In Arthur Erickson's Smith residence, modernity is rustic. Massive fir beams support a glass-walled living room that bridges over the entrance to an open-air central courtyard.
Gordon Smith knows landscapes. As one of the most prominent Canadian painters of his generation, the 84-year-old has a reputation for not-always-easy abstract expressionist depictions of the wilds near his British Columbia home. So it's fitting that his house, designed by Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey in 1964, be both in the forest and of the forest, yet still a work of art
Erickson and Smith were friends with mutual interests: European high modern design, abstract expressionism, and the new regional identity being forged in the Pacific Northwest. In 1953, Gordon and his wife, Marion, gave Erickson his first residential commission--a painting studio surrounded by living quarters. But as their Vancouver neighborhood grew throughout the '50s, the Smiths sought greater seclusion. They found it near Lighthouse Provincial Park in West Vancouver, on a wooded promontory overlooking the Straight of Georgia.
The second time around, the Smiths offered Erickson no brief. "They said, 'You know what we want,'" the architect recalls. "Gordon being a painter and Marion being a weaver, this was the one opportunity where I could use rough timber, because they'd both be interested in texture and not so fussy about things like splinters."
The massive Douglas fir beams may be rough, but the house is not rustic. Erickson arranged the building as a spiral of boxes around a courtyard, with each wing stepping up from the last. A sky-lit white studio--the only room not finished in wood--anchors one corner of the house, while the living room bridges a cleft in the site's solid granite, rising up to get the view. Both there and in the bedroom, huge expanses of glass define the wall, opening the house to the landscape, their smoothness contrasting with the roughness of the wood. The central courtyard serves a similar function, both confronting and illuminating the forest--Erickson once called it "an architectural reiteration of the forest clearing."
The house has been both home and studio to the Smiths for almost 40 years. "It's a very genuine house," Gordon says. "There's nothing pretentious about it. It's just simple post and beam, mostly all windows, looking out onto the park, onto the sea. It is the most honest of houses."
