From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
If you read my blog regularly, you know that I’m a huge fan of West Coast Modern, and especially of Fred Hollingsworth, an amazing North Vancouver architect who died this year at age 98 after changing the face of architecture.
But it wasn’t until I was at the West Vancouver Museum this summer that I heard the story behind the Sky Bungalow. So instead of writing up a talk for my book launch on Thursday, I decided to go check out the house.
The amazing thing about this house, apart from the fact that it exists at all—is that it started life in a downtown parking lot.
In 1949, Eric Allan, a developer, came up with the idea of building a house in the Hudson Bay’s parking lot to promote the new Capilano Highlands subdivision. The Bay agreed, but only if the house took up no more than three parking spots. No problem, said Hollingworth. He perched the wooden house on beams and floated it over the cars. In a 2004 interview Hollingsworth said: “The space below is just as important as space above. The whole building belongs to the site, in an organic sense. It should look as if it grew there and is just as comfortable as the plants are.”
The Sky Bungalow was a huge hit. Thousands of people paid their 10 cents to tour the house—and the money was donated to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
The house sold and moved to its current address on Aintree Drive.
Not only does the Sky Bungalow still exist, but it is surrounded by contemporary bungalows that have stayed with the scale and the feel of the area. It was pouring today and nobody was out, but the whole street screams community, and it’s easy to imagine it filled with kids on nicer days.
The house is also just blocks away from the house that Hollingsworth designed for his own family in 1946. And, even though he became highly successful designing projects that ranged all the way to Nat Bosa’s West Vancouver waterfront mansion (ranked by Vancouver Magazine as the second most expensive property in BC in 2005) and the building that houses UBC’s Faculty of Law, he stayed in his Ridgeway Drive house all of his life.
For more about Fred Hollingworth see:
- The book: Living Spaces: The Architecture of Fred Thornton Hollingsworth
- My blog: Our Missing North Vancouver Heritage
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