South Granville House

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Photo © nigel capo

Architects: tang kawasaki studio

Location: 1680 65th Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Year: 2008

This single-detached home in South Vancouver was the result of a conversion of a typical 60's style two-storey speculative home known as a "vancouver special". It consisted of a complete interior gut-renovation, exterior face-lift and vertical extension of the second floor and roof structure of the existing house to further loft ground floor ceiling heights.

Our clients, faced with the liberation of now married children living abroad, were enthusiastic about the prospect of a luxuriously reductive sequence of new living spaces. A new waxed finish concrete floor with a radiant heating on system provides the primary texture in an expansive sunken living area. A custom commercial kitchen fulfills its adjacency and visual connection to the open loft without revealing its mechanics behind a high island wall. A series of offset pivot doors conceal the remaining components of the rigorously efficient professional kitchen and further obscure a canadian maple staircase to the house's private quarters above.

The exterior of the house, once covered in a combination of bright purple and "rockdash" stuccos - ubiquitous with the "vancouver specials" of the era - was replaced with a palette of rough sawn western red cedar, in a variety of applications, and mottled ochre stucco.