Homage to the craftsman

"He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."

                                                        St. Francis

Jawing with Vern Krahn across a gate he had remade and just installed

 

Recently a dear friend of Victoria's heritage community passed away, alas far too soon. He was Vern Krahn, master carpenter, joiner and cabinet maker - an ally of all those who want older buildings to persist with fidelity to their past, an unsung hero of heritage for the many contributions of his creative hands. He worked on a lot of old Victoria during his productive lifetime, reviving things that were neglected and repairing what was damaged. He was beyond good with wood: a 360-degree craftsman who could reliably fashion anything to exact proportions, then fit it seamlessly into a pre-existing scheme. Vern was a true artisan carpenter, an invaluable anachronism who remained modest about his own talents and achievements.
 

We had the good fortune to have Vern execute projects, big and small, at our house over a period of fifteen years. Like most vintage residences on the west coast, the Savage bungalow is made largely of wood, and wooden buildings have bits that wear unevenly, inside and out. Heavy use means door panels may get broken, new owners may make unfortunate choices of decor and maul original features, sections of exterior board deteriorate in our long wet winters. All buildings that survive also require periodic updating as services change, and those modifications may be done well or crudely. And of course, bathrooms and kitchens get remodeled and they too may be mangled in the process. All of which means there is a great deal of work for capable hands in restoring and replacing wooden components in older homes. Such were Vern Krahn's.

 

Vern's first door for us, open now in the corner

 

We first turned to Vern to design and build a replacement for a solid wood door connecting our kitchen to a small utility room. I got his name from friends in the heritage community, and it turned out he lived just a block away from our house, so we were in fact neighbours. We asked him to replace a door whose panels had been cracked in several places and that had warped as well. The idea was to fashion a new door that would be true to the past (stiles, rails and panels identical to the original) but adapted for contemporary wants, so glazed in the upper half. We opted to modify the original design so as to lessen the door's walling effect when closed, feeling a glazed portion would keep a sense of visual connection to the next room while still admitting light when not open. This new door would also become the critical first step in an eventual full kitchen makeover. We really wanted to maintain continuity with the original decor while adjusting the door's effect on space, which is where a craftsman with Vern's skills came in. 

 

This door retains the past while incorporating the new

 

It takes an array of carpentry skills to be able to manufacture a solid door from scratch. Vern fashioned and installed a beautiful one of clear fir, replicating the dimensions of the original door exactly. Over a decade on, that door still fits like a glove and closes with reassuring solidity. The quality of the finished work and the exchange of ideas around its design left us very confident of Vern's ability to do more work on the house. We realized immediately what a privilege it was to have his attention focused on our home's needs. The real challenge would turn out to be getting access to his time for projects, because Vern was always and understandably in great demand. And, he preferred to work solo in a field where there is often a crew, so he could give it his undivided attention.

 

Replacement mirror and damaged frame Vern repaired above the fireplace

 

The next job we asked him to tackle was repair of some mistakes someone had made in the living room, when a broken mirror integral to a built-in above the fireplace had been replaced with mis-sized glass crudely skived into the existing frame. This had left the room's central feature looking damaged and abused. Vern executed one of his trademark seamless repairs, replacing the glass with a beveled mirror of proper thickness, and mending the damaged lower rail of the frame so flawlessly that one sees no signs of intervention (the earlier replacement glass had been held in place with plastic clips, a classy touch; Vern's painstaking repair employed a thin wood molding to hold the pane in place unobtrusively). As part of healing the built-in, Vern also adapted a couple of book-sized shelves to hold music CDs, with similar deftness. This precision of work and delicacy of touch Vern would characterize as 'museum-quality restoration,' a little joke he enjoyed from a time he'd been employed making precise exhibits for the provincial museum. 'Museum quality' became code for work done with utmost attention to details. He understood that we wanted it, and he capably delivered it.

 

View to the garden from the conservatory Vern repaired and rebuilt for us

 

After several rounds of finicky smaller restorations, we asked Vern to tackle the far larger job of repairing and restoring a small but important room off our kitchen. It had suffered indignities over the years and appeared neglected. On plan, it shows as a 'summer tea room', which both let onto the back garden and at the far end housed a small utility cluster sprouting around the original electrical inlet. Little bigger than a wide corridor in scale (below), and with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that allowed its designer to just tuck it in under an extension of the main roof form, this modest space began life partially open to the elements (screened, like a summer sleeping porch) before at some point being enclosed with windows. In the nineties, I'd had some crummy aluminum windows replaced with leaded casements that flanked a tiny picture window. While a distinct gain aesthetically, it only served to make it even more obvious that that rest of the room badly needed attention. It bore ugly scars where the utility room wall had been summarily ripped out in order to inch bulky appliances closer to the services.

 

 

End wall restored, new door installed, lino placed, built-in seat yet to appear

 

The original end wall had come with a door to access a closet-sized space that sequestered the utilities from view. All that remained now were jagged ends of a wall ripped out, framing timbers exposed, the door long gone. This shabby situation left the room feeling neglected, leaving a growing octopus of electrical wiring fanning out from an upgraded electrical panel in full view, alongside a water heater sitting directly on an unfinished floor. For a long time this situation stymied me, to a certain extent out of fear of what might happen without a discerning craftsman to help resolve the design choices and carry out the repair with surgical precision. All those hesitations evaporated once Vern appeared on the scene.
 

Conservatory painted, window seat varnished, looking very smart indeed

 

We agreed he would undertake an adaptive restoration, based on remaking the missing wall where it had been and fashioning a new door similar to the kitchen door, thereby recreating a true utility closet to contain the business end of the home. We determined there was just enough room to squeak in a European washer-dryer set, stacked in one corner of the closet, if we relocated the hot water tank to the corner diagonally opposite it. Vern liked the idea of putting the room's decor back to how it had been while modifying it just enough to accommodate a compact version of modern conveniences. Together we worked out the details of each facet of the restoration, beginning with a new door with translucent glass to admit light while masking the utilities. You can see from the picture above just how well Vern brought that piece of it off - we were and remain mightily pleased with it.

Facing north towards former cooling closet, original back door Vern repaired

 

It took some time from commissioning this project to actually getting Vern on site. But that delay in starting was how it had to be, because he was always in demand and insisted on giving every job his best attentions. Somehow he managed to find time for us in that busy schedule and once on site was totally seized of the project and saw the job right the way through. The wall he made consistent with the original finishing of the room, using identical vertical bead boarding so the repair would be invisible. Once that wall and door appeared, the sense of wounds healing was tangible. 

 

Cooling closet adapted to storage with lovely doors

 

We also had to adapt and evolve an awkward set of corner cupboards that had been poorly contrived from an original California cooler (a built-in device used to store food in the days before refrigeration, utilizing screened vents to the exterior to capture an airflow). These cupboards were (to be kind) poorly thought out, the base awkwardly accessed via a lid rather than through doors, the upper bank too shallow for much goods storage, the top out of keeping with the base. Vern deepened the upper tier of these built-in cupboards without damage to the ceiling, rendering it more useful and in better balance with the bottom half, and then sealed the lid on the base and opened its facade to accept cupboard doors. Next he fashioned two sets of cupboard doors, employing a light bead board (a tongue-and-groove board) for the panels, which in turn harmonized with the wall treatment. I think these doors are an especially good example of Vern's artistry: unpretentious, light but solid and finely rendered, with a graceful bevel along the inside rails and styles that takes them subtly off rectilinear. I managed to track down some authentic Craftsman hardware for the handles, to reinforce the period feeling of the room. I think you'll agree he did a fantastic job - this was the cabinet-maker at the top of his form, investing creativity in even the most humble work.

 

Vern fashioned a trio of drawers to utilize the base of the built-in as storage

  

 

We aspired not just to restore this space, but also to increase its utility and appeal as a room and lessen the feeling of it being a passage-way. That led us to the idea of installing a built-in bench seat under the bank of windows letting onto the back garden. The main roof swoops low at this point, pulling the windows down with it, so a wide view of the garden can only be obtained from a sitting position. We felt that a window seat would open up a cozy intimacy with the garden. At the same time, we wanted the seat to be functional for other purposes, so settled on gaining storage by having deep drawers built into its base (bungalows often provided these multi-use spaces). Vern fashioned us a lovely built-in seat from clear Douglas fir, with clear fir bead board for the drawer fronts. Together we developed a corner detail to supply a bit more

storage space while giving a secure surface on which to set a mug or a book. Vern carried his cupboard door design over into the drawer fronts, reinforcing the overall sense of harmony pervading the room. The drawers were installed with more Craftsman-style hardware, again for period feeling. To our eye, the furnished window seat fits the room perfectly, offering a wonderfully intimate view to the garden room outside. Vern did all the work in that room, from repairing the original back door to making a compatible ceiling for the utility closet to installing the new linoleum. He did a topnotch job and the room has worn-in delightfully.

Window seat makes the room intimate and inviting

 

The latest, and trickiest, of the big jobs Vern did for our house came about rather unexpectedly. It happened that the exterior had been comprehensively repaired in the late nineties, before Vern came on the scene. Or at least, we thought it had been. The work done was good quality but it turned out that some hidden rot had been missed at the time. That became evident one day when I chanced to notice that the soffits under
the gable ends across the facade of the house were sagging ominously. After a hundred years of exposure to dampness with little venting, their time was up. And so a new need for heritage carpentry of a high order opened up suddenly. Getting this repair done right was something the building's overall look depended upon, so the stakes were high as we headed towards its centennial year. I knew we needed Vern for this job, but again the challenge would be the long queue for his attention. Luckily for us and for the house, he liked working on our place, so was quite willing to entertain a job that would be very difficult to access and execute. He was no spring chicken at this point and this wasn't anything that could be easily done from a ladder - it needed scaffolding, to create a working platform and have equipment and materials to hand. And this scaffolding would have to be moved along a facade that advances and retreats, on ground that in places falls away sharply. 

Anyway, it took about a year for Vern to be able to fit this work in, but then in the summer of 2012, he arrived on site, set up a working platform on some scaffolding, and began tackling the complex job of repair. It happened that I took lots of photographs over the course of this challenging piece of repair work, which Vern did to the most exacting standards. I've selected a few of these pictures to show him at work in his element, rescuing an important piece of local history and endowing it with fresh life. I think the pictures capture the craftsman at work.

Carefully cutting out all the rotten pieces of wood

Then replacing them seamlessly with compatible new components

Removing no more wood than is absolutely necessary

Fashioning replacement components up on the platform

Scaffolding erected in an awkward location

Putting it all back together, blending old and new

Careful attention to the details, apparent locus of both God and the devil

Re-truing posts after inserting a shingle beneath

Ready at last for the painter to come and finish up the job

 

Vern passed away on January 6, 2016, and with that passing a talented artist-craftsman who looked after a lot of Victoria's wooden heritage departed our community. As his obituary notes, he "was a man of immense depth and integrity" and "his many fine works remain as testament to his craftsmanship". It's in that vein that I've tried to document the fine stewardship he gave our 1913 house, in recognition of the skill and discernment he brought to every piece of work he did. This is a rarity in our times, yet essential if we want to keep our landmarks alive. Vern possessed the bedrock skill of the traditional craftsman: the ability to generously invest himself in his work, putting care, attention to detail, and a lifetime knowledge of craft into everything he did, big or small, high falutin' or work-a-day. I had the great boon of knowing him for fifteen years, both as a client and a friend, and the chance to share many probing conversations. The regret I feel so deeply today is that he didn't have longer to express his craft, and that we as a community didn't find the way to transfer some of his insight to up and coming heritage carpenters. Like many I'm sure, I do feel grateful I had the opportunity to know him and the chance to work with him in preserving some heritage. And I feel fortunate to be able see and enjoy his work all around me, every day.

Refinished now, showing no signs of intervention (just what Vern wanted)

 

A service honouring Vern's life will be held on Saturday February 6th from 2 - 4:30 pm at First Memorial, 4725 Falaise Drive.

If you are interested in reading more about the challenges of restoring heritage buildings and the calling that is heritage carpentry, see my Sourcing Craft Skills For Heritage Preservation (http://centurybungalow.blogspot.ca/2013/06/sourcing-craft-skills-for-heritage.html), June 2013.

Century Bungalow Redux

Repair never really ends when a house is over 100, but in 2013 it looks renewed

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

No turned wood displayed

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

Tall piers: sense of entry

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

The local bungalow adapted to colonial needs

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

Bungalow with enclosed soffits: regional feature

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excavator and a dumpster: house be gone

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

Heigh ho, to the landfill it goes

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

 

Context smashed to pieces

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


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

Fuel loading: an ongoing problem in Arcadia

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

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

Sharing our place with Saanich's Heritage Tour

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

   

2. Town and Country

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

Electric railways brought suburbs to the country

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

Saanich Interurban line, Prospect Station

Interurban railways vastly amplified the dispersal of these suburban pods across whole regions, and had just come on stream when use of the automobile reached its first critical juncture. This took the shape of the jitney bus, which emerged as a business opportunity in private transport that allowed the enterprising to compete directly with urban railways for clientele. Jitneys became the common precursor to both the modern taxi and the bus. 

A jitney bus from the bungalow era

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

City grown out of countryside with streetcars

Even in a small city like Victoria, the appearance of jitneys, followed by the rise of private automobile use on an expanding scale, completely destabilized the economics of electric rail-based transit. It would take another thirty or so years before the trackage of town streetcars was torn out and the electric option fully purged. But beginning with the phenomenon of jitney cabs, the automobile began dominantly modifying urban form through its potential to open dispersed suburbs anywhere roads ran, wherever there was unbuilt land to be developed. 

Ford motor plant, components ready for assembly

The loss of economic vitality was especially hard on little Victoria, coming with the advent of WW1 in 1914. The receding economic tide left Hubert and Alys marooned out in the boonies and, after 1924, without rail passenger service to downtown. Boom times wouldn't return on anything approaching the pre-war scale until the post-WW2 housing boom once again swelled settlement of the suburban city-region. By then Hubert was nearing the end of his time on Grange Road, but the couple had managed to stay put on their picturesque hillside for nearly their whole lifetime. Savage apparently suffered the loss of much of his architectural practice in the immediate post-war doldrums, having to work for some time outside his field. In the end too, they must have adopted the car in order to access their paradisical enclave conveniently, a minor relic of which is a letter from Hubert Savage complaining to Saanich Council that Grange Road was becoming impassable due to potholes (a byproduct of the car)!

3. Outside In: Designing With Nature

Profound sense of prospect from the verandah

I still recall seeing the Savage bungalow for the first time and being struck by the novelty of a house in such a distinctive landscape. Its 'curb appeal' lay in the fact that enough of its original wooded lot remained intact that it continued to appear as pictorial composition, which appealed to me exceptionally, as an admirer of landscapes and as a gardener. At the time I didn’t know anything about picturesque composition, or the arts-and-crafts approach of placing and shaping a building specifically to suit the setting – I only knew that this house seemed profoundly different from any place I’d ever seen in suburbia (confession: I grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, where I had watched the smear of modern suburbia crawl over former farms on the margins of town).

A sense of refuge as well

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

Designed to admit light and frame views

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

All mod cons in a romanticized setting

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

4. A Printed Frieze By Lawson Wood

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


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

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

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

5. Sourcing Craft Skills for Heritage Restoration

Oldest building in North America: 1642

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

One of Canada's oldest houses: 1708

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

Vern Krahn and the replacement gate 

6.  A Shed of My Own

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

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

Seen in between winter and spring

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

A cottage designed for the Halls

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

 

 

7. Finishing Touches

Sanding a south wall before painting

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

Caulking and undercoating with primer

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

8. Allusive Architecture

Proportioning of materials mainly allowed to speak for themselves

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

In broad terms, progressive design involved rejecting Victorian excess in favour of more elegant proportioning and greater emphasis on the inherent qualities of natural materials. This was also Gustav Stickley's (The Craftsman) 

A building extended harmoniously

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

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

9. Shelter and Comfort

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

 

Epic fail: carton on end, zero landscape

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

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

Lo-maintenance plastic hedging

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

10. What’s  Next?

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

 

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