West End

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Tour of Roedde House Museum

Click smaller image to open larger version in a new window.
In 1893 Gustav Roedde built a house on Barclay Street in Vancouver's fashionable West End. It was a stately home, designed in the late Victorian manner, and served as a testament to the success and perseverance of the German-born immigrant who became Vancouver's first printer and bookbinder. The design of Roedde house is attributed to the B.C. architect Francis M. Rattenbury, notable for his work on the Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel in Victoria and for Vancouver's Art Gallery (formerly the Court House).

#1	#2	#3

Rattenbury, a friend of Gustav Roedde, conceived the house in a Queen Anne Revival style with a cupola, bay windows, an upstairs porch and a downstairs verandah. Terence Brunette, City of Vancouver's heritage planner and past curator of Roedde House, has noted that Rattenbury came from a professional climate that was associated with some of the most advanced and sophisticated developments in architectural thinking of the time. It is likely that the Roedde house would have been seen as a designer's house in the way that the homes of those involved with applied design often employ cutting-edge product.

#4	#5	#6

Today the house is a fully restored museum. It's the centrepieceof Barclay Heritage Square, which features a total of nine Victorian homes, most of which serve as community spaces and public housing facilities. The development of the Square intoduced an unusual combination of inner-city parkland and heritage buildings, thereby turning the site into a functional - and historical - community asset. The Museum maintains community involvement by providing a number of elementary-school tours as well as guided visits for the public. It also hosts teas and salon concert series, and is particularly known for its wonderful Victorian Christmas events.

#7	#8	#9

While the Victorian decor of the Museum makes time-honoured Christmas customs come to life, the Roedde's German background makes such celebrations even more fitting. The traditions which most of us associate with a Victorian or English Christmas originated in Germany and were brought into England by Prince Albert after his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840. Prince Albert became one of the greatest authorities on the English Christmas, and introduced Windsor to the first Christmas tree - with all its trimmings - which quickly became an institution throughout England and eventually throughout the Western world. Prince Albert also helped to popularize carol singing.

#10	#11	#12

#13	#14	#15

The Roedde family celebrated thirty-two of their Christmases at the House on Barclay Street. While most of the family's stories recall holidays filled with lavish decorating, gift-giving and elaborate supper preparations, a narrowly-averted tragedy nearly brought these traditions to an end in 1913. The Christmas tree, standing in the wide bay of the dining room and lit by candles attached to the branches by clips, caught fire just as everyone was about to sit down to dinner. The family tried to extinguish the flames with buckets from the kitchen until the fire engine from No. 6 Firehouse (now restored) on Nelson Street arrived in time to save the house. The dining room was gutted, panelling burned and furniture and china destroyed but no one was hurt. The fire accounts for the fact that the dining room was redecorated in a completely different style from the rest of the house - with a high dado, horizontal panelled doors, and framing in the new mission (or Arts and Crafts style) for the insides of the windows.

#16	#17	#18

#19	#20	#21

Since the Museum's inception, the Christmas season has been celebrated at the House with the accoutrements of times past: mulled cider and fruitcake, carolling in the parlour to the accompaniment of a Victorian Steinway piano, and the fresh scent of evergreens from the luxuriously decorated lintels hung with cedar, spruce and holly.

Historical narrative provided by Justina Krol, a curator at Roedde House Museum

#22	#23	#24