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The Roedde House Museum (1893) is a stately late-Victorian home attributed to the noted British Columbia architect Francis M. Rattenbury. Built for the bookbinder Gustav Roedde and his wife Matilda, who moved in the year it was completed, it is in the Queen Anne Revival style then popular in Vancouver's West End, and incorporates "cupola, bay windows, upstairs porch, and downstairs verandas" ("Roedde House Museum"). The house is located at 1415 Barclay Street in the West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
"The house measured some 36 by 54 feet, excluding the kitchen wing, and contained a hall, parlour, dining room, and one bedroom on the main floor, with five bedrooms and a bathroom and lavatory above" (Barret and Liscombe 344-345). Its attribution to Rattenbury is based on two facts: that it was built at just the time Rattenbury arrived in Vancouver; and that (in the English manner) the house has no basement. However, not everyone agrees: "the bay windows and octagonal towers are, like the ship-lap siding and bracketted verandah, typical of current North American domestic design" (Barret and Liscombe 29). When the attribution was proposed in a script for the Vancouver Community television series Then and Now (15 May 1975), an elderly West Ender, Hilda Weeks, asserted that, to her knowledge, the house was not a Rattenbury design. Nevertheless, it is now treated as an important piece of Vancouver's history:
At the urging of the Community Arts Council of Vancouver, the house was designated a “heritage building” in 1976. In the early 1980s the City, with the assistance of the Heritage Canada Foundation and the B.C. Heritage Trust, restored the exterior of the house. In 1984 the Roedde House Preservation Society was formed to implement the interior restoration of the house. [Roedde House Museum]
Partly, this is because of the association with Roedde himself. He was born in 1860 in Grossbodungen, Germany, learned the art of bookbinding in Leipzig, and immigrated to Cleveland in 1881. He and his new wife, Matilda Marie Cassebohm from Heligoland, moved to San Francisco and then to Vancouver. Here in 1888 he opened the new port city's first book-bindery. He did so well that by 1893 he could afford to build this new residence at 1415 Barclay Street.
The West End is among the newest districts of the City of Vancouver. Harold Kalman explains that it was originally opened up for a coal seam found on the shores of Burrard Inlet near the foot of Bute Street (a familiar name from the Welsh coal industry): "Although the deposit in Coal Harbour was never commercially exploited, a young English potter named John Morton discovered there the kind of clay he needed to make bricks. "In 1862, Morton, his cousin Samuel Brighouse, and friend William Hailstone pre-empted the "Brickmaker's Claim', the entire 550-acre parcel of land between Burrard Inlet and English Bay" (Kalman 113). Unfortunately, the "Three Greenhorns" as the locals called them could not make a go of their business and left the West End for nearly two decades. The Canadian Pacific Railway, however, saw the potential in the West End for an exclusive subdivision in 1887, when it decided to develop Georgia Street west of Burrard into a new, choice residential area that locals quickly called "Blueblood Alley" on account of the stately late-Victorian designs of houses, which nevertheless relied on timber rather than brick construction.
Bibliography
Barrett, Anthony A., and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe. Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983.
Elliot, David R. "Rattenbury, Francis Mawson." Canadian Encyclopedia. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988. Vol. 3: 1828-1829.
Kalman, Harold. "The West End." Exploring Vancouver. Photographs by John Roaf. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974. Pp. 122-130.
Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor. "Rattenbury, Francis Mawson." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Posted 20 May 2008. Web. Web. 25 April 2023.
Roedde House Museum. "Welcome to the restored 1893 home of Vancouver's First Bookbinder." Maison-musée Roedde (1893). Web. Update 2023. Web. 3 May 2023.
Created 7 May 2017