was an idea that did not stand up to closer scrutiny.

 

 

Discovery of the stylized signature block piqued my curiosity about Lawson Wood as an artist (I had never heard of him prior) so I visited the library to see what could be unearthed. I didn't learn much except that he had enjoyed great commercial success as a caricaturist, in England and in North America, in the first half of the twentieth century. This didn't explain a lot to me because my frieze certainly wasn't caricature per se, more like stylized illustration. Years later, with the advent of the Internet, and then the Google search engine, a good deal more emerged about Lawson Wood, who turned out to be a third generation artist who worked as an illustrator in many media, from magazines to commercial posters and even postcards. And, he was amazingly prolific.

 

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The very first images to surface were of a popular, well-drawn (but to me, disappointingly silly) series of cartoons featuring monkeys, one in particular called Gran'pop (see above) that Wood’s British audience apparently found highly amusing. Gran'pop subsequently became wildly popular in America too. Next there were samples of covers he executed for Colliers (a successful mass circulation American magazine for four decades, with four million readers at its height) illustrations of striking quality, often involving animals, but mostly without monkey-humour. Since then, more of the sophisticated side of his output has come to light, again often featuring animals as subject matter.

 

 

 

 

But it was a conversation with Victoria artist Rosemary James Cross, daughter of famous architect Percy Leonard James, that first lodged the thought that Lawson Wood may also have illustrated children’s story books. Rosemary knew the Savage bungalow well from her youth, having attended many social functions there with her father and her uncle, Douglas James, both of them friends and colleagues of architect Hubert Savage. She recalled her fascination as a child with the frieze, whose figures she characterized as being "like something from a child’s story book". This conjecture turned out to be a great clue to the varied talents and interests of its creator. While the frieze's scenes idealize a settled agrarian way of life evoking adult nostalgia for a disappearing past, the colours and styling of the farmers and animals reaches back to a tradition dating to the era of classic storybook illustration (cf. Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, circa 1890s). 

 

 

 

The colourful illustrated strips of paper gracing the living room walls have only been seen by those who have lived here, and their guests, over the course of nearly a century now. So these pictures of the frieze likely represent the first publication of their details as found today. I think you will agree these farm scenes are absolutely delightful vignettes, conveying remarkable detail through their simplified patches of distinct colours. Seeing them in situ is best, but unless one happens upon them at a moment when sunlight fills the room with the full force of indirect light, the whole tableau tends to be taken in at a glance and the details remain elusive. Placed so as not to have light fall directly upon them, many of the panels are semi-obscured due to the light-draining qualities of the room’s darkened walls, perhaps especially at night.

 

 

As to the illustration's contents: all the scenes depicted here have to do with farm chores and operations that are evidently set in the British, rather than in the British Columbia, countryside. They appear to embody a kind of steady cooperation between animals and humans  more typical of husbandry in the pre-industrial era of mixed farming, from before the advent of specialization and 'production agriculture'. Figures, animals and scenery are presented in a manner that is rather quaint, but not whimsical (which quality often prevails in Wood's cartoons).

 

 

 

To a North American, the farmers depicted appear rather formally dressed for the exertive nature of their work (which remained the way in traditional English farming long after 1921). But what jumps to my eye is Wood’s profound sympathy for the farm animals, who are depicted with dignity and purpose (his control of animal proportions and movements is quite remarkable!). They are lifelike, well-cared-for and above all possessed of a trusting innocence that relates to a distinct form of husbandry, all of which is modelled through Wood's simplified technique of rendering colours in patches and blocks. Had I possessed more knowledge of art technique, I would have grasped that this implied they were designed as prints to be drawn from a master engraving.

 

"To draw animals you must sympathize with them; you must know what it feels like to be an animal." Philip Webb, Arts and Crafts architect

 

 

 

Motive power on this farmstead is supplied by the massive Clydesdale-like horses relied on prior to the advent of tractors, an era that persisted well into the twentieth century in England. At the time these rural scenes were depicted, farming in North America was already far more mechanized (having deployed steam-tractors to break the land, it was now beginning the move into gas-powered tractors) and well on its way to becoming truly industrial in nature. (Mass manufacturer Henry Ford introduced the wildly popular Fordson gas-powered tractor in 1917).

 

 

The date on these illustrations (1921) also places the work just three years after a European war that saw the advent of fully mechanized slaughter, involving horrific carnage of lives to little tactical purpose. The war also enveloped the cavalry steeds and the army of dray horses used to lug materiel around the battlefields. As an enlisted man, Lawson Wood would have seen these horrifying scenes firsthand (he served as a spotter and was decorated by the French for valour shown at Vimy Ridge) and with his manifest sympathy for animals, must have been sorely affected by the cruelty inflicted on helpless working horses by such intense, pointless warfare.

 

 

However his sympathy for animals originated, Wood held a lifetime interest in the plight of domesticated animals and was sensitive to their potential suffering at the hands of humans. Obviously he was keenly interested in them as subjects too, and as the lifelike images in the frieze attest, he must have spent a lot of time closely observing their ways. While the array of colours sported by his dray horses, steers or even his chickens is fanciful, his renderings of other creatures, like crows and sheep, are depicted more sparely and even abstractly in simple black and buff tones. 

 

 

 

So how did this decidedly British country scenery come to grace a bungalow wall on southern Vancouver Island? My original surmise was that it was commissioned for the house, likely because artist and architect knew each other, perhaps as friends from Savage's upbringing in London. This may have been no more than speculative thinking on my part, but the arrangement did appear to my naive eye to have been commissioned for the locale. I even wondered whether Wood may have visited the house after the war, and seen the room for himself before defining the work, but I have since come to realize that almost certainly Savage framed some pre-existing frieze panels to fit the space available. I have recently confirmed that the individual panels were cut from larger, continuous strips, having been shown an original print of the threshing scene (second photo, at the top) that in fact is far wider! And so I can confirm that Wood must have run a copy of work he had already designed, colouring it to serve as a frieze expressly for the Savage bungalow.

 

 

I’ve found little recorded about Lawson Wood’s actual history with animal welfare, but it was apparently extensive. A current Wikipedia article reports that he eventually “established his own sanctuary for aging animals,” and that in 1934 he was “awarded a fellowship of the Royal Zoological Society for his work with animals and his concerns with their welfare”. 

 

 

Animal sympathies notwithstanding, Lawson Wood obviously wasn’t against commercializing their images for humour in order to make a living. He’s known to have done very well from his popular monkey series, going so far as merchandising a line of wooden children’s toys known as the Lawson Woodies! There was even a contract to turn some of this into a Hollywood film production, but that was nipped in the bud by the advent of World War II. Yet despite his commercial success with comedic art, Wood remained a serious artist-illustrator whose brilliance shone through perhaps especially in his print illustrations, including many delightful pieces for children’s fairy tales and stories.

 

Today Lawson Wood is enjoying something of a renaissance among the international community of illustrators. His work spans the period from the Gilded Age right up to the advent of the Cold War, and even illustrators working in domains he may have found foreign are inspired by his creative technique and sheer mastery of drawing and illustration. Sadly, the lion's share of images in circulation today still involve the monkey cartoons, which are nonetheless very well drawn.

 

The Savage frieze clearly romanticizes a human-animal partnership characteristic of an earlier phase of the British agricultural landscape. It depicts it as purposefully arranged, mechanized but not motorized, and decidedly not industrial in scale or technology. Animals retain a real dignity even if their ultimate raison d'etre is to provide or become food. In this sense the frieze’s contents fit well with bungalow (and Progressive) era themes, harking back to earlier, simpler times  that manifested a better balance between the human and natural realms. This was a disappearing reality at the dawn of mass production in fast-growing urban settings across North America. There is a certain irony in its appearance on a wall in a suburban home, itself a reaction against the rapid massing and mixing of peoples of all types in the emerging urban realm.

 

 

Modelling an ideal of agrarian balance is perhaps intended to serve as a star by which to steer the little ship of family, as well as a way of capturing some of the innocent delight that accompanies the best of children's storybook illustration. I take the message to be one of enduring respect for agrarian and pastoral endeavour, idealized here as mutually beneficial cooperation between man and animal in a world where animals are treated with respect and enjoy their own place. People and animals working alongside each other, in purposeful, caring relations. As we now know in a world of poultry batteries and CAFOs, this was not to be the case for much longer.

 

 

Having an artful representation as permanent décor brings some unique challenges as regards conservation. There is some damage to a couple of the panels, one context piece above a doorway seeming not to be part of the original work (or to have been rather crudely added) and there’s the unavoidable buildup of grime from a century of use that included a smoky fireplace (and some unknown incidence of tobacco smoke). I foresee a paper conservator being invited to recommend actions at some point in the future. There’s also the thorny question of lighting the panels for better viewing – whether and how to do it effectively but unobtrusively, so that their content can be better enjoyed when the room is in social use.

 

 

As I've noted before in previous posts, stewardship of an older building is a long road and the tasks are many and challenging. I'm approaching the point where maintenance and repair of the frieze is creeping onto my agenda, if I can actually source the appropriate skills. Sourcing the right skill set, perhaps the biggest challenge facing owners of heritage homes who value authenticity, forms the basis of my next post.

 

 

For additional information about Lawson Wood, visit these sites:

http://www.bpib.com/illustra2/lwood.htm

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/guide/draw-me-a-story-story-time-at-the-frick-center/

If you would like to get in touch with me, I'm at cubbs@telus.net

The Hubert Savage bungalow turns one hundred

A house made of old growth fir, intact after a hundred years and a succession of owners

 

Our antique bungalow is made almost entirely from the old-growth Douglas fir readily available back in 1913 on Vancouver Island. Its original footprint and exterior cladding were intact when I bought it, although several sections along the base of the building would require replacing when the exterior was finally repaired. And, best of all, it turns one hundred in 2013, which is a pretty good go for a wooden artifact and, I feel, should be a cause for celebration.

A century is a long time for any house to be continuously used and cared for – over three full generations in broad human terms -  and still remain substantially unaltered. Many houses are deemed to be dated and significantly altered within decades of being built. Many are neither functional nor loved as originally built, making it more likely they will be done over. For decades now the demand for ever-more interior space has meant larger houses with less and less exterior expression, effecting a growing detachment of owners from the look the house presents to the street. This prioritization of spatial gain has also multiplied the frequency of awkward expansions - let's call them 'unsympathetic additions' - that are tacked onto older homes, sometimes coarsely disfiguring their much classier original look. If spared demolition by means of expansion, some houses are so completely modified as to become unrecognizable. 

It's not unusual to see a finely detailed bungalow with an architectural carbuncle sprouting from its roof, one that grabs additional interior space efficiently but does so at the expense of the original look of the building.  



This new dormer is utterly out of keeping with the original roofline

 

 

This is even more blunt, with some cheesy modernist elements added in

 

 

 

Here it's become a two-storey house, with even more-discordant windows

 

Other houses are made to suffer lesser but not inconsequential indignities, such as having original wood siding suffocated under stucco icing or covered with spraytex paint (photo below). You can usually tell if a building is stuccoed-over because its window frames no longer sit proud of the walls (as intended), which adds a certain blankness to its rather forlorn appearance. This one has the added indignity of a lick-and-stick stone base glued to its lower level - the bizarre lift under the art-glass window is utterly inexplicable.

 




Faux rock foundation, stuccoed walls, window frames buried, details minimized

 

Still others have had their original old-growth cedar shingle siding entombed by asbestos-cement shingles, or today covered over with vinyl replica siding, despite the original wood being in pristine condition. Some are further injured by having fine double-hung sash windows replaced by cheap aluminum sliders or, more recently, vinyl thermopane windows. 

 





Buried under asbestos shingles, original drop siding emerges: caring restoration

 

I still feel entirely fortunate, a quarter century on, that back in 1988 when I took possession, our bungalow’s exterior remained intact - after 75 years of continuous use, it may have been rather neglected and in need of renewal paint-wise, but at least it hadn't been monkeyed with. It could so easily have been otherwise!
 

Bare as a fresh-shorn lamb, this tiny colonial bungalow awaits its new look

   

 

In fact it’s surprising to me, in light of the Savage bungalow's relatively modest size, that it hadn't been awkwardly expanded, or raised by a storey, or simply bulldozed in favour of the humungous McMansion that could in fact now cover most of the lot under its RS-6 zoning. Nothing would have prevented that outcome before I came along and had the house, which was already heritage-listed, designated in 1993.

 




Despite subdivision, the bungalow retains a sense of rural setting among oaks

 

 

There are tons of reasons (or more realistically put,  'excuses') to tear down older buildings, quite apart from the simple fact that their highly depreciated value in assessment terms, after such long duration, makes them sitting ducks for the wrecker’s ball (or his excavator, which is how the deed is done nowadays).  For at one hundred years of age, even with considerable upkeep, a modest bungalow could easily be assessed at a mere fraction of its actual replacement costs, which means it could be disposed of (i.e., sent to the landfill) for a remarkably low 'opportunity cost'. (If the building is worth just over ten percent of its actual replacement costs in assessed terms, then getting rid of it for a fresh start is a tiny fraction of the total costs of land and building, plus minimal charges for an excavator, a dumpster, and some tipping fees). Today the lot's value is the major component of market value, while back in the day of purchase the lot was only a fraction of the total cost of the building, which was itself quite low.

House be gone: an excavator and a dumpster hauler, and it's landfill bound

 

In fact, the spectre of demolition haunts buildings from a relatively young age. Canadian architect Witold Rybczynksi puts ‘the useful life of a building’ at 20 – 40 years, indicating that it takes 'special features' to double that lifetime or to extend it to a full century. He’s speaking of commercial and institutional buildings rather than residential structures, which reflect different economics and respond to a narrower range of needs (those of a family rather than a corporation). But today almost no one invests in 'special features' for any kind of building, preferring a form of planned obsolescence to any enduring continuity (atrium entries and three-car garages notwithstanding). In such circumstances demolition remains the primary option by default, and 100 years is now a very long life for any structure.

 



Lack of maintenance and depreciating value reduce the chances of survival

 

 

One US study of building demolition found three main reasons that are given for tearing buildings down:  area-wide redevelopment (34%), lack of maintenance (24%), and ‘no longer suitable for intended use’ (22%).  For those buildings that are deemed ‘no longer suitable for intended use’, being too small and having antiquated services and systems are handy rationales for knocking it down. Lack of maintenance threatening physical structure is one that municipal councillors frequently hear from those hoping to tap the many rewards of new construction. But at one hundred years of age, all three pressures can combine to place a considerable weight on the future of a house.  And simple accidents of placement – say, where someone decides the new freeway interchange should be built – can be the kiss of death for entire areas (as in Los Angeles, picture below). 

 

 



LA freeways consume colossal spaces at the expense of neighbourhoods

 

 

Lots of homes (and many buildings of more utilitarian purpose) are torn down within fifty years, long before they are in any sense worn out. It’s partly our throwaway culture, which assigns absolutely no value whatsoever to embodied energy, let alone to period aesthetics. Collectively we tend not to care whether something is representative of its era, or whether its era holds any significance for the future. Yet today, bungalows enjoy increasing protection because families are once again breathing new life into these remarkable structures, which embody workable ideas of home that modern stucco boxes simply do not. And bungalows - wooden buildings par excellence here on the west coast where forests abound - survive despite our collective tendency to think of houses made of wood as more fragile and transient than those composed of other materials.

 

 

Wentworth Villa (1863) was made largely of wood

As I write this article, a campaign is under way in Phoenix, Arizona to save a 2500 square foot classic Frank Lloyd Wright house that he designed for his son David in 1952 - a modular modernist bungalow elevated a storey above ground (but with none of those ugly pilotis that Le Corbusier revered).

 




Wright playfully incorporated curves into this modernist 1952 bungalow

 

 

The threat to this F.L.Wright design derives from a developer’s desire to subdivide the lot it sits on, simply to realize a capital gain in the housing market. Grabbing the value of two lots requires demolition of the existing structure, which is in restorable condition despite some recent neglect. The economics of the situation (ie. the building's depreciated value) mean the developer can disregard this home’s stature as a valuable work of art that the broader community actually treasures. Fortunately the community does care about the house, and with a public fundraising campaign ongoing, the building is likely to be saved. (It has since been purchased, restored, and is now on the market again, lot intact, thanks to direct action by citizens).

 

Poor building envelope condition, due to neglect of routine maintenance, is an excuse frequently given for demolishing both residential and commercial buildings (typically by those who want to redevelop land at higher densities in order to maximize gain). Yet rarely if ever is the implied structural deterioration real, even in houses made substantially of wood. Places are simply allowed to become shabby and neglected to the point of presenting a superficial impression of being structurally unsound. Which in turn establishes a great cover for today's economics to trump yesterday's, making preservation seem almost irrational.

 




Neglected, maintenance deferred, this house can be repaired but it seems unlikely

 

Unless, that is, someone cares enough to see the house's potential to live on

 

 

The fact of wood's durability was confirmed when repair of our own bungalow finally got under way. Structurally the building was just fine after 85 years in use, the wood framing solid, most of the exterior totally intact. There were some rotten spots close to the ground at the rear, where rainwater had been allowed to splash back against walls when downspouts were allowed to fail (lack of vigilance on the part of occupants), but mostly it just needed loads of prep before full repainting. And there were some small errors of adaptation (like an unsightly cat door that had been skived into the spot where the lower vent for the original cooling cupboard had been located) standing out like blemishes on a pretty face, but these things, it turned out, were relatively easy to correct.

 

 

Some rot near the ground, but the ugly cat door is now gone for good

 

One thing predisposing this bungalow’s survival largely intact was the fact its original inhabitants, who designed it and oversaw its construction, inhabited it for over six decades. This was a very good thing for the house, as incompatible changes often come in tandem with new owners who tend to redesign elements without any experience of inhabiting the building (we have this narcissistic tendency to remake buildings in an image of what we imagined we were looking for). Important details are easily eviscerated in our quest for the new, walls come down and shiny aluminum patio doors casually disfigure intact facades, while strange carbuncular growths pop incongruously from rooftops (see photos at the outset for three examples of this). 

 



Neglected, this small airplane bungalow is in danger of actual dilapidation

 

 

It was also lucky that this building's creators inhabited it for their entire lifetime, tending to its needs while raising their family there, while overseeing a single, modest alteration of its footprint, in the form of a walk-in closet designed to be compatible with the building's exterior form. The legacy they bequeathed to the community is a bungalow that is architecturally significant and worthy of conservation: designed by an architect in the era when bungalows were the entire rage, as a relatively pure application of Arts-and-Crafts thinking, in order to create a setting for the architect's family to use and enjoy, while exploring the notion of a building connecting inside and outside. And, perhaps also to create a compelling calling card that he hoped might contribute to his future professional practice?

 

These were the Savages, Hubert and Alys, British immigrants on route to New Zealand back in 1912. He was a RIBA-certified London architect who stopped in Victoria to visit with a friend and fellow architect he'd worked with in London (Douglas James, brother of Percy Leonard James, a soon-to-be-famous architect). The James brothers convinced him there were good local opportunities (Victoria was then in the throes of a real estate boom that saw tons of offshore money careening around, triggering rapid housing growth, with a local population struck by the idea that one could buy as cheaply as rent, which was then true) and so they stayed on, and in the boom conditions of the time, Savage managed to secure a number of architectural commissions immediately. One of these commissions (a house at 11 Eaton Road, in View Royal, circa 1913) may have made him aware of the Garden City suburb, a major real estate play that was positioned to benefit from the building of a brand new Interurban electric railway line, and of the cheapness of lots that far out of town on what was still largely agricultural land dotted with rocky outcrops. Somehow, by early 1913, the Savages had managed to acquire a building site on a picturesque half-acre lying well beyond the city’s edge. On it they had constructed a small artistic bungalow of Savage's design, a new dwelling type then spreading all across North America from its suburban epicentre in Los Angeles. Interestingly, this house appears to be one of the rare occasions when Savage designed in a predominantly American Arts-and-Crafts style (despite the Tudor detailing and the obvious influence of local Arts-and-Crafts styling, expressed especially by the enclosed soffits). In his later professional practice, his designs were more often variants of English Arts-and-Crafts buildings (likely more marketable to middle-class Victorians in the post-war era) and upmarket to boot.

 




Sash windows, leaded glass, fir panels: the hallmarks of a true bungalow

 
 

 

Coming from dense, hectic London England, landing so quickly in a home of their own in such a pretty spot (if way out in the boonies by the standards of the day) must have felt like a magical turn of events - a dream suddenly come true. Home ownership was a rarity in England at that time – less than ten percent of the entire population enjoyed the status of owning their own home (from A. D. King, The Bungalow: The Production Of A Global Culture). Such sudden independence in a new house deep in pastoral countryside with few others around must have been absolutely transformative. 

 

The Savages were lucky enough to land in Victoria at the apex of an economic boom, then affecting all North American cities - a time when demand for architects abounded even in a place as small as Victoria (population 45,699 in 1911). Expectations of surging growth, on the nearby-Vancouver model, spread like wildfire, and speculation in land was rampant. There were over 300 real estate agencies operating in Victoria in 1913, and everyone was invited to join the speculative party because hordes of newcomers were on their way! However, within a year of occupying their new digs out in the back of beyond, the Savages' access to the benefits of growth and prosperity would simply evaporate, as an economic slump that dried up commissions arrived hand in hand with the advent of global warfare.

 

Part of the Savages’ grand good fortune must have been the sheer cheapness of suburban land on the distant periphery. Rural lands around cities, opened up by new transportation technologies like electric street railways and Interurban lines, were by then on offer to former renters looking to buy or build. And bungalows, echoing the Los Angeles experience with land assembly and tract building, were then being marketed as affordable housing, which they actually were at the time due to the relative cheapness of construction materials and rural lands. “Why pay rent?” was the pointed question posed by the Los Angeles Investment Company on one of its many brochures, “when you can own your own home as cheaply as renting” its snappy response. 

 



Encased by gardens, intimately linking indoors and out-of-doors as rooms

 
 

 

Due to the expanding reach of downtown streetcars and the new Interurban line, which made building lots affordable, and the ready availability of cheap, top-quality wooden building materials, a newly arrived middle-class family could literally step off the boat into home ownership while paying no more for it than the cost to rent digs in town. However it actually transpired, the Savages set up house on a picturesque hillside overlooking a dairy farm and the blue waters of Portage Inlet, with distant views across the Juan de Fuca straits to the majestic Olympic mountains. And with no immediate neighbours, which was actually a selling point back in those days!

 

Fate, luck and good timing landed the Savages on their upland parcel on the edge of an area called Strawberry Vale, while skill, artistry and the magic of old growth timber (rendered dimensionally in local Victoria mills) helped create the building. It was lucky too that the few owners prior to my buying the house in 1988, on a Friday afternoon in early March, hadn’t altered the footprint or ‘upgraded’ the look of the exterior. For the ensuing quarter century I’ve been engaged in stewarding this heritage resource, gradually correcting some errors of decor (1980s kitchen, Cubbon Home Centre bog with cultured marble countertop and straight-backed motel tub, back porch with a wall summarily ripped out to better accommodate overscaled appliances, and damaged built-ins like the tile apron in front of the living room fireplace) while enjoying the many artistic features of a house that was skillfully contrived to be intimate with its setting.

 

 



Intimate with its surroundings, Arts-and-Crafts style 

 

Houses built on rural lands subsequently overtaken by infill development do run the risk of further subdivision, an arbitrary process of gridding that typically takes no account of landscape features. Subdivision is exactly what happened when the Savage bungalow (sitting on its original half-acre lot) passed to the next generation: the larger original holding was subdivided into

Retaining wall for new infill: an 'engineered' solution leaving much to be desired

 

three separate parcels, with two new houses settled into what was a single landscape. Fortunately these homes were constructed at the same scale as the Savage homestead, so they don't visually encroach on the original dwelling and, as a result, now amicably share the land they are built on.

I sometimes try to visualize what it would have been like out here without a built-up neighbourhood around it. But I always end up thinking that it was a miracle that just enough land remained around the original homestead to retain the sense of a house placed comfortably in a natural setting, a rare and unusual attribute in today's more closely built tract suburbs. Many an historic house has had its entire landscape context filched from it by insensitive infill development. The Savage bungalow got lucky, again (thanks to daughter Joy and her husband Albert, who cared enough about 'the old place' she grew up in to see that it wasn't mangled in the process of subdivision).

 



Vegetation heals an edge created by panhandling the original lot with a driveway

 

I feel very privileged to be on the verge of seeing this special building through its century year. I wish I could say that it will be fully restored to its original glory in time for the centennial party we intend to hold, but I know from experience now that ‘fully restored’ is a moving target. In effect, with an older building like this, there will always be things to do, in order to meet William Morris's insightful maxim of watchful stewardship and timely repair.

 
I hope to use the Century Bungalow blog to share my experience with maintenance and restoration of an older wooden house, to place it in relation to the broader bungalow phenomenon in order to understand its character better, to inquire further into the intentions of its designer and the influences swirling around and through him, and also to sing its many praises, all the while creating a record of its condition as it turns 100. All of which I hope will improve, however slightly, its prospects for survival as it embarks on its second century - as well as allowing me to share it with you.

I hope you enjoy it, as I have been for more than a quarter century now!

 

Books for looks: 

Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production Of A Global Culture.

William Morris, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), Manifesto: file:///D:/David/Downloads/Morris-1.pdf

 

Postscript: in January 2022, this house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was placed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places (saved by citizen action in the service of preserving heritage).

 

Read more about how the house was saved at: https://savewright.org/saving-the-david-and-gladys-wright-house/