Selwyn Pullan’s Studio

A Fred Hollingworth designed studio and carport, has been given a last-minute reprieve from the bulldozer, as the District of North Vancouver looks for a way to save the structures, according to an article by Brent Richter in the North Shore News this week.

I spent quite a bit of time in that studio with Selwyn when I was writing Sensational Vancouver in 2014. In 1960, Hollingsworth created a covered passageway that led from the house. The studio was built on two-levels with floor-to-ceiling window sand concretes floors, that in typical Hollingsworth fashion, blended seamlessly in with the landscape. Selwyn’s stories, his house and some of the photos he lent me, are in my book, Sensational Vancouver

Selwyn Pullan:

Selwyn died in 2017 at 95 and his wife Margaret continued to live in the house for a few more years. The half-acre property in Upper Lonsdale has now changed hands and the new owners say the carport and studio can’t be saved, but bizarrely have offered to incorporate their replicas into a new build that includes a six-unit development.

The house was built in 1900, and Selwyn bought it in 1952. He had served in the Canadian Navy during the Second World War. Then he moved to Los Angeles to study photography at the Art Centre School under legendary photographer Ansel Adams. After graduation he went to work as a news photographer at the Halifax Chronicle and by the time he returned to Vancouver in 1950, he found a new movement of artists and architects who were reinventing the house. Selwyn reinvented architectural photography.

When he found that the Speed Graphic was inadequate for the movement needed for photographing this new style of architecture, he built his own camera. He quickly became a sought-after commercial photographer, working for magazines such as Western Homes and Living, Macleans and Architectural Digest. He intuitively understood the work of these architects, emphasizing light and space and often pulling in the homeowners and their children to show how the architectural and interior design fit with family life.

Carport and Studio:

The Hollingworth-designed carport that once housed Selwyn’s beloved 1963 Jaguar, looks more like a plane than a garage, and that’s interesting not just from an architectural point of view, but because he and Hollingsworth used to make model airplanes together as teenagers. Hollingsworth kept making them all his life. He died in 2015 at 98.

When I visited Selwyn in his studio over a decade ago, there was a grand piano left over from the ‘70s when he was on the cutting edge of digital recording, and the room was filled with lights and props and dozens of photographs of people, and fashion and designer furniture, and art stacked in piles against the walls.

The book that Lawren Harris published in 1969, was resting on the piano. Selwyn told me that he was asked to shoot the paintings that spanned the artist’s career, from his early days with the Group of Seven through to his abstract period in Vancouver. Selwyn refused to shoot them anywhere except in his studio and only when he was alone. The paintings would be trucked to his studio in batches, taken away and a new group brought in.

“I had millions of bucks worth of paintings in my studio back then,” he told me.

Related:

• Selwyn Pullan’s Photography
• Fred Hollingsworth
• Shalal Gardens and the Disappearing West Coast Homes
• Artists and Architects

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