My Design Point Of View

Saving the Trees

My first hands-on experience with a significantly large Douglas Fir was trying to buck it up for firewood using a double-handled, two-man crosscut saw. I was twelve. The man on the other handle was my stepfather. Before this encounter with old growth forests of British Columbia he had been a lingerie salesman in England. The logging operation didn't last long but I give him credit for trying. (Other details of his life and mine can be found in the Ardmore House & I , and my novel, The Charlatan Variations.)

The fallen giant was about eight feet in diameter at its stump. We hadn't felled it: from the stump there was a mysterious missing section of roughly fifteen paces, after which came the bramble-covered, remaining 200 odd feet we attempted to attack. I mention it because it was both an example of how BC logging was conducted until the day before yesterday (in terms of a big tree's life span), and how brief a time European -- although as Britons we didn't consider ourselves that -- newcomers had been on the West Coast of North America.

The fir was finally reduced to firewood by the first chainsaw I watched in action. It also still needed two men -- heavy duty loggers -- to handle its weight and kickback. Between tobacco spits, the sawyers explained that the missing fifteen paces of wood was the length of log the original fallers hauled away: it represented the vertical distance to the first major branch of the standing tree. That meant clear wood, with no knots. The rest was considered worthless.

This long winded introduction simply shows that I have always been guided by two opposing principles in my building. First, I could never imagine a house on the West Coast that didn't make use of its magnificent trees; and in an unfixable contradiction I wanted to save as many as possible on any piece of land I owned.

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Using the Trees

Trees and rocks are inseparable on the islands of Canada's west coast. That means if you build with them, you want to look at them -- and that means a lot of glass. But in the Zen of building you can never know what you will see through a window until you have the window. That means putting in a lot of afterthoughts. To do that you have to be your own boss.

I had always had an affinity for the houses of Frank Lloyd-Wright, but ironically, it was only while writing Arcadia We$t (in which he has only a bit part) that I studied and really understood him -- and saw that I was his disciple. A good painter doesn't farm out the vision, the painting, and the frame to third parties. If you set out to design a house, I firmly believe that you should be able to build it, decorate it, furnish it, and landscape it. With luck, the first three can be combined in a single feature.

A picture should replace all these words, but building -- whether websites or houses -- is all compromises. In the house (above) where I saved one tree (by letting it grow up through a sundeck), I used another to construct its main staircase. I wanted a spiral, but the only possible location had already been commandeered for one of the fir posts supporting the main ridge. The solution was to use the post as the central spindle. The stair treads, or winders, also fir, were each cut in a cheese-wedge, 24 inches at the wide end, 8 inches at the narrow, and 4 inches thick. They were set into notches in the post, very similar in appearance to the axed notches remaining in ancient cedar stumps, put there for the planks supporting the men cutting them down.

The other designer and architect I have a lot of time for is Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I never got to build chairs like his, but I would have if writing hadn't taken over my spare time. The chairs were to go with a table I did make.

Again, the picture should tell the story -- but it requires a cat called Angus. The table was a slab cut from a single log, and only one mill, B.C. Forest Products, now globalized into extinction, could do the job. I asked for a slab 36 inches wide, 4 inches thick, and 18 feet long. Once they found it, and I had it, I needed to cure it. The drying time was several months and everyone I spoke to said it would warp too badly to use. I worried, but nature proved them wrong.

Once the table was assembled I sat at the head of it and ate off it every day -- and every day Angus the cat attacked the wood beside my right hand with his claws until I placated him with food. His clawing and my placating infuriated me but became a family joke. The point of telling this story is that one day when I was knocking Angus's paw aside in another futile gesture... I noticed that his scratches had gouged out the rings marking the butt end of the slab.

I began to count them. In several places it required a magnifying glass, indicating 70 year periods of drought . It is an interesting academic exercise to wonder what such a dry spell would do to contemporary cities like Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle. The table could also tell my children a bit of local history -- when the aforesaid Europeans arrived as Juan de Fuca and Captain Cook. I estimated the table to have needed a tree 500 years old. One day when I was speaking to the mill I asked a head sawyer what size the original log would have had to be. "Around eight feet at the stump."

And so another circle closes... to bring us out of doors, and into:

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My Gardens

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*Creative Endeavours Only