Will there be an original ‘Vancouver Special’ in the future?

Naoibh O’Connor explores the question in the Vancouver Courier:

Heritage foundation hosts Vancouver Special tour

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The glossy white front door and sleek grey and cedar exterior of a Vancouver Special on East 22nd Avenue located not far off of Main Street reflect the modern renovations completed on the interior. But before entering the home, which was built in 1975, visitors will find a nod to its history — two small lion figures that originally guarded the home from atop brick pillars on either side of a gate. They’ve been “chromed” and are now nestled into the ivy to the right of the doorway.

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Photo Scott Massey

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This house is among those featured on Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s April 18 self-guided Vancouver Special tour, which reveals how five homeowners mixed the old and new to reinvent their houses. It’s the organization’s sixth tour of Vancouver Specials whose popularity has soared over the past decade.

“There are a lot of people who just really like the fact that they’re a blank canvas. You take a Vancouver Special and it has a big footprint and kind of a basic layout and from that you can either stick with the Vancouver Special style and embrace it or you can completely change it, make it entirely your own and very modern. So, there’s a lot of possibilities there,” said VHF spokeswoman Kathryn Morrow.

The possibilities are what convinced Scott Massey and Laura Quilici to buy their 2,278 square-foot Vancouver Special on East 22nd in 2007. They live in it with their daughter Lola, 10, and have spent eight years painstakingly renovating it.

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Vancouver Specials may be bland — neither beautiful nor ugly, according to former city councillor Gordon Price, but he’d still like one of them, or even a streetscape, preserved

“The definition of [heritage] has broadened out to what is culturally significant to a community as it is expressed in how they build,” he said, adding that the Vancouver Special has profound cultural significance and is an example of how builders and buyers during that time tried to achieve housing affordability.

“In so many ways it’s a remarkable testament to the energy and strategy of people who have shaped this city and this region. Really, they were looking for a way to maximize the density with a simple form of construction that would be affordable, particularly for immigrants’ extended families who were putting down roots in Vancouver and becoming Canadians.”

While there is no shortage of Vancouver Specials in the city today, Price, who writes a blog called Price Tags and is director of the city program at Simon Fraser University, said that might not always be true, especially ones that haven’t been renovated by subsequent generations.

“It would be expensive to do. Probably the way it would be done today, if it was so decided that it was a serious idea worthy of merit, and a developer had acquired, say, a row of Vancouver Specials, maybe you could save one of them and allow increased density of the rest of the site,” he said.

Price would like the house to be furnished in the style of the time and for it to include the story of its inhabitants.

“I think it would be important, for whatever Vancouver Special that was retained, that it should keep its context. It shouldn’t be moved and indeed a streetscape of Vancouver Specials would even be better — so that you could actually see what the impact was of that form of building. You don’t have any problem finding it at the moment, but in the future absolutely. Maybe not in our lifetime, but certainly in the next century it will be hard to find a remaining Vancouver Special as it was originally built,” he said.