check out the listing for this little beauty.
i can’t say too many things negative about this one, so let me tell you what I do love about this house.
1. it is for sale.
2. it is on the westside of vancouver and not a bad walking distance to the beach.
3. excellent landscaping and clean modern design.
check out that backyard! one of the best backyards i have seen in a long time. you might think i am nuts but i do like all the paving/solid surface in the backyard. a nice built-in bench is awesome for long night out and when the party is happening outside which give lots of people to sit and chat and enjoy the fresh air.
what is going to make this house a hard sell is the fact that it doesn’t have a basement or a secondary suite to help out with the mortgage. perhaps an option would be to build a laneway house over the garage? looks like a one car garage so there is definitely an opportunity for that addition. i wonder if the large window in the garage is intended for a future conversion into a small suite (200 sq.ft is going to be a quite a small suite!)
feel free to comment. i would be interested in knowing if this sort of housing is going to get more popular in vancouver.
followup – july 3, 2010 :
courtesy of the previous owner, here is a sideshow of the renovation process he undertook to bring the house from its original vancouver special to what it is now.
it was an eye-opener to find out that this was a renovation, and it explains the reasoning behind there being no basement. One great thing about the ‘vancouver specials’ in this city is that the do have so much square feet of living space. had the owner demolished and built new, the home would be significantly smaller. after all, there are 4 bedrooms and a study on the upper floor!
modern vancouver houses 
thanks,…this was my house.
the basement was a problem in selling but we sold.
believe it or not it was a vancouver special conversion. if you would like some images of the transformation…let me know and i can add to your collection. thanks, R
We were looking at the renovations required to transform this house and are wondering would it have been cheaper to just teardown? Especially since the house had to be lifted. Looks like the only thing left were the outer wall studs at one point. Do you know how much the renovations cost? To build new on a 33′ lot would probably be $650,000 – $800,000. Just wondering if there is a cost advantage to a large scale renovation like this one. Thanks. (We are shopping for a house so it would be good to get a ball park figure of what renovations at this scale could cost)
almost always is the new-build more economic than a renovation. The reasoning for a renovation in this case was the allowance of more floor area, as well as being environmentally sensitive, since these vancouver specials have good bones.
the floor area for a new build on this 3717 sq.ft lot would entail about 2230 sq.ft. but this renovation completed had 2540 sq.ft.
in the new-build scenario, there is an option to get 2601 sq.ft if you propose a 929 sq.ft. (.25 FSR) basement and 1672 sq.ft. maximum for remaining above grade floor area.