Spite Houses Archives

Chuck Currie moved here in 1989 and painted his house three years later — 2105 East 3rd Avenue, Eve Lazarus photo 2013

Spite Houses:

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Spite Houses and ran a picture of a lime green house painted with large purple dots. The back story was the owner had run afoul of the local heritage commission, was denied a building permit for a porch, and chose his colour scheme out of spite.

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John Belshaw tipped me off to a white house with red polka dots on the corner of East 3^rd and Lakewood, and thought it might have a similar story. I dropped by yesterday, took some photos, knocked on the door, and was astounded to find Chuck Currie, executive chef of White Spot Restaurants answer the door.

Chef Chuck Currie, Eve Lazarus photo, 2013

Chuck who has lived in the house since 1989, and painted the polka dots in 1992, says there’s no big story. A friend who owned a painting company went on holidays and came home to find that his friends had painted his house with purple polka dots. Chuck loved the idea and thought it was a great way to liven up his neighbourhood. The neighbourhood incidentally, is packed full of gorgeous old heritage houses.

chuck Currie's polka dotted house

He’s never had a single complaint:

“I still remember the first car that stopped and gaped. It was a cool fall day and the windows were closed but my friend John (the painter) and I could clearly see the driver say “HOLY SHIT. I had a sax quartet rehearsal here that Sunday and one of the musicians said he had been talking to a friend in Toronto who asked him, ‘Say, have you heard about that polka dot house in Vancouver?’ That was five days after we painted it!”

Chef Chuck, who can wrestle up a mean ravioli—he opened up the first Earls Restaurant in 1982—also plays and teaches saxophone and clarinet. He says the great thing about his house is that students find it easily. The other thing is he’s always coming home to find anonymous gifts on his doorstep—bowls, juice pitchers, coffee mugs—all with polka dots of course.

2105 East 3rd Avenue — The garage behind Chuck’s house. Eve Lazarus photo, 2013

A Spite house is a building “constructed or modified to irritate neighbours or other parties with land stakes. Spite houses often serve as obstructions, blocking out light or access to neighbouring buildings, or as flamboyant symbols of defiance. Because long-term occupation is at best a secondary consideration, spite houses frequently sport strange and impractical structures” Wikipedia.

148 and 150 West 10th Avenue built in 1907 — John Davis House, 150 West 10th Avenue

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Not a style of architecture:

When I first heard the term “Spite house” I thought it was a style of architecture named after its designer – you know “oh that’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house” or “an Arthur Erickson house” or a “John Spite house”—turns out it’s far more interesting.

A spite house is built to piss somebody off. It’s a permanent way to give city hall the finger, or have the last word with that neighbour who has the annoying dog.

Wikipedia lists 22 examples of spite houses. The oldest dates back to 1716, when a man upset by his small share of the family’s estate in Marblehead, Massachusetts built a house just tall enough to block the view of his two brothers’ houses.

In Toowoomba, Australia, an owner who lost an appeal to put an extra storey on his house, adorned it with various pig apparel including nose and tail. Although the owner has since moved on, the house is known as The Pig House.

More recently, Stan Pike’s plan to build a rounded porch on the house he owned in Georgia was thwarted by the local Historical Preservation Commission. In retaliation, Sam painted the house a bright green with purple dots.

Vancouver’s Spite House:

Vancouver’s 1913 Sam Kee Building is #19 on Wikipedia’s spite list, and has the distinction of being the thinnest commercial building in the world (Guinness Book of Records and Ripley’s Believe it or Not!) The Sam Kee Company was one of the wealthiest businesses in the early 1900s owned by Chang Toy. Originally Chang Toy owned a standard 30-foot lot at the West Pender site, but when a huge chunk of it was expropriated by the City of Vancouver, he had this structure built with the ground floor measuring just under five feet.

Spite Houses — Corner view of the Sam Kee Building in Vancouver’s Chinatown, which holds the Guinness World Record for “narrowest commercial building in the world”. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

John Davis House:

It hasn’t made any list as yet, but Mount Pleasant has its own Spite House. John Davis and his family started buying up and renovating dilapidated Queen Anne and Edwardian houses along the 100-block west 10^th back in the early 1970s. “Nobody gave a damn about any of it at that time,” says John. “We were seen to be the lunatic fringe.”

The full story of the Davis’ houses is in At Home with History, but my favourite story is the one about the two Edwardians at 148 and 150 West 10^th that intentionally touch each other. A neighbour and descendant of one of the original families told John that it was the result of a feud. Two women came over from England and had the house at 150 built right on the property line. “That didn’t offend the building code in 1907, if they even had such a thing, but it infuriated the owner of the property at 148 and he built his house the next year right up against their house in order to block the view out of the bay window on the side of 150, which he certainly achieved—I can attest to that.”

See Wikipedia for more examples of spite houses.

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