BC Modern

BC Binnings house, now a modernist museum

 One of the treats of our recent visit to the West coast was a visit to  BC (Bertram Charles) Binnings house in West Vancouver. 

From the ’50s through the ’70s, BC, along with his friends and contemporaries Arthur Erickson and Richard Neutra, was one of the voices of modernism on the Pacific (presumably a rather lonely role, particularly in Anglophile Vancouver at the time), and his pioneering 1941 bungalow–now a museum– is a perfect expression of the early Modern West Coast spirit. Continue reading…

Art of the written word

Changeroom for bookworms

I don’t know about you, but I have stumbled upon so much book art lately. And I’m not just talking about arty looking books (although the newly re-designed Random House Vintage classics are looking awfully fetching these days), but art made with books, like this cool silo built  from a stack of paperbacks that functions as the changeroom in the supremely chic LynnSteven boutique in Vancouver’s Gastown. Continue reading…

Urban quandary

Beautiful, but urban?

Blissfully laid back, with its beaches and bridges and absurdly bucolic geographical setting, Vancouver is one town that seems to be oddly insecure about its urbanity. Continue reading…

The ‘W’ is for the Winds of change

Sign of the Times

Since 1903, the old Woodward’s building at 108  West Cordova has been a landmark of downtown Vancouver–first, as the city’s premier department store, and then, when the downtown Eastside crumbled into a seedy strip of bombed-out shells populated by the bedraggled and desperate around it–ground-zero for the city’s many cracked-out junkies.  

Now as the neighbourhood around Woodward’s rapidly becomes the chicest place in town to shop (at cool indie boutiques), dine (at artisanal charcuterie places in still-scary alleyways), and live (in “loft-style condos), the ‘W” is back in business. Continue reading…

A sky full of lanterns

The birthday boy

My son Philip is a genius. Every year we have a party for his birthday on the beach at Lake Huron. It’s always a gorgeous, moon-lit night in the dunes and we gather with friends and build a bonfire.  Just to make it extra insane, we like to pick a broad theme, which also involves highly improvised costumes and a  beach-friendly menu. Continue reading…