Paradise at the crossroads
West Vancouver has a reputation for resisting change, although in the past it has been at its forefront. Facing pressure from changing demographics and seemingly limitless housing prices, what’s Metro Vancouver’s
tiny, perfect municipality to do?

By BEVERLY CRAMP

If any community in greater Vancouver can be said to “nestle” it’s West Vancouver. Nestle (intransitive verb): 1, archaic) to nest; 2) to settle snugly or comfortably; 3) to lie in an inconspicuous or sheltered manner. Sure enough, approached from the Lions Gate Bridge, or seen from Prospect Point in Stanley Park, or from a million postcards from the same points of view, there is West Vancouver, Metro’s best address, nestled picturesquely along the slopes of the North Shore Mountains. What would greater Vancouver be without its showcase of the best Pacific Northwest Coast living?

The District of West Vancouver is the verdant flagship of the Lower Mainland, one of Canada’s most luxurious neighbourhoods, its lush greenery evident from the apartment blocks along its waterfront to the heavily treed home properties in the lower slopes and the large tracts of forest that still take up half the mountainside. Such desirability comes at a price: Home costs more than doubled between the years 2002 and 2006, to reach on average $1,572,000 for a single detached home and $847,000 for an apartment.

“Most people come here because of the natural setting,” says Mayor Pamela Goldsmith-Jones who likes to promote all of West Vancouver’s amenities, including such man-made ones as the recreation centre and library (West Vancouver claims the highest number of book loans per capita of any library in the country). “I often see our public amenities being used to sell properties here,” says Goldsmith-Jones. “In the advertising material, there’s usually a picture of the seawall, a creek or words that say the location is ‘steps away from the library.’”

West Vancouver realtors make the most of the expansive ocean views, greenery and these public amenities. Yet some recent housing development has shown disregard for West Vancouver’s natural beauty. For more than a decade, anyone glancing across to the North could not miss the clear-cut slashes appearing where new housing was being built. Using construction techniques that call for complete clearing of the vegetation and the bulldozing flat of all landscape features, some developers have left their brash marks. Vancouver novelist Grant

Buday described these incursions as looking like “a trip to the barber gone badly.”

“Some of the new developments we have witnessed are terrible,” agrees Allan Mark Angell, partner with Malcolm Hasman in West Vancouver’s top-selling realty firm, Angell Hasman. “I used to say this was the greatest place to live but it’s changed so much. The mountains and creeks are great. And the way [West Vancouver developer] British Pacific Properties built on huge, state-like lots – it was great. But these new, little lots, where they take out every tree, it’s disgusting.”

There was a time when idealists wouldn’t dream of building in such a heavy-handed manner. During the economic boom that followed World War II, a wave of new housing construction was influenced by the new Modernist architecture. Houses were built into the natural landscape, and not by blasting out all the ecological elements. For example, the Duncan McNab home, built in 1956, had a tree enframed at its entrance so that it could grow through the low-pitched roof. The same house fitted the living and sleeping rooms above and around a rocky outcrop.

“West Vancouver and the North Shore were pivotal places where architects expanded and explored new ideas after the Second World War,” says Darrin Morrison, director of the West Vancouver Museum, which frequently has exhibitions that focus on the mid-century modern homes that are still plentiful in West Vancouver. “Properties were relatively inexpensive then and although the topography proved difficult to build on, they saw opportunities on these sites. The houses were modest in scope, not like the lavish, extravagant homes built today, and they were built for the needs of young families. There was an emphasis on integrating the inside with the outside, houses were built into the landscapes and floor-to-ceiling glass was popular.”

West Vancouver is where some of the earliest flat-roofed houses were built and surprising new shapes were favoured over older styles. One of the earliest to do this was architect and artist B.C. Binning who completed his shocking new house in 1941. Today it is one of the most significant houses in Canada, modest though it is compared to its newer neighbours. “Binning abandoned the typical Vancouver basement, pitched roof and gables, and opted for a large living space between a kitchen and bedroom with adjacent bathroom,” wrote Rhodri Windsor Liscombe in his book The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver 1938–1963.

“The North Shore with its magnificent mountains and sea setting has been a favourite place for architects and artists to practise their work,” wrote Vancouver artist Gordon Smith in a foreword to the catalogue for a 2005 show at the Ferry Building Gallery called The Poetics of West Coast Modernism in West Vancouver.

In addition to Bert Binning, the North Shore attracted people such as Group of Seven artists Fred Varley and Lawren Harris. An unknown teenaged Arthur Erickson went to parties at Harris’s home in West Vancouver at a time when drinking coffee, turning off all the lights and listening to jazz records was considered a radical way to entertain. Erickson went on to international fame as an architect but not before he had designed some of his best residential buildings in West Vancouver – homes that were featured in leading Canadian and American magazines as some of the finest homes of their time.

“West Vancouver does have numerous examples of works by architects that were some of their best,” says Morrison as he names Erickson’s home for Gordon Smith (see page 34), Binning’s house and other West Coast architects. Morrison is concerned West Vancouver’s stock of Modernist architectural treasures is vulnerable to redevelopment and bad renovations. Because these relatively small houses are situated on large lots, many owners are opting to demolish them in favour of larger new places. This happened recently when an Arthur Erickson-designed home known as The Graham House was demolished. In its heyday, the Graham house had been featured in Life magazine. But it had fallen victim to bad extensions and repairs, then left to fall into disrepair before the current owner tore it down to rebuild.

“Many of the mid-century homes are 50 to 60 years old,” says Morrison. “Many were built with local materials such as cedar wood, which, no matter how hardy it is, does degrade in the rainforest we live in. When people go to renovate, they often use new materials that aren’t in keeping with the original aesthetic. They also enlarge these homes and in doing so, drastically change them.”

Bob Sokol, West Vancouver’s new Director of Planning, Lands and Permits has his work cut out for him. In a place that is growing older (as of the 2006 Census, almost one quarter of West Vancouver’s residents were 65 or older), where property is so expensive it is increasingly beyond the reach of young families and where development pressures endanger heritage housing, neighbourhoods and the environment, what is to be done to maintain the affluent lifestyle many have come to expect?

“There is a high quality of both natural and cultural amenities here,” says Sokol. “Fundamental to the neighbourhoods is how the trees and greenery have been integrated. It has been a focus of our community dialogue with people about housing and neighbourhood character here. The feedback we have gotten is that the new development is not in keeping with the character of what people are used to: taking treed lots that aren’t level and changing them with a lot of blasting.”

Sokol and his staff have begun developing new plans and bylaws to ameliorate some of the more drastic development trends. “We will change the bylaws to limit blasting. But we don’t have a clear message about trees versus views. Some people want to protect the natural forest; others want the way cleared for views to the ocean.”

There is also the problem of affordable housing. “Young families can’t afford to move in, people’s children are choosing to stay with their parents or move out because they can’t afford to live here, and as people age and look for smaller homes, there aren’t a lot of smaller strata for them to move to.”

Sokol says West Vancouver must find ways to increase the housing mix to be a sustainable community with a broad range of housing types to accommodate different life-cycle needs. “We must integrate such housing into existing neighbourhoods without changing their character drastically.”

One of the ways that Sokol hopes to meet these needs and protect modernist homes is to provide incentives to keep that stock of important buildings. “These homes are on large lots, so we can look at variances to give owners the permission to build carriage houses on the same lot or allow secondary suites or even do a subdivision to create a smaller second lot.”

Such incentives not only will maintain heritage housing, but also provide a wider selection of housing that West Vancouver so badly needs.

Sokol also points to the planned Rodgers Creek development as one where there will be better protection of natural land as well as a broad mix of housing. “Fifty-two per cent of the land will not be touched, including stream corridors, and remain green. Up to 45 per cent of the land will be built denser because we need smaller units like townhouses and apartment buildings. We don’t have enough of that kind of housing now and we need places for empty-nesters and single people.”

These are changes that please Linda Burger, one of the premier builders of single-family homes in West Vancouver. “I live here because of the ocean, the mountains and the whole lifestyle,” says Burger. “It’s community-oriented and people tend to know each other.” But Burger notices that it is hard to get younger people to move to West Vancouver and she bemoans the lack of a night life. “I’m in my early 50s and I don’t want to be in bed at 9 o’clock at night. The politicians here seem to think that allowing liquor licenses will make West Vancouver lose its sleepy-town feeling. We need more patios in Ambleside and Dundarave where people can gather.”

Certainly change is coming to West Vancouver, change that often has been resisted. Trevor Lautens, who has lived in West Vancouver for more than 23 years (he calls himself a newcomer), remembers a time when he first moved to Vancouver in the early 1960s. Lautens had been invited to have dinner at a West Vancouver home. “Upon being introduced to the matron of the house, she felt it necessary to declare, ‘We are B.B.’ I didn’t know what that meant and when I asked her, she rose to her full height to say, ‘Before Bridge!’ She thought all the people who came after 1939 were interlopers and that she was part of the true, old aristocracy of West Vancouver.”

Lautens, a journalist retired from The Vancouver Sun and now a columnist with the North Shore News, is skeptical about whether planners can effect change to encourage young families to move in and provide housing for older people. “It’s hypocritical of City Hall to suggest they can provide affordable housing for seniors. If you have a house worth the average $1.3–1.5 million, and you sell it for a condo that’ll cost $1 million, how does that help you?”

Neither does Lautens sympathize with those who want to stay in an expensive neighborhood. “I’ve got a difficult property and in the fullness of time I will have to move. I will likely have to leave West Vancouver. So I’ll have to be a big boy about it. It’s the reality of the marketplace.”

Whether or not West Vancouver is successful in providing more housing options, there is one big supporter of its many natural and cultural amenities. “It’s our public amenities that are one of the big aspects of our population retention,” says Goldsmith-Jones, citing the District’s parks, greenways, distinct neighbourhoods, community recreation center, library and public safety record. “These are well-supported foundations of the West Vancouver community and they are the things that help a community continue to thrive when the economy gets tough.”