Switzer House

Switzer House (1960-1971)

by Eve Lazarus on February 25, 2017

The Switzer house of West Vancouver was designed one Sunday, painted pink, and received attention from all over the world.

North Shore News, August 19, 1994. Courtesy West Vancouver Museum.

840 Mathers:

In 1960, the Taylor Way interchange on the Upper Levels Highway looked radically different than it does today. That year, local builder Henry Switzer placed his shocking pink house at 840 Mathers Avenue at the end of 9^th Street. The futuristic-looking house quickly became a North Shore landmark, and locals called it the helicopter house, the airplane house, and the Jetson’s house because it appeared to have wings.

Even though the house was only there for eleven years, it seems to have resonated with everyone who saw it.

Henry Switzer house — 840 Mathers Avenue, West Vancouver. ca. 1970 courtesy Daryl Parsons

“I lived on the same street as the Switzer house,” recalls John Oberhoffner. “I was eight and I cried when they tore it down.”

Alice Brock says that she and her four brothers called it “the Windmill House” because each wing reminded them of the blade of a windmill. “We would always look for the house when we were driving on the Upper Levels in our ’54 Chev Bel-Air,” she says.

Experiment:

The house was a radical experiment designed to be built on a rocky building site or steep slope. Switzer designed it one Sunday afternoon, and it attracted attention from all over the world.

The Switzer house shared many of the elements of Googie architecture, a southern Californian movement born out of the car culture of the 1950s and influenced by the space race. Googie was popular among roadside motels, coffee shops and gas stations and typically featured swooping rooflines, brightly coloured geometric shapes, glass, steel and neon.

“The Switzer house was unusual in design with four elevated cantilevers supported by a central column where the front entrance was located,” says Kiriko Watanabe, curator at the West Vancouver Museum.

It was also the second house of its type that Switzer designed. The first predates it by four years, and although renovated, still exists on Inglewood Avenue in Sentinel Hill.

Watanabe organized a West Coast Modern house tour this summer featuring the first Switzer House. “It isn’t elevated like the second one, but the roof line is raised in the middle part of the house and the overall shape looks like open wings,” she says. “It’s very symmetrical when you look at the house from the distance.”

Ironically, the house that was built on car culture was expropriated and then demolished in 1971 to make way for the widening of the Upper Levels Highway.

Top photo: North Shore News, August 19, 1994. Courtesy West Vancouver Museum.

Tags Henry Switzer, Switzer House, West Vancouver Museum

Five Eccentric B.C. Houses

by Eve Lazarus on April 18, 2015

Here are five of my favourite eccentric BC houses that still stand (or did at the time of research).

1. The Hobbit House(s)

There are two in Vancouver and one in West Van designed by Ross Lort in the early 40s, and against all odds, all survive. Hobbit house at King Edward and Cambie is now part of a town house development. The future looked shaky for The Hobbit House on West Broadway when it sold to a developer six years ago, but instead of razing the place, James Curtis did a deal with the City where he sunk close to a million dollars into renovating the house, designated it, and in return was allowed to subdivide and build a second house on the large lot.

2. The Rotating House

Barney Oldfield (1913-1978) was a mechanical genius and inventor. In 1969 he built a 12-sided rotating house out of steel on the Old West Saanich Road on Vancouver Island. This house rotates at a complete 360 degrees, can spin at two speeds and reverse. His other inventions include a specialized 24-ton logging truck, bulldozer blades and a custom-built aerodynamic car he built in 1940 called “the spirit of tomorrow.” When I took this photo in 2010, the house was still in the Oldfield family, but renters had hooked up a television in a way that interfered with the houses mechanics and stopped it from turning.

3. Chuck Currie’s Polka Dotted house

Chuck Currie moved here in 1989 and painted his house three years later — 2105 East 3rd Avenue

Technically, the only thing that’s eccentric about Chef Chuck Currie’s house is the paint job. But it’s so startling that it rates a spot on this list. Chuck bought the house at 3^rd and Lakewood in 1989 and painted it white with huge red polka dots a few years later. It was a joke, he says. 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 spruce up his neighbourhood.

4. The Steel House

When I wrote about this house in December 2010, Shaun Torontow, its designer and owner had it for sale. I suspect he still does. At 35 feet long and three levels, the house comes in at just over 1,000 square feet. And at just nine feet wide, it’s one of the skinniest houses in Canada (The Sam Kee building in Vancouver’s Chinatown holds the record at just under five feet). Shaun, an artist and welder, built his house out of steel and outfitted it with steel furniture, a bathroom that looks like a laboratory and an elevator to an underground pool.

5. Paul Merrick’s Tree House

Architect Paul Merrick designed this West Vancouver for his family in 1974. The original structure was less than 900 sq.ft. Later Merrick added a major addition incorporating cedar stone and glass and recycled building materials. There are soaring ceilings, multiple levels and exterior decks that blur the indoors with the outdoors. Because it’s built on a rocky promontory and nestled within private forest much of the house has the feel of living in a tree canopy. The current owner describes it as “part tree house, part Winnie the Pooh.”

“Living in this house is a lifestyle, it is your life and it becomes who you are,” she told me for my chapter about West Coast architects in Sensational Vancouver.

Tags 210 East 3rd, 3112 Steel Street, 5321 Old West Saanich Road, Barney Oldfield, Chuck Currie, Hobbit House, James Curtis, Paul Merrick, Shaun Torontow, Switzer House

The Switzer House of West Vancouver (1960-1971)

by Eve Lazarus on March 28, 2015

The Switzer House (1960-1971) — The Switzer House of West Vancouver

Back in September 2013 I blogged about a Fred Hollingsworth designed house in North Vancouver that was sold, torn down and soon after flipped for land value that was more than the original house. Chris left a comment asking me if I could find a photo of another North Shore landmark, a futuristic-looking house that was painted a “shocking pink” and looked like a spaceship. “Ideas Brewing” added that he or she remember it as “the airplane house” on Taylor Way.

Wow, a bright pink flying house – what’s not to love about this!

And, now I understand why the house left such an imprint in the memories of people who grew up on the North Shore.

The Switzer house was built in 1960 at 840 Mathers near Taylor Way.

The house was the first of its kind in North America, a radical experiment that was designed to be built on a rocky building site or steep slope. The house was designed one Sunday by Henry “Curly” Switzer and attracted attention from all over the world.

According to an article in the West Vancouver Museum News (2007), it was adapted from a California style called “Googie,” born out of the car culture of the 1950s and ‘60s and influenced by the space race (and likely the Jetsons).

According to the article: “Structures that appear to float, swooping rooflines and otherwise futuristic shapes used in the construction and design of buildings of the time illustrated the promise new technology could make for a better and more progressive tomorrow.”

In 1994, Dorothy Foster, a North Shore News columnist wrote that the house had a circular staircase leading to the two bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, and two bathrooms that were on the wings, just off the central foyer—which also held the fireplace. A special plastic dome was designed for a skylight and the base of the centre cement support measured 17 feet wide.

Ironically, the house that was built on car culture was demolished in 1971 to make way for an extension to the Upper Levels Highway.

*Special thanks to the librarians at the West Vancouver Memorial Library and the West Vancouver Museum and Archives.

For more posts see: Our Missing Heritage

Tags 840 Mathers Avenue, Dorothy Foster, Googie, Henry Switzer, Switzer House, West Vancouver Memorial Library, West Vancouver Museum and Archives

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