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VANCOUVER — I grew up on the Prairies, in Saskatchewan and Alberta, but the flatlands never really had traction in my imagination. From the age of seven, I'd importune relatives on the West Coast to take me in for the summer holidays. Those days, all I wanted was to feel beach sand underfoot. Today, as I look out at a Vancouver socked in steel-grey rain clouds, it seems a devil's bargain.
This is my first column for The Globe and Mail, so my editor suggested that, by way of introducing myself, I talk about a home that exemplifies West Coast design.
I was immediately worried. It's something like being asked to name a starlet who epitomizes Hollywood. You could point to Marilyn Monroe, who was of course a paragon of beauty, glamour and sensuality. But she was also, in her way, a sad, inadequate and avoidable cliché.
The Marilyn Monroe of West Coast design is a post-and-beam cedar home with soaring ceilings, fir-clad windows, slate floors and a granite fireplace — all located on a forested bluff overlooking the ocean, where from behind a cup of Lemon Zinger you can watch the sun set over tankers and seine boats plying the Pacific. But to focus on stereotypes is to miss a great deal of worthy detail.
Kelly Deck is the director of Kelly Deck Design, based in Vancouver, and the host of Take it Outside on HGTV. This is her first column in The Globe and Mail
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In Vancouver architecture, for instance, that means the work of the firm Battersby Howat, whose modern concrete homes are unapologetically boxy. Instead of blending into the landscape, as is often prescribed on the coast, their structures jut out defiantly, creating a discord as intriguing as it is jarring.
Then there are the craftsman-style homes, whose sloping roofs, cedar shakes, and front porches hold great nostalgic appeal here, although there's little uniquely West Coast about them. The homes' origins are in the British (and then the American) arts and crafts movement, although local builders and architects are riffing interestingly on the classic design with signatures such as exposed cedar shake and white trim around black doors.
It's a mixed bag out here in the West, for sure. But if our designs aren't of a piece, at least I can point to three unique and immutable factors that give rise to the many variations we see.
The first is the landscape. The product of the grinding and buckling of tectonic plates and crashing of water, there is nothing gentle about the West Coast. It's a vista of violence, not of quietude and soft curve. Our topography is domineering, and, not surprisingly, everything in design orients itself toward the view.
The result is that a home's interior must be understated; it must make an effort to coexist with rather than confront the tumult of the view outside. For me, this means drawing on the colour palette of the surrounding landscape — its warm greys, dark browns and dirty greens, its ivories and myriad blues, rendered in limestone, concrete, walnut and oak.
A designer preserves the spirit of non-contention by sticking to tailored, simple forms. Bigger pieces such as sofas and tables make a statement with strong lines, enabling the curvature of accent pieces and chairs to soften the feel. I prefer to use things made from local materials and furnishings, wall pieces or sculptures by North Vancouver artist Brent Comber are my favourites. These originals, rendered in reclaimed lumber, speak to a distinctly West Coast ethic of refining the raw and elemental — but only slightly.
The second influence on design here is the weather. With our rain and mild winters, designers feel less compelled to define a rigid boundary as a bulwark between the living space and the out-of-doors.
The world beyond our window is always lush and green, and so we're freer to experiment with living spaces that fuse the natural and the domestic. One common way is stone floors that run seamlessly from interior to exterior, creating dining rooms that spill out to patios that give on to gardens.
The winter isn't as harsh for Vancouverites as it is for Winnipeggers or Torontonians, but the wet, in its way, can be as formidable an opponent as the cold. When the January damp sets into your bones, it stays there for weeks. So while West Coasters may not demand that their domiciles be bunkers from the elements, they require interiors that are tactile, sensuous and cozy.
From a design remove, this means liberal use of textured fabrics, window finishes, and bedding in inviting wools, linens and velvets.
The third influence on West Coast design is so pervasive it almost escapes notice: our cool grey light. It's the end of summer now, and our season of complaint about shortening days is just beginning. But it's not so much the amount of light we receive that designers need to correct for, it's more the tone and colour.
One mistake I see too often, even in Vancouver's most prestigious neighbourhoods, is bold, vibrant colours in interior and exterior applications — homes smeared in terracotta, ochre and canary yellow. These Mediterranean-inspired villas, which look wonderful in the penetrating glare of strong sun, look in Vancouver like some displaced daydream of a hotter climate. Our West Coast light is inhospitable to the lustre of deep colours — the flat grey of our atmosphere makes them look sickly and forlorn.
That's not to say colour has no place here, only that it be used subtly. Grey, brown and green form the foundation of the our palette, but there is a wide range of corals, purples, oranges and blues with which to accent and adorn.
I'm glad to have the opportunity to be your correspondent on the West Coast, and I'm excited to set to work, interrogating the people and exploring the ideas that inform design in this part of the world. I hope you'll check in from week to week, to see how the conversation is developing.
Kelly Deck is the director of Kelly Deck Design, based in Vancouver, and the host of Take it Outside on HGTV.
