In 1981, when artist Chris Thom decided to build her dream house on Hornby Island, she made an intriguing choice of architect: her former husband, Ron Thom. This was no ordinary ex, though: He was one of the most important Canadian architects of the 20th century.
Chris and Ron had divorced 20 years earlier, at which point he moved from Vancouver to Toronto to make his national reputation with such landmark buildings as Massey College, Trent University, the Metro Toronto Zoo and Shaw Festival Theatre. Ron Thom died in 1986; Chris passed away last January – now, their four children have put the waterfront house on the market.
“Dad had offered to help her design the house and she accepted it, because by then they were friends,” recalls younger daughter Bronwen Thom McLeod. Her parents had first met in the early 1940s when they were both students at the Vancouver School of Art, and they shared a deep appreciation for art, craft, and nature. They discovered Hornby Island together in the late 1950s, while visiting the summer home of their former art teachers Grace Melvin and Charles Scott, who were both prominent figures in the West Coast cultural community.
After divorcing, Chris set her sights on eventually resettling on Hornby Island, while Ron remarried and raised a second family. By the time she was ready to build there two decades later, any bad feelings between them had largely evaporated. Their son, Robin Thom, acted as contractor, builder and landscaper. “Dad and Robin had originally worked as a team together, way back in the day, and now Mom was happy to see them working together again,” Bronwen says. Her father also appreciated the chance to be back on Hornby Island, a locale that remained one of his most cherished places throughout his life.
The house is modest, but with the essential Ron Thom characteristics: front entrance with a covered enclave, plenty of raw wood, built-in furniture and cabinetry, deep overhangs, and every window boasting a carefully calibrated view of the spectacular scenery outside. The building follows the slope of the lot and seems to grow organically out of the landscape. It nonetheless boasts much more zen-like simplicity than his complex award-winning houses in Vancouver and Toronto.
“It’s a shoebox plan, essentially,” says Robin – although a finely crafted shoebox, to be sure. Robin contributed his own skills and also helped source some signature materials, such as the home’s heavy oak doors, repurposed from a defunct Vancouver-based printing press.
Robin gleaned much of his design savvy by following his father around on job sites and attending the site inspections with him. Robin also attended the Vancouver School of Art, and inherited his parents’ creative bent, honing a first career as a landscaper and, more recently, a photographer. He remembers that his father was not the sort to give didactic lectures, but he gleaned much by Ron’s penchant for communicating in images. “Anything he couldn’t say in words, he would draw,” Robin recalls, “on a napkin, a piece of wood, the wall, whatever was around.”
The largest and most central room of the house, an expansive space with a jaw-dropping wide-angle view of the tree-framed ocean and stone shore, was Chris Thom’s huge art studio — “my playroom,” as she once described it to this reporter.
Although the house boasts just over 2,000 square feet and plenty of room to move around, work or play or relax, there is just one bedroom. “It was really designed just for Chris, with a small kitchen and big studio,” notes the home’s realtor, Donna Tuele of Coast Realty on Hornby Island. But, Tuele adds, the spatial arrangement is such that new owners can reconfigure the studio with its prime ocean view into whatever kind of space they want. With loads of natural daylight bathing shelves, cabinets, easels, worktables and nooks, the room seems ready for transformation by the next creative spirit. “The way the architect brought natural light coming in through the studio is brilliant,” says Tuele. “The skylights are not lined up in the usual linear way; they’re stragically placed over key working areas.”
The Chris Thom home is one of a diminishing number of Ron Thom houses on the West Coast. Several of Thom’s residential masterpieces have already fallen victim to real estate speculators and other buyers intent on razing them for something bigger and newer. The tear-down order has just been issued for a bungalow filled with Ron Thom’s trademark artisanal woodwork, on West Vancouver’s Ottawa Avenue. A few kilometres west of there, a gorgeous waterfront home on Erwin Drive – described by its realtor as a “well cared for … authentic Ron Thom beach house” is nonetheless being marketed as tear-down, with a price tag of $9.5-million and an exhortation to “build your 6,500-square-foot dream home.” Some of the losses may be inevitable, says architectural historian Don Luxton, but each Ron Thom house is significant by the very fact of Thom’s renown as one of the greatest Canadian architects of the 20th century. “Every one of these houses tells us something about the evolution of his career,” says Luxton. “We may not be able to save every house, but we should be careful to think about them and document them.”
The Hornby Island property is priced reasonably enough that the family is hoping it will find an appreciative buyer who will want to keep it and upgrade it. Listed at $929,000, the house has already drawn the attention of locals and mainlanders alike, including several architects entranced by its Ron Thom pedigree. A new owner would likely want to invest about $100,000 in upgrades, including a new roof and design adjustments to reconfigure it for their own lifestyles.
The property’s sandstone beach has become a repository of beautiful memories for all four of Chris and Ron’s children: as well as Bronwen and Robin, there was sister Sidney and brother Aaron. “We’d go down to the beach and look for sea urchins and chase bullheads, the tiny little fish that live in tide pools,” Sidney recalls. “Or we’d spend hours looking for petroglyphs. Properties like that just don’t exist any more.”
Chris Thom had paid $11,500 in 1964 for the originally 2.5-hectare waterfront property, later subdividing it into three separate acreages and keeping the middle one for her own house – it turned out to be a stupendous long-term investment. But 50 years ago, long before Hornby became a mainstream mecca for stressed-out Vancouverites, it was an audacious purchase. “She told me that she would lie in bed at night sweating, worried that she had paid too much,” says Sidney. “But she wanted the property that badly, and she knew what it would do for her life.”