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By Hadani Ditmars
It’s Arthur Erickson season in Vancouver. In a rare double play, two houses designed by the city’s patron saint of modernism are up for sale. The homes are both in bucolic West Vancouver, one of Canada’s richest postal codes and a secret treasure trove of mid-century West Coast gems. With many local properties under threat due to lax heritage laws, the West Vancouver Art Museum has long championed their preservation with an annual homes tour—which was canceled this year due to COVID-19.
But one of the homes originally planned for this year’s tour—the 1966 Fuldauer Residence, designed by Erickson with then partner Geoffrey Massey—will soon be available for viewing once it officially hits the market in August.
An archival image of West Vancouver’s Fuldauer Residence by Erickson/Massey Architects from 1966.
Conceived as a kind of woodsy Shinto shrine, the house has a colorful past, with residents ranging from a race car magnate to a wheeler-dealer on the Vancouver Stock Exchange to the current owners from mainland China, according to a previous owner. But with its early ’70s extension and subsequent ’80s and ’90s interventions—including the addition of a pool and a giant palm tree—it has been significantly altered. The price has yet to be determined, but it last sold in 2016 for $6 million in Canadian dollars ($4,465,000 USD).The other Erickson home has already hit the market—listed recently for $3,188,000 in Canadian dollars ($2,382,760 USD). The property dates from 1981 and was a “model home” for Montiverdi Estates–a unique community of 20 detached dwellings in a parklike setting within an old growth forest. Some four decades after it was built, the Erickson home remains true to the architect’s original intent partly because of a covenant protecting the 20 homes from exterior renovations and partly because it was acquired by an architect and engineer couple who updated and preserved it.
“It’s like living in a tree house,” says owner and designer Desiree LaCas of the mainly glass and cedar six-bedroom residence literally built around existing conifers. Composed of three separate structures, the residence cascades down the steeply graded site with a sense of ceremonial procession. Spanning 4,400 square feet, it’s the largest of Montiverdi’s 20 homes and features floor-to-ceiling Pacific Ocean views.
The living room inside the Erickson-designed home at Montiverdi Estates.
The home is an architectural triumph, with a street-level garage cantilevered over a cliff, a glass wall looking out onto the ocean and forest, and an adjacent photography studio for owner Brian LaCas. A platform leads to a 400-square-foot guesthouse with a giant old-growth fir towering straight through its deck. A cedar stairway ascends to the main entrance, opening up onto the living space, kitchen, and family areas. Everywhere the eye is drawn to the surrounding forest—even the powder room has a glass ceiling where one can gaze up at a canopy of trees. A light-filled stairwell leads to a second level with bedrooms, and the ground floor features a deck with an onsen-style hot tub flanked by natural bedrock. The home also retains its original 21 skylights along its spine.
When the couple first moved in, says Desiree LaCas, the ’80s-style mirrored walls created blinding daylight. “There were mirrors everywhere,” LaCas recounts. “In the living room, the bathroom, the shower—I called it the narcissist’s house.” The LaCases replaced the mirrors with limestone facing and shoji screens. Bathrooms were streamlined and opened up, and bamboo flooring was introduced throughout the home. The original cedar was stained in sage to match the moss on the trees, and a traditional Japanese garden was planted, augmenting Erickson collaborator Cornelia Oberlander’s ferns and Himalayan rhododendrons.
A tree trunk punctuates Arthur Erickson’s indoor-outdoor architecture.
The owners continued Erickson’s technique of wabi-sabi—juxtaposing the coarse and the refined – not just with rough-hewn cedar and glass but also introducing new materials, like seagrass walls contrasted with soft wool Berber carpeting on the bedroom level. The effect hearkened back to Erickson’s original 1960s-era Japanese-influenced design.
The LaCases, who were honored by the Arthur Erickson Foundation for their work, will be sad to leave their Zen abode. “Erickson was a genius when it came to siting,” says Desiree. “Living here is like being at one with the landscape.”
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