This is by far one of my favourite houses in Vancouver. It’s in the municipality of West Vancouver, home to many of the best modern houses in the city, and it belongs to the novelist Douglas Coupland. He grew up in West Vancouver, not far from this house. Just as beautiful as this place is the house below it, a beautiful midcentury modern post and beam house designed by the architect Ron Thom. That’s the house Coupland actually lives in with his architect partner David Weir. Coupland is an artist and designer as well as a writer, and the house shown here serves as his gallery, guest house, and many other things. One of the reasons Coupland bought a second house is that the rate of demolition of midcentury modern houses in Vancouver is accelerating, and he wanted to preserve what was in his own back yard. Everything in the house is original – the flagstone floor, the carport, the railings. Lastly I’m sure it’s partly my visual OCD or some pyschedelic tendency, as well as of course their beauty, but his collections of shapes and objects are completely mesmerizing to me. Spools of thread, lego, polyhedra, modernist vases: I’m fixated. There are informative captions on the NYT blog – click on photos to go there (or link at bottom), and see my previous post on Coupland here. The fantastic photos are by Vancouver photographer Martin Tessler for the New York Times.

For NYT captions, click below:

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One last Vancouver house by Arthur Erickson. The house was built for and is still owned by the painterGordon Smith and his partner Marion. They have carefully maintained it over the years, in keeping with Erickson’s original design and intention. There’s an interesting article in Vancouver Magazine about the difference between their informed maintenance and the slow degradation of Erickson’s nearby Graham House, which was demolished in 2007. For another painter’s house in West Vancouver, see the BC Binning house here. All photos are from Arthur Erickson’s site and are by Ezra Stoller, John Fulker and Steven Zhen Wang.

Vancouver artist Arni Haraldsson, known for his photographic studies of modernist architecture and his research on Corbusier, produced these three photographs of the house of another artist, BC Binning, in 1994. Binning, a painter, built a beautiful little modernist house for himself and his wife in West Vancouver, B.C. in 1940. West Vancouver, for a set of complicated reasons, is home to most of the Vancouver area’s best residential modernism. This is a beautiful, functional house; see more photos of it here. Haraldsson’s works appear here courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.  ”Entrance with Exterior Mural, B.C. Binning House (1940), West Vancouver, Bert Binning, Architect”, 1994, details here. “Terrace Doors, B.C. Binning House (1940), West Vancouver, Bert Binning, Architect” can be seen here. And “Picture Gallery, B.C. Binning House (1940), West Vancouver, Bert Binning, Architect” is here. 

The photo above of Binning in his home studio is from an article on the Binning house in canadianarchitect.com and the whole article is worth reading. “Surrounded by Paintbrushes, Canvas and Other Tools of His Trade, Artist B.C. Binning Is Seated in His Home Studio in This Photograph From 1950.”