Young at Heart

A tightknit family upgrades its Vancouver lifestyle with a legacy home overlooking English Bay.

- Jennifer Sperry

For this client, family comes first. With two girls and four boys ranging in ages from 5 to 17, home life is busy and marked by constant comings and goings for school and sports and activities.

The couple loved living in West Point Grey, one of Vancouver's oldest, most prestigious oceanside neighborhoods. Just across the street is a city park, which prefaces the sparkling blue water of English Bay and the mountains beyond.

However, the family of eight quickly began pushing the boundaries of their existing home, built in 2012. To avoid a disruptive move, and to address the newish structure's lack of history, they decided to acquire the property next door and commissioned architect Eric Stine to dream up a more expansive forever home.

The intricacies of preserving the original home near the ocean presented challenges, with restricted excavation depth and lowerfloor ceiling heights. "It was truly an engineering feat," recalls interior designer Kelly Deck, principal of Kelly Deck Design, of the transformation. "Eric kept half of the original home, but the scale of the addition is much larger than the original. It's really like new construction," she adds.

While Stine deftly achieved a seamless 8,000-square-foot new-old home with seven bedrooms and eight baths in the Craftsman style, Deck and her team tackled the couple's aesthetic goals while considering their needs, present and future. Meanwhile, landscape architect Paul Sangha refreshed the exterior with a poolscape and various outdoor-living destinations.