The architect was Ross Lort, who designed Casa Mia
John Mackie
Sun
The ‘hobbit house’ with the unique roof at 3979 West Broadway has been sold, the lot subdivided and the old house, one of the best examples of its kind in town, is to be restored. Photograph by : Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
In the 1920s and ’30s, there was a brief fervour for “storybook” houses, structures that mixed the traditional look of an old English cottage with a playful style inspired by the houses in children’s books and Hollywood movies.
One of the best storybook houses in Vancouver is at 3979 West Broadway, two blocks west of Alma. The house is quite small, but it has an amazing shingle roof that curves, dips and rises over the building like a living organism. It’s the kind of roof Hansel and Gretel might have, or a hobbit house out of a J. R. R. Tolkien book.
Recently a construction fence went up and the windows were boarded up with plywood — the familiar look of a building about to be demolished. But this time, one of Vancouver‘s great character houses is going to be saved, and restored.
Plans are being prepared to subdivide the property the house sits on, with a new house to be built on the west end of the lot and the storybook house restored on the east side.
Unfortunately, the house has been sitting empty for some time and has been vandalized.
“You leave a building vacant for a day practically and it gets stripped,” laments Don Luxton, who is working as the heritage consultant on the project. “Somebody got in and got the plumbing out of there and wiring and just really made a mess out of it.”
The thieves also made off with the house’s distinctive cross-leaded windows. But the owner went looking for them, and found them in a salvage store nearby.
“They were stolen but my client found them,” said Luxton. “Somebody had taken them out, put them in a shopping cart and rolled them down to Fourth Avenue. My client went looking for them and got them back.”
The house was constructed in 1942 by Brenton Lea, a builder. The architect was Ross Lort, who also designed the Casa Mia mansion on Southwest Marine Drive.
Lea’s modus operandi apparently was to build houses, live there a while, then sell them.
“He had done some contemporary architecture,” said Luxton.
“He did a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright style house at 25th and Marguerite back in 1930 [which was on a Heritage Vancouver house tour a couple of years ago].
“This was his wife’s dream house. The one she wanted was basically Anne Hathaway’s cottage,” [William Shakespeare’s wife, who had a famous cottage in England].
Storybook architecture was quite popular on the West Coast.
“In California you had backlots in the ’20s and ’30s where you had set designers building fanciful villages and things,” relates heritage expert John Atkin.
“Many of these guys were architects, and the architecture kind of caught on. They started building homes for clients, sometimes stars and studio execs [like Charlie Chaplin] in this very fanciful style which became known as storybook style.”
Lea built three storybook houses around 1942; one of them still stands at 587 West King Edward. But financial constraints forced him to sell off his wife’s dream home soon after he built it.
“The sad thing is that the timing was bad,” said Luxton.
“He built it in 1942, and by the time they finished the house they couldn’t afford to keep it very long. They were only apparently there for about a year.”
Though the house is small (two bedrooms), it sold for $1,050,000 in June 2006. A year later, it was sold again, for $1,650,000.
The house is on Vancouver‘s heritage register, and the heritage department negotiated with the successive owners to find a way to keep it. Because it’s a heritage house, the city was able to offer the subdivision of the lot as an incentive, which the owner accepted.
Restoring the house won’t be cheap, because the roof has to be replaced. Luxton said that will cost upwards of $100,000.
“It’s a very specific kind of shingling, many many many layers,” he said.
“Demolishing the existing roof is part of the expense: there’s so many layers nailed together that it’s really hard to deconstruct the roof and then put a new one on. It’s very expensive.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
