hobbit house
By: jackieamsden
tags: abandoned house, condos, culture, photography, random, thoughts, urban, vancouver
Category: arts and culture, the built environment
The hobbit house stands empty, its Cotswold roof sagging and diamond leaded windows either smashed or boarded up.
Its owner, a developer, wants to subdivide the lot in two in order to build a second dwelling on the Point Grey property. And, I’m pretty sure, if he could, he’d like to demolish the existing house as well.
However, none of that has happened so far, due the efforts of the City of Vancouver’s Heritage committee, which wants to preserve the house as a “romantic representation of traditional domestic ideals and class values.”
What about all those new condos being built downtown, I wonder, whose promotional billboards feature ’romantaized representations’ of urban living and business class values? Maybe in fifty years we’ll want to preserve those too.
Good point about downtown. The people who bought those condos complain about the noise. What did they expect? People in any other city move downtown to be in the middle of the action. In Vancouver, however, these people have been sold a romantic notion: “it’s like the suburbs downtown”.