3789 Renovation
Complete
Renovation
Vancouver, British Columbia
2018 – 2023
This renovation carefully restored and strengthened a 115-year-old house, undoing many nonfunctionaladditions and awkward previous alterations. The building was originally a rooming house before transitioning to a community hospital in Vancouver’s Mt. Pleasant when the area was surrounded by farmland on the city's edge.
The dilapidated house was disconnected and lifted from its existing crumbling base, allowing a new code-conforming reinforced concrete foundation to be built underneath. After it was lowered, the existing wood-framed structure was retained and seismically reinforced with an exposed steel frame and bent steel stair. The steel structure’s apparent indifference to interior spaces and spatial demarcations results from the existing house’s joists and beam locations. Preserving them in place meant the steel was not always in ideal locations. Still, this strategy highlights that the project is a renovation and shows where the interior walls used to be, so the house’s original plan and proportions live on like a map on the ceiling. A new central stair of the same steal was rebuilt in the exact location as the original, modernizing the symmetry and planning of this historic building. Instead of feeling industrial, the steel gives the interior a more casual character than the exterior suggests.