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. Trained as a painter, not an architect, the former head of the Fine Arts department at UBC is most fondly recalled for his vibrant public murals and mosaics (most notably for the BC Electric building and the Imperial Bank of Commerce). 

But Binnings’ greatest legacy is arguably his odd jewel-box of a house, which  appears to have almost no right angles, requiring every corner to be less an example of architecture than a sort of custom-built decorative object one might live in. 

Here is an exterior view, from the garden (note the fashionable Japanese influence, and the odd irregularity of the windows).  

Customary view

   Here is the lovely front hall, from the entrance, with a view to one of Binnings lively murals, and a row of very Japanese influenced built-in cupboards.  

Customary style

 The livingroom, with its rustic fireplace wall of locally hewn Squamish granite, and contemporary Scandesign furnishings,  is perfectly preserved.   

BC Binnings lived here

 Absolutely everything in the house is oddly one-of-a-kind and custom-designed, including this brass reading attachment for the chair (and note the irregular, almost fan shape of the cement tiles in front of the fireplace).   

BC read here

  I did also love the perfectly fitted bathroom which looks as if it were designed for a ship, even though it was clearly updated (at least new tiles were added) some time in the 1970s. A set of high clerestory windows (which you can’t see–sorry) let in fresh air via a handsome (and charmingly nautical) bronze tasseled ring on a rope-like pull. 

BC bathed here

And then of course up a set of stairs off his bedroom, there is BC Binning’s light-filled and pegboard-appointed home studio–a charming reminder that Binnings was first and foremost an artist, and that his offbeat and amazingly progressive home was itself a work of art. 

BC worked here