Emily Carr’s 100-year-old Oak Bay cabin could be yours for $5.5 million dollars! The good news is that it comes with a 10-bedroom heritage house designed by Samuel Maclure.
In 1913, Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in Oak Bay. According to a story,* she built a 12 by 20 foot cabin the following year, “nail by nail” at a cost of $150 with the help of “one old carpenter.”
Assessment records show that the builder was Thomas Cattarall, the same “old carpenter” who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and later worked with architect Samuel Maclure on Hatley Castle. By 1914, he was 70, retired, and living not far away on Beach Drive.
Emily wrote extensively about James Bay and her family home in The Book of Small, about her time as a landlady in The House of All Sorts, and about selling that house, her family home, and her later houses in Hundreds and Thousands. Yet with all these books, including her biography, there is not one mention of the Oak Bay cabin.
Probably the cabin was a much-needed refuge from her hated landlady duties, a place she could escape to in summer.
In 1919, both her sisters Clara and Edith died, and Emily sold her cottage to Ellen Hodgson Phipps, the wife of a local farmer. The little cottage went through a series of owners and renters—mostly single women—as well as a number of alterations. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the cottage. They tried to give the cabin to the provincial government which runs Carr House, but officials said no thanks.
At this point Terry Tallentire stepped in. She paid the city $1.00 and then spent another $4,000 to move it to her house at 825 Foul Bay Road. An artist herself, Terry used Emily’s cabin for her studio. She moved years ago, but the cabin remained.
825 Foul Bay Road, Oak Bay, 2024
New owners were renovating the house into suites when I was researching this story in 2011 and I was able to get in and have a look around. According to the current real estate listing, it has a 3,600 sq.ft. owner’s suite, five private suites, and one “historic detached cottage.”
825 Foul Bay Road. Emily Carr’s cabin, 2024
Emily loathed being a landlady, but somehow, I think she would have liked this house.
*Mention of the “story” was in Emily Carr: The Untold Story, by Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher (1978)
Francis Rattenbury, ca. 1900. Courtesy Victoria Archives
Francis Rattenbury moved to Victoria in 1892. The 25-year-old had beat out 60 other architects to win the design competition for BC’s Parliament Buildings. Although massively over budget, the commission propelled the young architect’s career, and before long he had a slew of buildings after his name including the Empress Hotel, The Crystal Gardens, the CPR Steamship Building, the Bank of Montreal on Government (Irish Times Pub), and the Law Courts (Vancouver Art Gallery), as well as his own Oak Bay Mansion–Iechinihl, now a private school.
In 1898, Rattenbury (or Ratz as he was known), stunned Victoria’s hierarchy by marrying Florence Eleanor Nunn, the adopted daughter of a woman who ran a boarding house. The couple had two children—Francis born in 1899 and Mary in 1904.
Florrie Rattenbury, ca.1900. Courtesy Victoria Archives
Gradually things started to unravel. Rattenbury had a falling out with the CPR and resigned as its architect. He demanded total control of his projects and would fire off pompous letters to clients who interfered with his plans. He lost a fortune in the crash of 1913. At home, things were falling apart.
Francis Rattenbury and Alma Pakenham
Alma:
In 1923, with his career and marriage in tatters, Rattenbury met Alma Pakenham, twice-married and 30-years younger. When Florrie refused to divorce him, Rattenbury had the heat and electricity cut off at the house and scandalized Victoria’s society by flaunting his affair.
When Florrie eventually agreed to a divorce, as part of the settlement Rattenbury provided her with her own house. She bought a corner lot at 1513 Prospect Place. Samuel Maclure, who worked with Rattenbury on Government House, designed Florrie’s new home with a view of Iechinihl, where Rattenbury lived with Alma.
Florrie’s house. 1513 Prospect Place. Courtesy BC Assessment
George:
Florrie died in 1929, the same year that Rattenbury and Alma moved to Bournemouth, England. By all accounts the architect should have ended his life in obscurity, but Alma took up with George Stoner, the 18-year-old chauffeur. In a fit of jealously, George bashed Rattenbury to death in 1935.
Vancouver Sun, June 5, 1935
Both Alma and George were tried for murder, Alma was acquitted, but after hearing George would hang, she promptly stabbed herself, fell into a river and drowned. George later had his death sentence overturned. He died in 2000 at age 83.
Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck by Eve Lazarus, coming April 2025. Preorder through Arsenal Pulp Press, or your favourite indie bookstore
Eve Lazarus with Amanda Quill, Greg Mansfield and CTV’s St John Alexander on the haunted staircase. October 2021
Earlier this month, St. John Alexander invited me to hang out at Overlynn, a Burnaby mansion for a CTV news Halloween segment. I spent an amazing Saturday with St. John, Greg Mansfield and Amanda Quill—two experienced ghost hunters.
Overlynn ca.1920. The four dormer attic windows are long gone and the conservatory was turned into a chapel for the Sisters of Charity of Halifax. Burnaby Archives photo.
As the history geek in the group, I discovered that Overlynn, which is in Vancouver Heights, is part of North Burnaby. Around 1909 when the streetcar line was extended to Boundary Road, and the CPR was selling off Shaughnessy, Charles Peter, head of the Blue Ribbon Tea Business, a division of GF and J. Galt Company, thought that Vancouver Heights could become another exclusive subdivision for the rich.
Overlynn staircase. Eve Lazarus photo, October 2021
At the time, the average house cost $1,000 to build, but you had to spend at least $3,500 to buy into Vancouver Heights. Peter’s house was a model for what the rich could do. Designed by Samuel Maclure at a cost of $75,000, it was named Overlynn because you could look right over Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver’s Lynn Creek. The house took three years and was finished in 1912. It didn’t work though, the rich stayed in Vancouver.
The Sisters of Charity of Halifax:
The Peters family lived here until the late 1920s when the house sold to the Sisters of Charity of Halifax. The nuns ran Seton Academy, a private Catholic girls boarding and day school for the next 40 years.
Vancouver Sun, August 28, 1937
We had all two and one-half storeys to ourselves. Greg and Amanda say the house may look empty but it’s brimming with paranormal activity. Thornton Tunnel which runs under North Burnaby, may be behind some bumps and shakes, but it can’t explain the swinging arm, the man who coughs or the little girl in the white dress who suddenly appears, and just as suddenly, disappears.
Eve in the attic, courtesy CTV News
The Attic:
The stain-glassed windows, the elaborately tiled fireplaces and the wood paneled walls are just gorgeous, but the most interesting part of the house is the attic. You go through the servant’s quarters and up a narrow set of stairs until you get to a heavy metal door at the top.
Courtesy CTV news
What’s particularly creepy is that the locks are on the outside and this is where the girls must have slept. The floor is still covered in red and grey checkered lino, there is a bathroom with several sinks and a large room that likely served as a dormitory.
Attic bathroom. Eve Lazarus photo, October 2021
In 1970 the house and grounds were sold to the Action line housing society for $350,000. A tower was added, and it’s been used as seniors housing ever since.
The house received heritage designation in 1995.
Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck by Eve Lazarus, coming April 2025. Preorder through Arsenal Pulp Press, or your favourite indie bookstore
“We slept in a long room located on the second floor, with a row of beds down each side. As I recall, there was a bathroom at one end of the room. I remember the nuns rag curling my hair after bath time,” says Maureen Whiteside (shown bottom row fourth from right).
We probably have more monkey puzzle trees in BC than in all of their native Chile. The quirky trees started arriving in gardens in the 1920s.
In 2012, I wrote a book called Sensational Victoria and one of my favourite chapters was Heritage Gardens. I visited and then wrote about large rich-people’s gardens like Hatley Park, and smaller ones like the Abkhazi Garden on Fairfield road built on the back of a love story. There was Carole Sabiston’s beautiful garden on Rockland Avenue anchored by a 100-year-old purple lilac tree, and the garden Brian and Jennifer Rogers created around their century-old Samuel Maclure designed horse stable. (Brian is the grandson of BT Rogers, the Vancouver sugar king, and another ardent gardener).
Nellie McClung at her Ferndale Road home in 1949. Courtesy Saanich Archives
On the back cover of the book, there’s a photo of Nellie McClung standing in front of a giant monkey puzzle tree at the house she retired to at Gordon Head in 1935.
Lurancy Harris, the first female police officer in Canada, built her house on Venables in 1916. When I went to photograph it, the now two-storey house was dwarfed by a monkey puzzle tree that she’d planted in her front garden.
Lurancy Harris built 1836 Venables in 1916 and planted herself a monkey tree.
I’ve always had a thing for monkey puzzle trees—they seem to go particularly well with turrets, old houses and great stories. But I’ve never given them much thought until I was chatting with Christine Allen this morning about her upcoming talk for the Vancouver Historical Society next month. Christine—another Australian transplant—is a master gardener. She tells me that there was a huge craze for monkey puzzles trees here in the 1920s and 1930s.
“People were very proud of their monkey puzzle trees. It was so Victorian, they loved that kind of odd ball stuff,” she says. “There is a tiny post-war bungalow in my neighbourhood (Grandview) where somebody planted two massive ones on the south side of the house. That house gets no sun ever.”
Christine says the trees got their name because even a monkey would find it a puzzle to climb.
Bowen Island Inn in the 1930s with a massive monkey puzzle tree. Courtesy Vancouver Archives
Christine says that another reason why these Chilean pines were so popular is because of Vancouver’s mild climate that allows us to grow anything from arctic tundra plants to palm trees.
But it’s not just people, towns are proud of them to. The tiny town of Holberg on Vancouver Island boasts the world’s tallest monkey puzzle tree. I have no idea how tall it is now, but in 1995 it was measured at 77 feet—that’s higher than a seven-storey building.
Nellie McClung’s home was known as Lantern Lane after the books she wrote in her upstairs study. Courtesy Saanich Archives, 1960
This is an occasional series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down.
603 Manchester Road in Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood
Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the BC Archives.
Favourite Building:
One of my favourite houses is an unprepossessing, colonial-style bungalow on Manchester Road. The house was built in 1908 by Charles Deacon, who had emigrated from England with his family six years earlier, and became the foreman of a Rock Bay sawmill. I like the design and proportions of the house; and I applaud the current owners for painting the exterior a warm yellow, a colour that was popular when the house was built. This is an unfashionable part of Victoria and old houses like this are at risk. Kudos to City of Victoria Heritage Planners, who have recommended that the 600 block of Manchester and adjacent Dunedin Street, be designated as a Heritage Conservation Area. The proposal still needs to be approved by homeowners. Fingers crossed.
The Coburn family home at 2640 Blanshard, an Italianate-style house built in 1898.
The one that got away:
In the 1960s when “urban renewal” was popular and local authorities were eradicating “blighted areas,” Victoria City council used the program to demolish nearly 160 houses in its Rose-Blanshard Renewal Scheme. This “blighted” area consisted of houses built in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rose Street was its centre and North Ward School (1894), a four-storey brick structure, was a landmark. The school and neighbouring residences were demolished so that Blanshard Street could be widened to benefit motorists travelling from the new BC ferry terminal. Properties were expropriated, and occupants who refused to leave their homes were forcibly evicted. The Coburn family home was the last house standing when it was bulldozed in March 1969. It was replaced with Blanshard Court, a “low income housing estate,” now called Evergreen Terrace.
The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro’s Books of Victoria.
My daily workplace is a magnificent former bank building. The Edwardian-era former Royal Bank of Canada at 1108 Government St. was in terrible disrepair when purchased (against his banker’s advice) by Jim Munro in 1984. He returned the structure to its former glory, notably removing a suspended ceiling added as part of a modernizing renovation in the 1950s. Today, tapered pilasters and a cast-plaster coffer ceiling attract tourists from around the globe eager to visit a bookstore co-founded in 1963 by future Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Designed in 1909 by local architect Thomas Hooper as a Temple Bank in the Classical Revival style, with an all-granite facade including two impressive Doric columns, Munro’s Books remains a temple to a commerce less pecuniary than literary.
Exhibition Building, Willows Fairgrounds, Oak Bay (Victoria) (BCArchives H-02390)
The one that got away:
In 1899, a grand exhibition hall with an adjacent horse racing track was built on farmland in Oak Bay. The roof stood 56 feet above the ground with central octagonal towers reaching to a height of 100 feet. An open cupola topped the impressive building, which dominated the Willows Fairgrounds like a manor house amid verdant lawns.
Among the visitors to the exhibition hall, which boasted 20,000 square feet of floor space surrounded by galleries, was the future King George V.
The building and the streetcar connection, that now extended from Royal Jubilee Hospital to the fairgrounds, spurred the growth of Oak Bay, which incorporated as a municipality in 1906. Alas, the building was destroyed by fire in 1907, to be replaced by a warehouse structure of little merit. The site of the fairgrounds was subdivided into housing after the Second World War with 10 acres reserved for Carnarvon Park.
Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Eve Lazarus is a journalist, author and blogger who has a passion for unconventional history and a fascination with murder. She is the author of Cold Case Vancouver.
Favourite Building:
Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in 1913, and according to a story built the cottage “nail by nail” with the help of “one old carpenter.” After a bit of digging it turns out the carpenter was Thomas Cattarall, who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and worked on Hatley Castle. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the little cottage. Terry Tallentire stepped in, paid the city $1.00, spent another $4,000 to move it to her house, and it now lives behind a Samuel Maclure designed house on Foul Bay Road. (The full story is in Sensational Victoria).
The Wilson mansion at 730 Burdett Avenue, Victoria
The one that got away:
There are many reasons why Victoria should have saved the Wilson Mansion, but perhaps the best one is because its social history is just so eccentric. There’s the overprotective father who surrounded it with high walls, Jane, the daughter who kept exotic birds in the attic and owned a 100 pairs of white gloves. And there’s the beneficiary of her will in 1949—Louis, a macaw parrot from South America, who was then in his eighties. Jane named Wah Wong, the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper, and the terms of the will stated that the property could not be sold while the birds were still alive. The feathered tenants managed to stave off developers until 1966, when it was bulldozed to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel.
Never heard of Manson’s Deep? You’re not alone. It’s one of the deepest points in Howe Sound just off Point Atkinson. It’s also been a burial ground for old sailors since 1941.
Manson’s Deep gets its name from Captain Thomas Manson who came to Vancouver from Scotland in 1892.
Captain Manson. From Westcoast Mariner, 2000
According to an article by Kellsie McLeod*, Manson, himself was buried there in 1946. Part of the service, she writes was the recital of a poem: “Now again, ‘Old Cap,’ you’re with your first love, with the sea. We hear you shout, ‘Stand by and tack, when the Shetland Isles you see.”
Kellsie’s own husband, Ernie McLeod, had his ashes scattered from a tug into Manson’s Deep in 1977. Ernie was a rum runner and appears in Sensational Vancouver “built on rum,” chapter as well as in the ghost chapter because the house that he and Kellsie lived in on Glen Drive was haunted.
Manson’s House. Photo courtesy the Vancouver Heritage Foundation and to Martin Knowles Photo/Media
You may even catch the ghost of Captain Manson on the annual Vancouver Heritage House Tour Sunday. The West 2nd Avenue house is one of nine houses that you’ll be able to get inside. Others include craftsman houses in Kerrisdale and Kitsilano, a Tudor in South Granville, and WilMar on Southwest Marine Drive. WilMar, a 9,000 square-foot 1925 house on a two-acre lot was in the news recently because of redevelopment plans that will hopefully save the old mansion from demolition.
WilMar, 2050 SW Marine Drive. Photo courtesy Heritage Vancouver
If Art Moderne is more to your taste, the Vancouver Heritage Foundation has you covered. You can get a peek inside the Barber Residence—that’s the big white concrete house that sits up on the West 10th Avenue hill near Highbury in Point Grey.
Apparently there is some dispute as to who designed this futuristic looking house (remember this was 1936). My money is on Ross Lort, a super talented architect who is featured in At Home with History. At one point Lort worked with Samuel Maclure, and he designed Maxine’s on Bidwell, G.F. Strong building on Laurel, the Park Lane Apartments on Chilco and Casa Mia on Southwest Marine Drive.
Barber Residence on West 10th. Vancouver Sun photo, 2011
If you need to buy tickets on Sunday, they are $42 or $31.50 with student ID. You can pick them up after 9:00 a.m. at the information booths at 3118 Alberta Street and 2744 Dunbar. These are also two of the tour houses.
It’s hard to imagine today, but from the 1930s until the mid 1950s there were three daily newspapers—the Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Vancouver News-Herald operating in Vancouver—all independents fighting for market share in a population of less than 350,000.
The Vancouver News-Herald called itself “Western Canada’s Largest Morning Herald.” When it was founded in 1933 the Herald had a circulation of 10,000. Always the underdog, it was a feisty paper, well laid-out, and staffed with well-known newspaper people such as Pierre Berton, the paper’s city editor when he was just twenty-one, Barry Broadfoot, and Himie Koshevoy, who became managing editor at the Vancouver Sun. In those early years, reporters sat on orange crates and shared typewriters.
Vancouver News-Herald Staff in 1942 CVA 1184-1232
The Herald was located at 426 Homer Street for most of its existence, which is interesting because, although horribly disfigured, parts of the building still exist. It’s one of the oldest in the city. The building was designed by Samuel Maclure and Richard Sharp in 1892 for the Vancouver World—another independent owned by serial mayor L.D. Taylor. The World built what’s now the Sun Tower on Pender and Beatty Streets, and left its former digs to a series of occupants that included a real estate company, a bowling alley, printing presses and the Army and Navy Vet Association before becoming the Herald’s home in 1935.
The Herald remained on Homer for the next two decades, and in 1954 it moved to a larger building on West Georgia (where the Shangri-La Vancouver now sits). Shortly after, it went out of business.
The Homer Street building is looking a lot worse for wear these days and its current tenant is the Platinum Club, which advertises “erotic” and “safe and discreet” services from “sexy escorts.” There’s more information about the building and a great then and now picture at Changing Vancouver.
A couple of weeks ago my friend Tom Carter and I climbed to the top of the Sun Tower, one of my favourite buildings in Vancouver.
It’s also one of our most familiar landmarks, and at one time the tallest building in the British Empire when mayor, L.D. Taylor had it built over a century ago to house his newspaper—the Vancouver World.
The building has a unique L shape with eight stories that runs along West Pender and Beatty Streets, topped by a nine-storey tower, capped by a Beaux-arts dome and cupola.
View from the Cupola:
We took the lift to the 17th floor, climbed up a couple of flights of stairs into the dome, and then up a ladder to the cupola. Even with all the high-rises that have popped up around to overshadow it, the view from the cupola is breathtaking.
The building’s elevator machinery is housed inside the dome. Eve Lazarus photo
One of the biggest misconceptions about the Sun Tower is its copper roof. Turns out it’s not copper at all, just concrete painted green.
Sculptures by Charles Marega:
Designed by William Tuff Whiteway in 1911, details include a marble staircase and nine topless maidens created by Charles Marega, who also sculpted the two lions at the Stanley Park end of the Lions Gate Bridge, the George Vancouver statue at City Hall and the Joe Fortes Memorial Fountain at English Bay. The “caryatids” support a cornice line halfway up the building, and so shocked the city’s elite they hindered leasing of the building.
View from the Cupola – Eve Lazarus photo 2013
LD Taylor still holds the record as the most elected mayor in the City of Vancouver. He won nine elections, lost seven, and served eight terms between 1910 and 1934. He looks like a nerdy little man in his trademark red tie and owlish glasses, but he was actually a flamboyant risk taker. In 1905, he bought the World, one of four daily newspapers in Vancouver, from Sara McLagan, the sister of noted architect Samuel Maclure, and rode the real estate boom so that The World carried the most display advertising of any daily in North America.
The newspaper was a huge success for LD, but his mega building couldn’t withstand the crash of 1913 and LD sold after only three years.
Undated postcard showing what looks like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders?
The Human Fly:
In 1918, the building attracted masses to watch Harry Gardiner “the human fly” scale the tower and climb through one of the top floor windows.
For a time the building was owned by Bekins, a Seattle-based moving company, and in 1937, became home to the Vancouver Sun for the next three decades. Laura Anderson tells me that Artists E.J. Hughes, Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher once had a studio in the tower, and Sun photographers set up a lair in the dome, but today, instead of the clattering of typewriters in the offices and the rumbling of presses, the basement holds a sleek new gym.
