AT HOME ON THE EDGE
Western Living cover story
September 1992
It is an absurd fancy to compare a West Vancouver oceanfront home with the Guggenheim Museum. In this case, the exercise is irresistible, nonetheless. The $2-million residence that developer Dennis Milstein shares with his partner, Claudio Barbero, is something of an exhibition space and modernist landmark, qualities it shares with Front Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Manhattan storehouse of the abstract, surreal and downright puzzling.
At the Guggenheim, one rides an elevator to its top floor, then strolls down circular ramps while wrestling with the murky symbolic depths of Klee, Kokoschka and de Kooning. Likewise, the Millstein home is a top-to-bottom proposition. Visitors enter through an unassuming front door at its highest point, then descend via a spiral staircase through four floors and 3,800 square feet of living space. At every turn there is fresh evidence of the owners’ eclectic and expensive tastes: striking objets d’art and antique colonial furniture, arrays of 19th-century Staffordshire Historical Blue china and mechanical penny banks, a painting of the contemporary Philadelphia skyline and an oil-on-glass portrait of Napoleon painted in China circa 1800. Then, at journey’s end, the utterly unexpected: a towering Haida house pole commissioned from Vancouver Island carver Tony Hunt Jr.
Only when standing on its postage-stamp-sized lawn, however, does the singular character of this remarkable house reveal itself. Rising 12 meters from beach to cliff-top, it is comprised of four rectangular “modules” made of concrete, cedar and glass. Nestling one into the next, each module doubles in size as it steps down towards the choppy waters of Howe Sound. The steel-trussed roof of the bottom module serves as the exterior deck and interior floor of its mate above, and so on in an exact repeating pattern.
Like the Guggenheim, the structure is simplicity itself, a bold statement made with geometric forms. In 1982, it won an Architectural Institute of B.C. Award for noted Vancouver residential designer Daniel Evan White. Seven years later, Milstein purchased the house and hired White to renovate and expand it. “Architects don’t often get a chance to correct their own mistakes,” White says with a quiet laugh. (Coincidentally, the Guggenheim has just undergone a controversial renovation based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s original blueprint for the museum.)
Wright and White. The latter is quick to admit his debt to the former. “He is an influence on anybody who builds west coast houses with an indoor-outdoor living plan.” Certainly, the Milstein house subscribes to what Wright once termed a “severe simplicity of form.” The decorative flourishes of post-modern design have no place in White’s work, which for 30 years has hewn to the principles of his teacher at the University of British Columbia, Arthur Erickson.
Site dictates style, however, and White had to contend with the a typically miniscule plot of ultra-expensive West Vancouver real estate on the ocean side of West Marine Drive – in this case a scrap of landfill at the base of a 90-foot incline. The original owner, boating authority and writer Ferenec Mate, wanted direct access to the water and the adjacent Race Rock Boatyard. “We had to somehow get into the house from the roadway and get out at sea-level,” explains White. “That required an extraordinarily tall house with a vertical circulation system.” Several other architects had failed to answer the challenge, but White hit on a solution that was practical yet aesthetically exciting.
New arrivals from landlocked Pennsylvania, Milstein and Barbero were … (cont.)
Western Living cover story
September 1992
It is an absurd fancy to compare a West Vancouver oceanfront home with the Guggenheim Museum. In this case, the exercise is irresistible, nonetheless. The $2-million residence that developer Dennis Milstein shares with his partner, Claudio Barbero, is something of an exhibition space and modernist landmark, qualities it shares with Front Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Manhattan storehouse of the abstract, surreal and downright puzzling.
At the Guggenheim, one rides an elevator to its top floor, then strolls down circular ramps while wrestling with the murky symbolic depths of Klee, Kokoschka and de Kooning. Likewise, the Millstein home is a top-to-bottom proposition. Visitors enter through an unassuming front door at its highest point, then descend via a spiral staircase through four floors and 3,800 square feet of living space. At every turn there is fresh evidence of the owners’ eclectic and expensive tastes: striking objets d’art and antique colonial furniture, arrays of 19th-century Staffordshire Historical Blue china and mechanical penny banks, a painting of the contemporary Philadelphia skyline and an oil-on-glass portrait of Napoleon painted in China circa 1800. Then, at journey’s end, the utterly unexpected: a towering Haida house pole commissioned from Vancouver Island carver Tony Hunt Jr.
Only when standing on its postage-stamp-sized lawn, however, does the singular character of this remarkable house reveal itself. Rising 12 meters from beach to cliff-top, it is comprised of four rectangular “modules” made of concrete, cedar and glass. Nestling one into the next, each module doubles in size as it steps down towards the choppy waters of Howe Sound. The steel-trussed roof of the bottom module serves as the exterior deck and interior floor of its mate above, and so on in an exact repeating pattern.
Like the Guggenheim, the structure is simplicity itself, a bold statement made with geometric forms. In 1982, it won an Architectural Institute of B.C. Award for noted Vancouver residential designer Daniel Evan White. Seven years later, Milstein purchased the house and hired White to renovate and expand it. “Architects don’t often get a chance to correct their own mistakes,” White says with a quiet laugh. (Coincidentally, the Guggenheim has just undergone a controversial renovation based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s original blueprint for the museum.)
Wright and White. The latter is quick to admit his debt to the former. “He is an influence on anybody who builds west coast houses with an indoor-outdoor living plan.” Certainly, the Milstein house subscribes to what Wright once termed a “severe simplicity of form.” The decorative flourishes of post-modern design have no place in White’s work, which for 30 years has hewn to the principles of his teacher at the University of British Columbia, Arthur Erickson.
Site dictates style, however, and White had to contend with the a typically miniscule plot of ultra-expensive West Vancouver real estate on the ocean side of West Marine Drive – in this case a scrap of landfill at the base of a 90-foot incline. The original owner, boating authority and writer Ferenec Mate, wanted direct access to the water and the adjacent Race Rock Boatyard. “We had to somehow get into the house from the roadway and get out at sea-level,” explains White. “That required an extraordinarily tall house with a vertical circulation system.” Several other architects had failed to answer the challenge, but White hit on a solution that was practical yet aesthetically exciting.
New arrivals from landlocked Pennsylvania, Milstein and Barbero were … (cont.)