"Vancouver Special" Christmas Ornament
The “Vancouver Special,” once the most reviled house design in the city, is now feeling a resurgence of love in Vancouver’s pop culture. My Vancouver Special Christmas ornament – with its low-pitched roof, simple metal balcony, and the classic variegated orange brick – is a miniature composite of the thousands of these houses in my East Van neighbourhood.
The “Vancouver Special,” once the most reviled house design in the city, is now feeling a resurgence of love in Vancouver’s pop culture. My Vancouver Special Christmas ornament – with its low-pitched roof, simple metal balcony, and the classic variegated orange brick – is a miniature composite of the thousands of these houses in my East Van neighbourhood.
The “Vancouver Special,” once the most reviled house design in the city, is now feeling a resurgence of love in Vancouver’s pop culture. My Vancouver Special Christmas ornament – with its low-pitched roof, simple metal balcony, and the classic variegated orange brick – is a miniature composite of the thousands of these houses in my East Van neighbourhood.
The simple, boxy house design of the Vancouver Special was created in the 1960s by draftsman Larry Cudney to provide a low-cost option for family homes. They were big and not particularly pretty – but they were practical and quick to build, so they proliferated. It’s estimated there were about 10,000 built, predominantly in Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise and Marpole communities.
What’s special about this ornament? (Well… everything!)
The second storey of my miniature Vancouver Special is painted in the typical warm white stucco colour, while the first story is a 1970s burnt sienna. Windows and the sliding glass doors are outlined in silver paint, nodding to the aluminum window frames. The garage diverges slightly from the classic Vancouver Special to make it easier to create in blown glass. The brick-look on the front facade and on the resin chimney is achieved with a decal I designed. To give the ornament a little Christmas flair, the roof is sprinkled with “snow” and there’s a tiny green wreath painted on the front door. Most of all, it’s just sooooooo Vancouver!
Size: 3” x 2” x 2” (7.5 cm x 5 cm x 5 cm)
Learn more about Larry Cudney’s motivation for designing the once-maligned-and-now-beloved Vancouver Special in this fantastic article, “His ‘Revenge’ on Architects Was the Vancouver Special,” in the Tyee.
In this CBC video, A ‘Special’ Solution to the Housing Crisis, you’ll find out how the Vancouver Special exploited a loophole in the building code of the day and how and why that led to thousands of them being built.
