Outside In: Designing With nature

"When both inside and outside work hand in hand, the result is a home that extends far beyond its actual walls." Sarah Susanka, Home By Design

Small variations in wall planes extend a building into the landscape, helping unify both

 

The idea that the inside and the exterior of a house could be unified with the building's immediate surroundings was a staple of arts-and-crafts thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. Design parameters were needed in order to achieve this synthesis, and in North America the popular vehicle for these turned out to be the bungalow, especially as conceived for life in sunny southern California. This feat took place systematically in Los Angeles, where a genial climate and sustained in-migration saw modern subdivision-style development appear on a massive scale (between 1900 and 1910, LA nearly tripled in size; between 1910 and 1920, it nearly doubled). Many of the new subdivision homes bought by newcomers were bungalows, a building type already in vogue as recreational housing, many designed by architects despite being marketed as housing for the middle class. Essentially, a bungalow is a one-storey building with the principal rooms gathered under a massive gabled roof, but artful designers sometimes clustered these internal spaces under a collection of roof forms. Sometimes the attic was also used for additional space, by means of a shallow dormer; often the predominant roofline, pushed well out over its walls for sheltering effect, also sported subsidiary gables projecting over important spaces like verandahs and bay windows.

 

 

California-style bungalow, beckoning front verandah, set relatively close to the ground

 

The modern west coast version of the bungalow grew from an earlier British adaptation of a rural Bengali house for colonial administrators and officers. Bungalows of all eras share certain defining features, like being cottagey, sitting close to the ground and, especially when architect-designed, rambling out into the landscape with cross-gables or projections - all features conferring a marked horizontal effect in contrast to multi-storied houses. Bungalows also came equipped with all the amenities of their day, in order to better meet first European, and later American, expectations of domestic comfort. The typical California-style bungalow sported a shallow-pitched gable roof (there were no snow loads to deal with) and was set on a concrete pad placed directly on grade (or in the case of the Savage bungalow, over a low crawlspace) making the house feel as if glued to the ground. Another singular feature is that no matter how small the overall footprint (and they could be diminutive), the bungalow always came with a substantial verandah employed so as to give it a distinctive look (there are hints of Japanese-temple woodwork in the California idiom). Over time the look adopted for bungalows would become synonymous in the public mind with the very idea of 'home' itself. The welcoming front verandah, combined with smart-looking exterior features like wooden siding and substantial sash windows, helped evoke cozy feelings among prospective buyers. What these engaging small buildings did with remarkable flair was to actively beckon to their clientele - people saw them and immediately wanted to inhabit one!

 

California-style bungalow, timbered verandah across the entire frontage

 

The bungalow as a housing type was exported from India to a number of Britain's other colonies in the nineteenth century, including Australia and what would later become Canada's westernmost province, British Columbia. From British Columbia, the house type likely migrated, by unknown routes, down the west coast before being re-imagined in Los Angeles. Here, it turned out, bungalows were being adapted for all modern North American cities. From the start, they were designed to embody a vision of 'the good life', which the design of the house was to provide for its residents. This vision anchored itself in feelings of coziness, smartness and up-to-dateness, in a house furnished with artistic wood finishes, built-ins like window seats, and all the latest domestic contrivances. One idea central to the vision was that the occupants aspired to enjoy an enhanced relationship with their immediate natural surroundings, which began with the way the house was intimately connected with them. Architects achieved this by featuring natural materials in construction, often with some rustic touches to intensify an arts-and-crafts effect. This was especially true of the use of local stone, often employed for foundations and for the massive piers supporting a typically impressive front verandah. Rustic effects were further magnified if the stone was actually gathered onsite or brought in from nearby. A lot of milled old growth wood was used as well, both outside and in, reinforcing the bungalow claim to naturalness. The shot below reveals the use of rounded river rock for foundation, chimney and piers, along with exposed timbers and planks on the exterior. Notice how this architect-designed bungalow appears to ramble outwards from its core.

1912 California bungalow with swooping porch roof on massive arroyo-stone piers

 

 

Bungalows were marketed as a kind of stylized cottage in a gardened setting, an allusion their designers strove to maintain even as they crammed more and more of them onto uniformly platted streets. These homes came equipped with the latest in modern conveniences, which quickly included electricity and lighting, hot and cold running water, modern bathrooms and kitchens, and central heating (at least in parts of North America that needed it, which was nearly everywhere outside of southern California). Mechanical refrigeration wouldn't become widespread until the 1930s, but bungalow designers inventively incorporated a nifty feature known as a cooling cupboard into kitchens and pantries to help in preserving food. This device took advantage of something known as the 'stack effect', based on hot air's tendency to rise and, if provided with an escape in the form of a vent, its effect of pulling cooler air in behind it through a lower vent. These cooling cupboards were widespread in the era before refrigeration (especially on the coast), and necessary until such time as the icebox (and weekly ice delivery service) reached customers. 

 

 

 

Suburban buildings from the outset, bungalows were regularly built on the outskirts of settlements and readily became ideal subdivision housing. The ubiquitous front verandah, championed as a virtue by the progressive movement in America, was fancifully elaborated in order to dramatically announce house to street. This really clicked as an architectural device, so monumental styling of verandahs quickly came to define the building's look in ways that allowed designers to individualize it for the market. Personality was expressed via the porch. Always roofed, often projecting from or settled into the principal gable, sometimes running across the entire front face of the building, always advancing and declaring itself in no uncertain terms, the verandah's commanding presence quickly came to stand for the bungalow itself. No matter how small the house, the front verandah was intended to make a statement and leave a lasting impression. And they really did! The verandah-as-signature-feature could be Japanesque, with piled timbers supported on chunky vertical posts resting on tapered piers of stone or brick. But it could also be framed up and set on tapered piers too. This combination of solid framing, heavy posts, and tapered stone piers, capped by an emphatically sheltering roof form, successfully caught the eye of most everyone who saw them. The example below, from north of Indianapolis, combines exposed rafter tails with timbered knee braces set on tapered brick piers.

Verandahs, fancifully conceived, were key to bungalow character, here an effective mix of features

 

 

As rendered architecturally, the North American version of the bungalow reinforced the links between building and surroundings, by design. Sometimes existing landscape features were built around, exaggerating the built-in look; more often, materials extracted from the site or from nearby were allowed to inform the look. Both techniques gave the impression the building derived from the site itself. Architects typically planned these bungalows within the limits of a smallish space envelope, offsetting lack of size by adding artistic interior features like wainscotting and exposed beams and exploiting technical devices in order to intensify or moderate climatic effects. The capture of light in the layout of rooms, of breezes out on the spacious verandah and inside via numerous opening windows, the access to glimpses of nature and garden from inside the rooms - all these elements were consciously explored in order to more intimately connect inside to outside. By design, bungalows intended to relate their occupants visually and experientially to both their surroundings and the possibilities of local climate. There were, it was felt back then, numerous benefits to bringing nature closer to the family in controllable ways.  

 

St. Francis Court, Pasadena, 1909: stone piers, exposed joinery, wood shingles.

 

Southern California's moderate climate had a lot to do with launching the overall design direction for bungalows, but architectural responses derived in this benign climate somehow migrated wherever bungalows came to be built (which, over time, was pretty much everywhere!). The lightness of California construction required insulating and heating as the building moved northwards and winters became more severe; the desirability of central heating and weather-proofing led to them being built over full basements, which in turn pushed them further out of the ground in the Pacific Northwest (as well as making them more expensive to build). However, the spirit of visual openness to surroundings, along with controlled connection to nature and seasons, was absorbed into the building's DNA, and these features show up even in more-rigid suburban layouts on subdivision streets. In what follows, I try to illustrate how Victoria architect Hubert Savage went about bringing the outside into his house on the outskirts of Victoria back in 1913, and how he managed to keep this sense of connection to nature and surroundings alive throughout his home without sacrificing creature comforts or a sense of security against the elements. Also, I reveal how he took advantage of certain natural processes, like the stack effect, to more readily ventilate the house from heat buildup in the dog days of summer. As both client and architect, Savage enjoyed unparalleled freedom to experiment with designs blending artfulness, natural materials, relationships to surroundings and controlled exposure to the elements. With his arts-and-crafts tendencies and formal RIBA training, he seized the opportunity before him to lay out his own house and to place it picturesquely in a pristine landscape. 

 

Heavy timber posts chamfered for a more refined look on an elegant Victoria bungalow

 

Early California bungalows were often built as recreational retreats, setting a fashion for siting them in pretty country locales where unspoiled nature provided both setting and views. In San Francisco and its environs, where natural landscapes ran together with residential enclaves, such dwellings were seen to afford escape into calmer, more artistic worlds, situated in healthier, more natural environments. By design, these bungalows encouraged families to experience the air, light, season and natural surroundings more fully, yet always in carefully controlled ways. One familiar example is the fashion for impressive wood-burning fireplaces, often made of fieldstone or sometimes of brick, done up decoratively with wooden surrounds and a massive wooden mantle piece. All this elaboration was not intended for heat advantage (in fact, the fireplace was often inefficient as a source of heat), but rather to prompt a relationship with fire as an elemental force - one that could be safely and pleasurably consumed in comfortable settings, drawing people together around a hearth that served as a natural family focal point. Even modest bungalows came with at least one grand fireplace, typically designed as the centrepiece of the living room, often accompanied by built-in bookshelves, with a tiled apron set into the floor in front of it. The crackle of a wood fire in the grate was thought to imbue family life with meaning, hearkening to earlier times in human history where our collective character was formed by telling tales around a blazing fire. This interest in building-in controlled forms of exposure to elemental forces and the seasons differs markedly from contemporary housing design, which prioritizes withdrawal and cocooning in interior worlds that are more fully insulated from, and less linked to, nature and climate. Arts-and-crafts designers were seeking precisely the opposite effect.

 

Set in a landscape of oaks and other native species, a bungalow ensconced in nature

 

 

Early bungalows were often placed in a landscape setting of picturesque scenery, which on the Savages' half acre involved an upland cluster of gnarly Garry oaks. Dramatically elevated by placement on a rocky outcrop, the house rises directly from the ground it sits on. A prominent gabled verandah flanked by projecting gabled bays lends upward movement to the building's ground-hugging facade. The landscape setting around it envelops the house, which in turn feels fitted-into its surroundings on the arts-and-crafts model. A low stone foundation, rising dramatically up into tall tapered piers that support a substantial verandah on trios of thick timber posts, imparts a certain grandeur to what is in fact a relatively modest footprint (perhaps 1350 square feet all in). The trio of upthrusting gables echo the shapes of trees in the tall fir forest fringing the oak meadows at back. The result is a lessening of the stark contrast between house and surroundings that appears rather unusual to eyes habituated to much blunter spatial appropriation.

  

A curving stone path rises towards the verandah

 

 

Up on its rise, this bungalow is approached from below along a gently sloped stone path with a sequence of steps and landings that reach the front door in a circuitous manner. Likely suggested as a route by the glaciated rock folds it traverses, the path leads visitors along the entire facade before reaching the front door. This indirectness further cements the impression of a house snugged into its surroundings, combining formality in appearance with a certain rusticity of placement in the landscape. The horizontal plane of the building's length is dramatized by the trio of cross gables, advancing from the main roof-line towards visitors and offering eye-catching details to anyone walking by. This is a house designed not just to be glimpsed on the way to the door, but to be enjoyed as an experience for the entire journey.

 

A sheltered verandah with tapered stone columns

 

Rustic use of local stone for the foundation and piers has the effect of making the building feel more a piece of its landscape. While obviously man-made, the bungalow declares its oneness with nature by displaying natural materials and allowing their worked character to ultimately frame its composition. This technique further blurs distinctions between outside and inside, an objective of both the English and American strands of the arts-and-crafts movement. Often the use of stone for foundations was continued inside into an elaborate stone fireplace, sometimes paired with a stone chimney (especially if the chimney is placed on an outside wall), strengthening the partnership between man and native materials. Bungalows were also often built with tapered or even squared piers made of brick, sometimes clinkered (over-fired), which could be fashioned as supports for an imposing front gable. Savage opted for a more rustic look with his stone foundation and piers.

 

 

Rustic stone piers help fuse building and landform into a unity

 

An expressive, beckoning verandah defines the California style of bungalow, serving to create a dynamic first impression and lending a truly inviting sense of entry to even quite modest structures. While verandahs may be less extensive on the American style of bungalow than on their colonial predecessors (where they would sometimes wrap around the entire building), they are nevertheless strikingly elaborated so as to play a defining role that strengthens street-presence. The verandah was integral to both the look and the function of the house, calibrated to present an overall feeling of welcome coziness along with safe refuge. While the fashion for porches was common in America before bungalows, these buildings presented an entirely novel version of the verandah that gave the building some serious pizzazz. 

 

 

Tapered piers, low railings, solid construction of a verandah with knee braces

 

Back in the day absolutely everyone wanted one of these, and looking at these structures nowadays, it's not hard to see why that was. Often elaborately furnished with over-scaled, stacked timbering, a sheltered verandah on solid piers came to define the bungalow look. The verandah Savage designed not only offers shelter from the elements, it also creates a transitional space that's handy and needed in Victoria's long wet winter. At the same time, this space functions as an outdoor room that is shaded and breezy in spring, summer and fall. Verandahs like these also convey an intimate welcome to nature's realm, bringing it closer to the house by extending a sitting space out into it.

 

Stone steps leading to an elegant outdoor room

 

Well-removed from the road below, an inviting perch on an early spring day

 

The temptation to enjoy a seat (and a coffee) in the surroundings is built in

Verandahs provided both indoor and outdoor space, sheltered yet connected to the world at large, functional yet invitingly social and intimate, transitional yet inviting one to linger. You can be both in the setting enjoying the daylight and whatever gentle breeze there might be, and slightly removed from the outdoors and protected if need be. Prospect-and-refuge theory tells us that environments of this kind appeal deeply to humans at unconscious levels, especially when positioned well away from the roadway below. Here, high up on the rocky outcrop, the verandah feels like an aerie that's comfortably removed from the passing world. Low railings with a timbered look (above) define the enclosed space while also serving as informal seating for guests, offering an inviting perch from which nature may be unobtrusively observed. 

 

East light offsets the original dark wood panelling

 

The simplest and most direct way to bring the outside into a house is to ensure that light penetrates deep into its recesses. One way to do this is by placing it on a rise and running its length from north to south, so its long walls face east and west, which is how Savage placed his bungalow. Another is to give it ample windows to let the light in. Pictured above, a large, low window on an east-facing wall admits morning light to the core of the house, offsetting the darkened wood interior (an original feature). The use of exposed wood inside the house makes the building feel like an expression of native materials, while the illumination of interior space with natural light brings these materials to life. Here the designer has been able to capture light through windows despite the verandah roof shading the front doorway; this is because the building's elevated placement in turn affects sun angles, which lets daylight reach deeper into the rooms as the sun works its way around the house. This bungalow is also just two rooms and a hallway deep, so there is penetration of the interior by light throughout the year. Blinds are desirable especially in summer because at various times of day direct light can actually be too intense!

A window used to frame views of nature and building

 

Buildings that are planned to optimize interior light effects while simultaneously capturing exterior views have a certain magic to them. There's a lightness to the rooms despite the weight of the extensive darkened wood paneling (see below). Glimpses of exterior elements of the house from inside the building also increase the impression of spaciousness in layout, a vital ingredient in more-compact dwellings. Visual links to the exterior extend a sense of intimacy with immediate surroundings, causing an engaging impression that was skillfully worked up by its designer. A variety of large opening windows, courtesy of easy-to-operate sash design, makes it possible to bring the day's elements right into the house, both as light and in the form of ventilation. In the living room pictured below, compact venetian-style blinds (a contemporary adaptation) afford much-needed solar control whenever sun angles send invasive quantities of energy into the room. In this setting, the immediacy of trees, especially some substantial firs down slope, provide an agreeable partial screen for direct sunlight. 

 

Ample windows allow light in while affording views, shown here in the living room

Windows in a projecting bay extend into the landscape while capturing views

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light from south facing windows blasts the living room, warming it visually

 

 

Bungalows use built-in furnishings to make efficient use of limited interior spaces, as these encroach less into space than free-standing furniture. Some people think this makes a virtue of necessity in what is, by modern standards, a spatially limited environment, but the fact is, it actually works. Built-ins are one of the many schemes bungalow designers deployed to optimize the functionality of compact spaces while amplifying their perceived spaciousness. The literature of the era is replete with humour about the mildly obsessive use of every square inch of interior space for some sort of built-in or other, from inglenooks to sideboards and even ironing boards. The analogy with how space is turned to account in yacht design is perhaps not inapt. But built-ins can also work to help make rooms feel cozier while adding the visual interest of high quality finishing materials to designs. One highly pleasing form of built-in is the window seat - literally a seat fitted into a small bay or nook that projects out into the world, if only just slightly. This not only effects jogs in exterior walls, which makes the building feel more fitted into its physical surroundings, it also adds charm and convenience to interiors. Window seats serve as intimate, much-loved spaces for sitting, reading and sipping coffee, or conversing with another person, all of which happens in what feels like a gardened or landscaped setting. In this sense, window seats function as an outdoor room in miniature.

Window seat with casements draws nature nearer

 

Indirect morning light expands the apparent size of a modest dining room

 

As Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House and other works on home design, points out, a seat built into a window can also serve as a device to capture additional light for the room. Above, a leaded-glass transom window and wood-panelled sidewalls admit and reflect more light than a standard window casing, functioning as a kind of light fixture that's framed right into the wall. The source of light is external and obeys its own commands rather than those of a switch, but the glazing and the layered surfaces admit this found-light deep into the room. The effect is to make it feel both more inviting and larger than if it were less well illuminated.

Once open to the elements, now with a built-in window seat

 

Rooms with excellent sun access, generous window space and built-in seating not only invite us to nestle right into the view, they also bring the view dramatically closer to us, sometimes right up to the windows. This makes it easier to remain in touch with the day and with seasonal effects while staying inside the house. Light and season guarantee a continually changing scene, from day to day and month to month. The room pictured above, designed as a summer tea room that was once open to the elements, was eventually enclosed, re-muddled abusively, and stayed that way until steps were taken to set it right. The leaded-glass casements and built-in window seat now combine with the original barrel-vaulted ceiling to create an inviting space that feels as though it's a piece of the garden itself.

Windows framing views that change with the season, here in autumn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Same window, this time revealing a lush early spring garden scene

 

In the Hubert Savage bungalow, all of the windows have been treated as opportunities to capture views, admit light and air, and relieve the heaviness of blank walls. By connecting inside to outside visually on three sides, the house itself becomes a vehicle for capturing views. It succeeds in tapping into what the Japanese call 'borrowed scenery', in essence framing the natural surroundings to be seen as views from within. Many of the windows also open, both top and bottom, optimizing opportunities for ventilation of individual rooms (again allowing hot air out at the top, pulling cooler air in down below). Ambient light is caused to penetrate the building's interior by dint of its long east-west walls.

 

Late afternoon summer light reaches deep into the kitchen, imparting a warm glow

 
Above, generous sash windows set low in the wall plane invite sunlight deep into the interior, visually warming the rooms and connecting occupants directly to the day while drawing the eye out into surrounding greenery. Even in the weaker light of winter there's considerable solar gain and the interiors are visually warmed into a cozy, inviting space (heat is however still very much required!). These large, vertical windows are set a mere thirty inches from the floor, strengthening visual access to the sheltered garden beyond. Pictured below is our tiny central corridor, an intermediate space that gives access to no fewer than seven doorways! The door at the end of the hallway accesses our attic space, which in turn has a small north-facing window that opens. If on a sultry summer evening we open windows downstairs, then open the attic door and the attic window, hot air rushes out of the main floor space up into the attic and then flows out of the attic window. This is, once again, a conscious use of the stack effect to cool space, exploiting hot air's tendency to rise and pull cooler air in behind it. This effect is so strong that if you stand in the doorway to the attic when it's happening, you can feel the airflow moving swiftly through the opening. This form of ventilating to overcome excessive heat was expressly designed into these buildings. 

Light reaches deep into the central hallway

 

The connection between inside and outside is further reinforced by setting the floor plate of the house very close to the earth. The original Anglo-Indian bungalow mimicked its indigenous forebears in sitting on a low plinth or platform placed near or directly upon the ground. The trend-setting California bungalow was similarly set near to, or in some cases right on, the land, a practice that gives a distinctive look while further fusing these buildings with their immediate surroundings. This was less likely to be done in Victoria, however, where it was the practice from early on to put a full basement under a house. Whether Hubert Savage's placement of his own bungalow close to ground level at the back reflected his English arts and crafts training or, perhaps more likely, the then-California fashion for placing a bungalow directly on grade, is hard to say. However, one does detect numerous features with California/Craftsman influences in the overall design of the house, and certainly enough to know that he was paying attention to the flow of design-ideas coming from California.

 

Bumping wall planes outwards spreads the building out into the landscape

The exterior seen from inside reinforces their connection

 

Bungalows have been described as 'rambling' because they can project out into the landscape by means of bumpouts and roof lifts. Projecting bays and other roofed devices used to vary the surface of wall planes serve to counter the sense of boxiness that can accompany a house. Architectural projections link the building more directly to its landscape, allowing it to feel fitted around the land's contours; this may in turn create opportunities to step the building up or down the land. Another device used successfully by arts-and-crafts architects involves intentionally catching glimpses of the exterior of the building from within the house. Because the Savage bungalow's footprint was made irregular by design and its roof line is pushed well out over its walls, opportunities for such exterior glimpses abound. Above, kitchen windows afford views of a glazed door to the back porch, which advances out into the garden while offering a snug rear entry to the home. Below, a walk-in closet added years after the main building was erected is gained by projecting the rear wall outwards as a half-cabin and stepping it up a rising landform.

 

A building set directly on the land seems to grow right out of the ground

 

Hubert Savage chose to set a corner of the rear wall of his bungalow directly on the landform it crowns, further gluing it to the site (photo above). This cements the impression that building and landscape are one, making the house feel like it belongs just where it was built. At the back of the house, this placement gives access to a private garden realm entered almost imperceptibly from the main floor level (a drop of about fifteen inches). This in turn, visually, allows central living spaces to feel continuous with the gardened setting, emphasizing directly the sense of connection. Placement near ground level serves to pull the building downwards, so its entire mass feels accessible and more intimate at the back. In this way feelings of harmony between nature and dwelling are set in motion (picture below). Today this rock would likely be blasted out, the building pad leveled and extended for ease of construction, and the pre-existing relationships formed by retreating glaciers and advancing vegetation obliterated to allow construction of an over-scale home.

The building actually steps up the landform, knitting architecture and outcrops together

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The barge board was brought so close to ground its tail had to be clipped for safe movement

 

Setting the building into the landscape as opposed to remaking the site for convenience demonstrates respect, bordering on reverence, for the natural surroundings. It also anchors the feeling that nature and garden run right up to the house, reinforcing the sense of synthesis and complicity between the two. In this conception, nature isn't simply a distant glimpse of what lies outside. Of course this gives the illusion that one is somehow in the garden while still inside the house, a feeling that is encompassing by design.Whether inside gazing outwards, standing in an intermediate space like a verandah, or standing outside in the garden, perhaps looking back towards the building, nature is always present and defining.

 

The garden contrived as an enclave extends it as a series of outdoor rooms

 

While the house is designed as an architectural object in a garden and the garden developed as a context for the house, both are designed to exist in harmony with the broader landscape setting. The Garry Oaks, native shrubs and flowers, and glaciated rocky outcrops retain elements of an original landscape setting for both house and garden (magically, many remnants of native landscape survived subdivision of an originally much larger lot). One way of furthering the explicit connection between building and surroundings is to contrive the garden as an informal series of outdoor rooms, linked together by paths. If these garden rooms are implied rather than bluntly stated, it's possible to achieve a subtle extension of architecture into surroundings that provides orientation for human use without reducing nature to a sequence of activity spaces. This form of composition, known traditionally as picturesque landscaping, is also a lens through which the building's siting can be seen more accurately.

 

A patio 'room' of oblong pavers marks the transition from building to garden

Outdoor rooms arrange garden space and invite enjoyment of day and season 

 

Outdoor rooms, or compartments, have long been used successfully by artist-gardeners to blend house and garden into a unified whole. Bungalows lend themselves to this sort of treatment, both by dint of their history of being built in gardened compounds, and their architectural use of bump-outs and ancillary roof forms to extend irregularly into natural spaces. Also, as historian Alan Gowans remarks (The Comfortable House), early suburban homes of all types, and foremost among them bungalows, were novel in being designed to be seen from all four sides, often coming equipped with side and back doors, additional or wrap-around porches, and circulating pathways. This stands in sharp contrast to more vertical, street-oriented Victorian housing, as well as to modern planned suburbia, which often presents double garage doors and an undistinguished front door to the street while neglecting side facades in favour of interior spatial gain. All of which leads to a diminished sense of visual connection to the exterior of the house, affecting its potential to galvanize intimacy for its occupants.

 

Loose arrangement of sitting spaces integrates well with the remnant oak meadow

 

Seasonal changes and weather patterns affect the overall mood of the place, but this bungalow is designed to enable occupants to enjoy nature to whatever extent climate and day allow. Winter sleet or spring rains can be equally enjoyable as experience if the nature of the shelter allows us to observe them while keeping ourselves warm and dry. The management of precipitation, as rain or snow, is an important aspect of all house design, and the bungalow with its sheltering roof form affords a sense of security that permits enjoyment of even inclement weathers. The large and frequent window openings also enable the weather to be more agreeably watched, as an event happening around one, yet kept at a safe remove. This can however lose its charm quickly if weather is unchanging and insistent, as it can be in our typically dreary month of November here on southern Vancouver Island!

Even April sleet serves as an interesting spectacle glimpsed from a sheltered verandah

Pale light in winter, on natural and built objects, creates a scene of the moment

 

A complex and intimate relationship between a building opened to its surroundings and a natural or gardened setting is now decidedly old-fashioned, something the modern eye has been conditioned not to seek or even to notice should it appear. Subdivision development typically maximizes interior space, leaving only shallow setback strips between houses and paving over much of what might have been front garden to accommodate the automobile. Proximity of neighbouring buildings means sidewalls often have few windows and there is rarely a reason to look at or go to the spaces in between buildings, other than to mow whatever lawn exists there. Also, more generous landscape settings around older homes rarely survive generational changes in ownership, as there is simply too much money to be made by raiding the development larder, whether through subdivision or by tearing down the historic structure and then building out the entire bulky cube defined by contemporary setbacks.

Remnants of early suburbia displaying a balance between built objects and their surroundings reflect an openness and curiosity that people were, for a time, encouraged to explore in the very way their homes were designed. While this is arguably romanticization of nature (which, as we know, is hardly benign), it has the virtue of opening realms of pleasurable experience that can transform a mere house into a home-in-a-garden. Buildings with these attributes remain suggestive of ways of dwelling that engage us directly in observing and tending our surroundings while exposing us in controlled, hence pleasurable, ways to the variety of nature's moods. But, anyone tempted towards this sort of situation had better be interested in gardening, or at least prepared to manage landscape actively, because nature really does want to run right up to the door, and living closer to it is definitely a hands-on experience.

 

 

You had better enjoy gardening if you choose a country locale

 

This is the third in a series of posts in the centennial year of the Hubert Savage bungalow, intended to celebrate and share the house's history and character with the community. In March we were invited to receive an award of merit from the Victoria Hallmark Heritage Society, in recognition of our efforts to restore and preserve this antique house. I have gratefully accepted this proposal, while remaining all-too-aware that complete restoration of a 100-year-old wooden house is a moving target and a project that might well outrun my own efforts at stewardship. The awards ceremony is the evening of May 7th at St. Ann's Academy in Victoria, B.C.

Next post: a printed frieze by English artist Lawson Wood adds an artistic touch as a built-in feature in the Savage bungalow's living room.

This post was amended, edited and updated in early 2021. The author can be reached at cubbs@telus.net .

Town And Country

Oblana, built in 1916 near Blackwood Station, on the Saanich Interurban line

 

When Hubert Savage elected to build a country bungalow five kilometres out of town back in 1913, his was likely the first house on then-Blackwood Road and one of only a handful in that part of Saanich. The question is, why ever did he opt to locate way out in the back of beyond rather than on a more settled street closer to downtown? And, however did he get back and forth in those days, given the locale's relative remoteness and the need to commute to his office downtown? This all transpired before the private automobile had become a realistic option. Speculation about the links between a novel form of personal mobility and the early dispersal of suburbia into rural lands forms the basis of this post.

 

In his classic history of suburbia, Bourgeois Utopias, Robert Fishman recounts how the idea originated with wealthy British merchants who opted to build homes out in unspoiled countryside, a move that enabled them to flee the horrors of the industrial city they had created without having to sacrifice urban comforts. The impetus to move home to a rural locale became the opportunity to breathe cleaner air, gain more space for gardens and other outdoor pursuits, and especially, to raise family at a secure distance from the clamorous city. Additionally, rural land was dirt cheap to acquire because, up to the point of becoming accessible to development, it was typically either farmland or bush.

 

Town in country, house in a gardened setting - the ideas behind suburban bungalows

 

Fishman says this wish to flee the pitfalls of urban conditions lies behind the suburban aspiration, coupled with a hope of finding a safer haven nestled in nature's bosom. But for urbanites, choosing to relocate to the country means radical separation of the work and home milieus. This was initially only feasible for those wealthy enough to finance a dependable means of transport between their remote residence and their place of work. The choice to live this way only became more widespread with the advent of cheaper, more frequent and reliable forms of mobility. Initially, it was prompted by steam locomotion, which in the US in particular generated decidedly upper-end suburbs, often at a considerable remove from town. But from the early 1890s on, electric-powered streetcars appeared in many cities subject to rapid population growth. Electric street railways provided a new form of mobility that opened access to large areas of unbuilt land on the immediate periphery of town, and at much lower prices than town lots. In Victoria's striking coastal setting, such lands often came with picturesque scenery. So these new electric streetcar systems quickly led to suburban colonization of former farms and hillsides in immediate outlying areas. Victoria's first streetcar system, the third in the country, quickly gave rise to a number of small, inner ring suburbs on the outskirts of previously settled areas. Convenient access from these new suburban enclaves to the town centre, where jobs and shops were clustered, was the vital selling point of the daily real estate adverts flogging both land for investing and newly built houses. The connection between the electric streetcar network and the opening up of new zones for development was front-of-mind for those financially backing these schemes.

 

Los Angeles streetcar in 1908, serving dispersed enclaves on a vast scale

 

 

Fishman also shows that new suburban developments tended to cluster around stops along the new corridors, within easy walking distance of the means of mobility. Streetcars thus opened up the suburban option to the waves of people then flooding into urban regions looking for new economic opportunities and places to live. The form this more far-flung, rail-based suburbia took differs markedly from the more uniform shape it came to assume in the subsequent era of automobile transport. When cars eventually took over from the trains, a combination of cheapened house design, greater uniformity of look and lot size, and less-imaginative building placement (due to uniform setback requirements and subdivision-scale planning) would generate far-more anodyne outcomes. But up to 1920 at least, electric street railways and Interurban lines were the defining vehicles of regional mobility. They not only allowed for greater spatial separation of home and work, but also prompted entirely new relationships with regional attractions and activities beyond the range previously accessible on foot. The fact that land costs in outlying areas were very low also prompted subdivision patterns that tended to retain more of the look of countryside, resulting in houses set back from the road on lots with residual scenic features. Early suburban developers working in Los Angeles actually financed and constructed electric street railways in order to facilitate their speculative housing projects. The ready supply of newcomers meant rising demand for just such suburban spaces: a comfortable house, within easy commuting distance of work and, courtesy of abundant materials and cheap land, affordable for little more than the cost of renting in town. Anywhere within walking distance of a stop qualified for this new suburban homesteading, a feature that in turn served to 'democratize' residential housing choices.

 

 

Still way out in the back of beyond, rail line near Marigold Junction ca 1920

 

 

Cheap but high-quality building materials, like knot-free old growth Douglas Fir and durable cedar shingles, flew out of custom milling operations in large quantities around Victoria, contributing to the superb value-proposition a new house then represented. The ready availability of these quality materials also predisposed contractors to erect housing 'on spec', meaning it was made for the market without particular buyers commissioning the work. Another, even more important, factor affecting the value proposition of a house was the sheer cheapness of land on the periphery of town. So the revolution in transport galvanized the settlement of outlying suburbs, enabling home ownership for a rising share of the population. In the long boom that began about 1890 and ran well into 1913, the emerging housing market fuelled new heights of speculation in land development - turning it into a party that everyone in town was invited to! 

 

Garden City real estate play occasioned by the Saanich Interurban Railway

 

Out in the Garden City suburb, well before the new line was up and running, investors were busy marketing quarter-acre blocks of land for between $450 and $600, which in present-day dollars is a mere pittance. Four hundred and fifty dollars in 1913 equates to about $11,830 in today's dollars, while $600 is about $15,774. Let those figures sink in for a moment. Then consider that in December 2020, a chunk of raw land designated residential in Strawberry Vale had an asking price of $599,000. The difference between those two figures indicates how much inflated land-values structure contemporary prices, and illustrate what a bargain the 1913 land price represented. The same is true, albeit not nearly so dramatically, for the relative value of buildings back then. In 1913, you could buy a deluxe bungalow near the edge of town, on a full basement, for as little as $3500. Translated into today's dollars, that is roughly the equivalent of $91,000. So a 1400-square-foot smartly dressed house could be had for the equivalent of $91,000 in today's money (also including the land it was sitting on) or a cost of about $65 a square foot nowadays. Today a 2300 square foot 'standard' home, not including land, would cost $460,000 to $690,000 to build ($200-300 a square foot), and if it were done up with 'luxury' finishing (i.e., done to bungalow standards) it could run as high as $400 per square foot (or six times the 1913 cost of house and land rendered in today's dollars). Comparative costs of constructing homes also underscore just how good a deal the house-and-land package was back then. It's absolutely true that the land the building sits on is now ridiculously more costly than it was originally: 38 times more expensive today to buy the development potential of a featureless RS-4 lot on a busy street than it was to purchase a deluxe quarter-acre block in the Garden City suburb. No wonder Hubert and Alys were interested!

 

Ten minutes to transit, .75 acres, $3500 for house and land, 1909

 

The advent of electric street railways triggered the growth of rings of suburban outskirts around urban cores in booming cities across North America. In Victoria, electric streetcar service resulted in the populating of outlying areas like Fernwood, Fairfield, Hillside, Oak Bay and finally Burnside/Gorge. Towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, continuing in-migration fuelled a rising demand for suburban housing, creating conditions in which an exciting extension of the street car network, known as an 'Interurban' line, seemed economically feasible. Interurbans were faster electric systems - essentially precursors of today's light rail transit (LRT) - differing from on-street trams in having exclusive rights of way to run in. Sleek and classy additions to existing urban infrastructures, Interurban lines connected regional centres in novel ways, often taking their host region by storm while rapidly accelerating the dispersal of people into previously unpopulated areas. This power to disperse for residential purposes while, at the other end, assembling for jobs and shopping worked in tandem with local real estate interests to enable the marketing of new housing possibilities. By 1913 there was so much impetus in real estate speculation that tiny Victoria, population around 45,000, had over 300 real estate agencies in operation!

 

Map showing the BCERC system in 1923, Saanich Interurban Line in red

 

Hubert Savage's chance to live out in the country while working in town arose precisely because this new Interurban railway made the daily commute feasible. As a practicing city architect, he needed reliable transport from what was then a considerable distance. A recent ex-Londoner, he was perhaps already accustomed to using mass transit to get around a region, a habit that would have helped him view living out along a rail corridor as practical. Articling as an architect in London, England, he'd also likely been absorbing the growing English fascination with recreational use of the countryside, closely associated with a novel building type known as a 'bungalow' - recently imported from colonial India. Arts-and-Crafts architect R.A. Briggs was popularizing (among people of means) the idea of locating small, artistic bungalows for recreational use out in pristine countryside; his Bungalows and Country Residences (1891) preached the benefits of a new style of 'free and easy living' they made possible in scenic locales with convenient access to the metropolis. Certainly in England this choice was largely restricted to those with gobs of money, and what Briggs proposed as recreational getaways were not exactly small houses. But in spacious, enterprising North America, with an entirely different value-proposition on offer, the idea of a country bungalow was a whole other thing.

 

 

BCERC network in the Lower Mainland, new Saanich line, upper right

 
 

Such factors may have predisposed Savage to feel comfortable choosing a remote building site in then-distant Strawberry Vale, itself part of a newly organized district municipality known as Saanich (1906). Saanich (an anglicization of WSANEC, the Coast Salish name for the area) then comprised sparsely inhabited rural lands that were once part of First Nations' traditional territory. At the time, and certainly to a town eye, Strawberry Vale and its neighbouring Marigold district weren't much more than a few rural farms ringed by rocky outcrops and stands of native vegetation. One of the area's attractions was surely the low price of land-access, another the opportunity to inhabit some truly picturesque landscape on an upland slope. Perhaps that's what led the Savages to purchase a half-acre lot, with distinctive landscape advantages.

 

 

Hubert and Alys could inhabit a picturesque hilltop, thanks to a new rail corridor

 

 

A look around the area's built-out suburban streets today shows a collection of mostly modest, mainly single-storey houses dating from a variety of eras, a few still located scenically on larger parcels of land. Built loosely on a grid pattern but with some culs-de-sac courtesy of the steep Wilkinson escarpment, the Garden City suburb still retains a degree of natural landscape and native vegetation on its many upland sites. A glance around the locale today suggests its pattern wasn’t contrived by a single planner or builder, but rather grew gradually from infill of a more eclectic kind, accelerating in the 1960s housing boom. Its primary assets today are an unpretentious mix of housing and its residual greenery. Since the early nineties, when Saanich Council opted to stand firm on the idea of urban containment, this area has been undergoing infill development at a fairly rapid rate (and often not very compatibly, as below).

 

 

Sandwiched between mega-houses that now fully occupy its former grounds

 

 

One does observe too that the more recently built the home, the less modest and more mammoth the outcome tends to be. Garage doors appear and come to define facades, frontages come much closer to roads, setbacks are ever-more uniform. The biggest of these new houses fully occupy the smaller lots that are carved out of vestiges of earlier suburbia, where buildings tended to be sited well back from the road, in more generous landscape settings, and in greater sympathy with the lie of the land. This idea of a house placed carefully in a distinctive landscape contrasts sharply with the more packed-in and built-up feeling of both the urban core and later auto-oriented suburbia. Early layouts of rural suburbs were based more on integrating town and country in a way that achieved a balance, an explicit objective of the English Arts-and-Crafts movement.

 

 

Village-like atmosphere at the original Garden City at Letchworth, England

  

Country health plus the comforts of town

 

If Marigold's layout now resembles many another auto-centric suburbia, it was anything but that back in 1913. Mostly it was bush and stumps, and the prospect of it being anything other only arose because an electric Interurban line punched its way through the precinct. When plans for this major capital project were first revealed, speculators quickly bought land in anticipation of the rapid development they expected it to galvanize. It was named Garden City, a rather lame attempt to coat-tail Ebenezer Howard’s then-popular idea for self-sufficient garden cities (like Letchworth, pictured above). But beyond naming streets after common garden flowers like zinnias and hyacinths and lilacs, there's no evidence of Howard-like thinking behind this real estate play - just the desire to harvest a fresh bonanza of real estate froth on the fringes of town. Growth had typically followed rail lines, so the would-be subdividers of Garden City were confident it was coming their way. It certainly had gone that way all across the Lower Mainland too! And the ad below, the bottom section of the one discussed above, shows just how widely the net was cast in the run-up to the beginning of rail service. Prospective buyers were invited to "get in on the ground floor," "as the prices now offered will undoubtedly double as soon as the car line is in operation". That was real estate speculation in motion, but solidly grounded in what had been happening around the region for some time. Indeed, it was the pattern emerging in Victoria wherever streetcars gave people ready access to residential property. Victoria historian Harry Gregson notes that Fairfield "became one of the most popular residential areas and 60 X 120 foot lots were selling for $5,000 in 1912 compared with $400 six years earlier." One had only to find the wherewithal to buy in, and voila, riches would surely follow.

 

 

 

The privately owned BC Electric Railway Company (BCERC) decided to build this chic commuter service expressly to open up what they hoped would quickly become thriving residential enclaves along the western side of the Saanich peninsula. With a legislated monopoly to supply power and street-transport services in both Vancouver and Victoria, the BCERC was already enjoying robust success operating longer Interurban rail lines throughout the Lower Mainland. As the operators of Victoria's highly successful streetcar system, the BCERC brass were convinced that Victoria's hinterlands were similarly poised for residential takeoff, and they were keen to be both catalysts and beneficiaries of this growth. Adaptation of electricity to power lights and other devices in residences was also just then taking off, so the BCERC, sole generator and distributor of electrical power in the region, saw real potential in the emerging market for suburban homes.

 

Interurban railways unlocked new development in North American cities

 

Interurban Line, BC Electric Railway Company, in Chilliwack, 1910

 

 

Operating at higher speeds than streetcars sharing rights-of-way with other traffic, electric Interurbans vastly extended the possibility of new settlements setting up in outlying areas. In Los Angeles, railway spurs radiating outwards from a central spine allowed huge masses of people to work downtown while retreating at night to citrus-grove subdivisions dotting the vast metropolitan plain. The same phenomenon spread to other city-regions, also subject to rapid in-migration as farm labour moved into cities, so there was really no reason to think anything different would happen in then-also-booming Victoria. And the new areas to be opened up were often as pretty as postcards, with views to fields, inlets, straits, lakes and mountains, so they were doubly marketable as housing. Yet in the end, despite a few scattered residential starts like the Savage bungalow, the hoped-for real-estate bonanza from the new Interurban line would simply fail to materialize. Late in 1913, and quite unexpectedly, the economy began tanking badly, virtually everywhere in North America. Then in 1914, world war broke out, and so by 1915, many young Victorians had enlisted in the army in order to fight for their country, dealing a further blow to local demand. For the Savage bungalow, the stalled economy meant that rather than his bungalow serving as the forerunner of a whole new housing trend (as its designer may once have imagined) it became instead a rather distant outlier - marooned in a street-car suburbia that never actually came to pass. For Savage himself, the gravity of the financial crisis would mean that for a time he had to work outside his credentialed profession of architect. As Garden City failed to materialize around the rail-line as planned, the rural land it was to be platted from remained mostly cow pasture, rocky outcrops and oak-and-fir-clad hillsides for a good many decades to come. The form the neighbourhood took when it eventually did fill-in derived more from the primacy of automobile travel, and the sixties in-migration to Victoria, embodying on the whole a far less romantic, vastly more prosaic, vision of suburbia than than the suddenly outdated idea of 'town in country'.

 

Extensive streetcar suburbs of early C20 Los Angeles

 

None of this would necessarily have detracted from Hubert Savage’s plans to create a rural refuge for his own family in a pretty place, which came to fruition in tandem with the Saanich Interurban line's construction (an effort that cost nearly $1-million back in 1913). Some 23 miles long in total, with thirty-one stops and sheltered wooden platforms, this well-engineered electrified line enjoyed its own right of way north from Tillicum Station junction, continuing all the way out to Deep Bay on the Saanich Peninsula. From Tillicum Station inbound, the line shared Burnside Road with the streetcars en route to a convenient downtown terminus across from City Hall.

 

Dignitaries awaiting the Saanich Interurban Line's inaugural ride

 

Saanich Interurban, Prospect Station, after moving to single cars and solo drivers

 

Flitton family photo, Interurban rail fleet, across from City Hall, ca 1920

 

 

The first of the new rural stops along the Saanich line was called Marigold, after Marigold Avenue, which was less than a kilometre from Savage’s new digs on Blackwood Road (today Grange Road). Its second stop was Blackwood station, marginally closer to the Savage bungalow but apparently costing a nickel more for passage. I can easily picture a smartly dressed Hubert Savage walking a wee bit further each day in order to effect that significant saving, and feeling pleased with himself for getting exercise into the bargain.

 

      

Premier McBride driving the last spike, a set-piece of railway openings

 

 

 

 

Commercial cluster, Marigold station, Saanich Interurban line, ca 1923

 

 

Construction of the Savage bungalow was likely in full swing when rail service commenced on June 18, 1913. There was plenty of regional boosterism around the Interurban line's big opening, the train festooned with ribbons and laden with a cargo of some 100 dignitaries for its inaugural ride. It even featured a ceremony with Premier McBride symbolically driving a last spike out at Deep Bay (picture, two above), where the BCERC would soon build a chalet-restaurant as a destination in order to draw more sightseers. The initial service was a two-car train with comfortable seats and a smoking section, offering many return trips per day.  If Savage caught the 7:30 morning train at Blackwood station, or the 7:32 at Marigold station, he was downtown by 7:50 and could be at his drafting table by eight. The return trip would have been equally convenient, punctuated perhaps with a stop for groceries or sundries at one of the country stores located near Marigold junction (pictured above, looking a bit down-at-the-heels, in 1923).

 

Jud Yoho-designed bungalow, built in 1912 for a Victoria realtor, Marigold Station

 

It is undoubtedly true that Savage’s choice of such a remote building site was determined by this new and convenient method of commuting. Access to town water and electricity may also have played a role (the new number one water main from Sooke Lake was buried under nearby Burnside Road, opened in 1915). The house came equipped with an electrical system (knob-and-tube wiring) which initially fed overhead lights and several wall outlets per room, as well as front and back outside lights that illuminated the night. We can be certain that just this sort of suburban homesteading was what the Interurban's builders were counting on to generate future demand for electricity (both as passengers using the trains, and as domestic consumers). Embryonic markets for the power it was generating are the sole explanation for the BCERC making such a huge investment in rural passenger service. And, back in the day, it was just the sort of artistic, low-slung bungalow that Savage designed for himself that was proving a highly attractive lifestyle choice to the droves of newcomers filling North American cities.

 

The sort of artistic, low-slung bungalow attracting city folk back in 1913

 

 

If privately owned electric railways were contrived for the purpose of opening access to unbelievably cheap rural lands, real estate speculation was central to the equation. Interurbans were faster and more reliable than competitor railroads from the previous era of steam. They were in effect as distinctly contemporary an idea as the low, horizontal houses then finding favour with the newly minted suburbanites. Railway promoters and development interests in fact often operated as part of a single development scheme. Where the formula worked, settlements mushroomed around the stops on patterns of convenient walking access to the regularly scheduled trains. The Saanich Interurban's effect differed only in degree from patterns set in motion by the downtown streetcar system, which also sparked new neighbourhoods around its stops, albeit more tightly spaced and closer to the downtown core. One impact of covering greater distances more rapidly was to in fact physically disperse suburbia much further outwards.

 

 

Opening day fanfare anticipating a real estate bonanza that never came

 

 

However, to the great dismay of its investors, the Saanich Interurban line didn't spur the desired galloping growth, despite all the investment, fanfare and sustained effort to market its advantages. And then the economic boom that had been raising all boats for so long fizzled out just as competition from rubber-tired vehicles began filching the railroad's clientele. And picturesque little Victoria, distant from the major movements of goods and people animating larger centres, was not destined to be the people-magnet the port of Vancouver became as Canada's major west-coast trans-shipment point. So it would transpire that, little more than a decade after its opening, the Saanich line's prospects had dimmed to such an extent that it had to be shut down. Soon after that, its tracks and overhead wiring ripped out, it was made to suffer the ultimate indignity of conversion to municipal roadway - hence the level quality of the Interurban Road we still use to this day. The boom that went bust after 1913 wouldn’t return to Victoria until well after the Great Depression and a second global war, then still decades away. People who invested in parcels along the line hoping to get rich were left holding the bag well into the sixties before there was fresh hope of redemption.

 

 

Jitneys appeared suddenly in every city, scooping passengers from railways

 

In 1913 the immediate threat to the Saanich Interurban line was posed by cut-throat competition from vehicles making free use of public roads provided by civic tax revenues. If electric railways easily bested the older steam railways, they in turn were quickly trumped by the introduction of gas-powered automobiles. Soon after the Saanich Interurban line opened for business, dozens of ‘jitney’ cabs (or small buses) appeared out of the blue to compete for the rail clientele ('jitney' was slang for a nickel, the uniform price of a ride). By November 1913, over fifty such jitneys were operating in Victoria. By 1915, there were 150 of them, with an association (Victoria Jitney Association) to fend off municipal regulation.

 

 

Travel choices: Causeway launches, Burnside cars, or Gorge Road jitneys

 

With low operating costs and the ability to offer door-to-door service, jitneys posed a running threat to streetcar systems everywhere. Drivers cruised the stations in advance of the trains, scooping up riders with cheap fares and the chance to experience movement in one of these strange self-propelled contraptions. Widespread use of jitneys thus contributed to the early demise of many Interurban lines, whose relatively high capital and operating costs meant they couldn't compete on fares without virtually bankrupting themselves. Jitneys not only established prototype taxi and bus services, they also helped pave the way for the rapid spread of the private automobile, by far the deadliest competitor for any other form of mass transit.

 

1915 Packard Jitney, like those competing for the Interurban's customers 

 
 

While Interurban trains effectively linked regional centres, the new settlement patterns they sponsored were spread at broader intervals along their longer lengths. This pattern of growth leapfrogged a huge amount of undeveloped residential land that sat much closer to downtown, land that was potentially cheaper to service and offered shorter commutes once there was an alternative to fixed-link streetcars. Steady extension of paved roads by local municipalities made it easier for people to adopt automobiles, which helped in turn open up many previously unbuilt areas lying between existing streetcar lines at greater than walking distance. These locales came with rural, hillside and seaside settings too, giving them a resort-like or country feeling that in Victoria still persists to some extent to this day.

 

 

 

 

If Hubert Savage was counting on a train-based extension of suburbia to expand his architectural practice, he was doomed to disappointment. My guess, however, is that he chose this locale for its intrinsic merits as much as for business reasons, realizing that his own family would get to enjoy a pretty spot far from the crush of newcomers for a great many years to come. The idea of retreating to the country was very much in the air at the time, and architects discovered it could be made practical using the novel housing type known as a bungalow as the basic building block. R.A. Brigg's writings advocated finding a pretty place in the countryside and simply popping a building onto it, thus enabling a family to enjoy a lifestyle 'of rusticity and ease'. Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman magazine advocated much the same thing too. And that's pretty much what Hubert and Alys Savage did way out in Strawberry Vale. The bungalow, reinvented prosaically in Los Angeles as subdivision housing, would prove the perfect medium for this outward movement all across land-rich North America, providing safe haven and creature comforts in gardened settings. It's no surprise that Hubert and Alys wanted this experience for themselves.

 

 

 

The Lake Hill jitney, one of many such precursors to buses and cabs

 

To return to the rapidly changing mobility equation: if the low fares offered by the jitneys bled the Interurban lines, the rapid rise of the private automobile delivered the coup de grace. Canadian streetcar historian Henry Ewart says that jitneys served to introduce people to the idea of car travel while demonstrating its profound utility. The car's advantages of flexibility (leave on your own schedule) and convenience (weather protected and secure), coupled with its continually falling price-tag once mass production got rolling, made it truly unstoppable - especially once municipalities were invested in the business of paving roads.

 

 

Model Ts coming off the world's first moving production line: Ford Nation emerging

 
 

In an even deeper irony, unknown to either electric railway builders or suburban homesteaders back in 1913, Henry Ford was just then successfully introducing the moving production line to car manufacture (photo above). His pioneering leap into automated production cut the time needed to build a car chassis from some 12 hours to just 2.5! This innovation dramatically increased his factory's output while in turn lowering the price of its products, guaranteeing growing markets for the private automobile. It also allowed Ford ultimately to introduce the $5 working day (which led his competitors to accuse him of being a socialist!) a feat that meant his own workers could actually aspire to own the fruits of their own labour. Far from implying any socialist inclination, Ford's wage increase was aimed at improving retention of workers who had to endure the relentless monotony of the moving production line.

 

Streetcars still serving the Ford plant, not yet put out of business by the car

 

We don't know at what point Hubert Savage abandoned the train and began commuting to work by car, but the Interurban option had shut down by 1924, just 11 years after startup. Even the extreme measures taken by Vancouver and Victoria city councils late in the day to formally ban jitneys from cruising rail stops for customers wouldn’t prove sufficient to save the Saanich Interurban. It was perhaps prophetic that Saanich, home to the region's first and only electric Interurban railway, took no action to curb the use of jitney cabs at stops. Perhaps the council of the day was early to recognize that automobile travel represented the real wave of the future? 

 

 

A remnant of the Saanich line, now a part of the Interurban rail-trail

 

So the owners of the rail-inspired Garden City suburb had little choice but to adapt to growing automobility from early on. Yet, given its distance from downtown in a now-slow-growing city, this relative remoteness meant incremental rather than rapid build-out, and ultimately of a more modest nature than initially envisaged. Of course, Savage's bungalow was quite indifferent to how it was accessed, and it certainly didn't require a built-up neighbourhood crowding in on it. Its unique placement on a hilltop in the countryside only necessitated access to some form of viable mobility in order to overcome the separation of home and job and services. If suburbia does involve an element of escape from the crowding of town conditions, its precondition is inevitably some form of convenient mobility. Without it, suburbia can't really exist.

 

 

Suburbia remade for cars: city without services, country without nature

 

 

At the time it was built, the Savage bungalow would have appeared sleekly modern and entirely novel: radically horizontal in contrast to its Victorian forebears, forward-looking with its motion-minded kitchen and new electric appliances, isolated geographically yet connected with the broader world via telephone initially (services and friends) and then by radio (news and entertainments). While fully modern in its day, in true Arts-and-Crafts fashion it was consciously styled to appear firmly rooted in tradition, working closely with the landform beneath it, and built entirely from local wooden materials. 

 

 

Consciously styled to appear rooted in the past, offering fully modern living

 

Yet the bungalow could only embody this novel combination of town and country (and secure the emerging suburban lifestyle) because of the transportation revolution occurring in the first decades of the twentieth century. The scale of this revolution - particularly the advent of the privately owned automobile - would quickly downgrade the vision behind Savage's inspired choice and slowly but steadily alter the look and purpose of suburban housing in new developments. The flair and panache of the bungalow movement in general, and that Savage in particular invested in designing his own home, ultimately affecting building placement, proportioning and the use of natural materials, all went the way of the dodo by the time of the great depression. Exuberance in domestic architecture left town permanently for the more affordable range of dwellings built for aspiring middle class families, replaced by far less elaborate options, much more meagrely appointed, and rendered in cheaper and increasingly more-synthetic materials. Unwittingly, Hubert Savage designed and built an outlier that quickly became an anomaly rather than a representative form. Today it stands as a rare example of a true country bungalow, built on a suburban model that embraces the integration of town and country, sited to draw the best out of its surroundings, and erected just before that model was trumped by the personal automobile.

 

 

And the winner is the automobile: comfort and convenience prove irresistible

                                                          

 

This post is the second in a series celebrating the centennial of Hubert Savage’s Arts-and-Crafts bungalow, which turned 100 in 2013. Other articles are planned irregularly throughout the year. The ideas are those of David Cubberley (owner since 1988), and speculative to some degree because there is almost no evidence available of Savage family history. The author may be contacted at cubbs@telus.net .

 
 

Vestiges of the Interurban line:

 

 

On the platform across from City Hall, customers await their departure

 

Commemorative sign at Tillicum Station, where the Saanich Interurban began

 

Installing tracks to accommodate turns onto Pandora and Douglas

Former head office, BC Electric Railway, designed by Rattenbury

Model suburb, BCERC, indicating railway involvement in development

Cyclist enjoying time on the Interurban rail-trail, along the original route

 

Books for Looks:

The Story of the BC Electric Railway Company, by Henry Ewert, Whitecap Books, 1986.

Victoria's Streetcar Era, by Henry Ewert, Sono Nis Press, 1992. 

Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, by Robert Fishman, Basic Books, 1989.

The City of Los Angeles: History of Transportation,  https://usp100la.weebly.com/history-of-transportation.html