The writer Douglas Coupland (“Generation X”), who has been interested in Canadiana for a long time, recently went about finding a classic 70s “builder’s special” house slated for demolition, filled it with objects constructed from the Canadian paraphernalia of his childhood, and then staged a party in it. He called the sprawling art installation “Canada House” and its eccentrically decorated rooms contained numerous sculptures assembled from items that only Canadians would really fully understand. Coupland’s Canadiana is not really the hunting lodge/maple syrup Canadiana of the East, but a specifically West Coast version referencing the ocean and all other things British Columbian. It’s a lesser known fact that Coupland had a career as an artist before he became a writer, graduating from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver where he grew up. Coupland’s interest in Canadiana, a lot of it quite odd, first appeared in his two books “Souvenir  of Canada.” The book and his “Canada House” installation spawned a recent film called Souvenir of Canada in which the entire process described above is documented. It’s a strange combination of dispassionate irony and deeply personal nostalgia. An interesting CBC review is here. These fantastic photos were shot by well-known Vancouver photographer Martin Tessler who has also shot covers for Metropolitan Home and many other shelter magazines. Photos, in order: fishing float lamps; whale vertebrae made from styrofoam jetsam; mussel shell midden; Haida button blanket.

Sometimes when I’ve seen too many chichi, precious, citified and finishy houses, too much shiny design, and everything around me just starts to look too estranged from the things it was made from, I want to see pictures of handbuilt houses. People can dismiss these as “hippie houses,” but the evident Japanese, Scandinavian and other architectural influences actually ally these buildings within a certain strand of modernism. In particular there’s plenty of crossover between westcoast modernism and the handbuilt house. This bedroom’s use of textiles, the wool blanket on the patterned bedspread, the coarse but pleasing textures, the architecturally bold beams and trusses, the skylight and the generally abundant light, the sense that the trees outside are part of the room – maybe it’s because my favourite aunt lived in a house like this when I was growing up, but to me this room is beautiful. Maybe not to everyone, but for me, well, you can almost smell the perfume of the wood in this room. This photo is from a great book from 1972 titled Handmade Houses. There are also two relatively new books on handbuilt houses by Lloyd Kahn, who has probably  documented more of these Pacific coast houses than anyone and used to be the shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. I’ll periodically feature examples of what I think are the most interesting of these buildings.