ARCHITECTURE:
It has been suggested that Samuel Maclure pioneered the Edwardian Vernacular Arts & Crafts (EVA&C) bungalow (that became a wildly popular builders’ style in the 1904-14 period, but then almost disappeared) with a few houses that he designed around the end of the 19th Century. This 1½-storey front-gabled house revisits the style after its decline in popularity. It departs from the norm of the recessed front corner entry of most EVA&Cs in having a left side entry with an open gabled porch supported by pairs of plain posts. The main roof and a pent roof across the façade have open eaves and exposed raftertails, features that Maclure seemed to favour in his later designs. There is a shallow angled bay on the right front pairing a window on the left side, both with central fixed 5-over-1 panes with flanking 4-over-1 sashes. The sashes have horns, unusual in a house this late. There is a tri-part window with 6-pane casements in the half-timbered gable. A shouldered exterior chimney just to the rear of the entry porch has a brick cap. The building is clad in pebbledash stucco.
ORIGINAL OCCUPANTS:
The house was built for BC civil servant William Hedley MacInnes (1879-1975), and his wife Mathilde (Moyenstern, 1873-1957) who lived here until the late 1920s. William was born in Lancaster County, ON, and Mathilde in Cincinnati, OH, to German parents. They married in Vancouver in 1911. William was a civil service commissioner in Victoria from 1918-26, then official administrator when he moved to Vancouver in the late 1920s. In 1937 he formed the Western Soap Co of which he was president until his death.
OTHER OCCUPANTS:
Retirees Peter and Levina Blackie lived here c.1929-31. By 1933, Lt-Col Squire (1886-1979) and Florence Beatrice (Maude, 1880-1967) Baxandall were living here with their daughters, Dorothy Maude and Mildred Alma. Born in Yorkshire, England, Squire was an army paymaster with the Royal Canadian Army Pay Corps who came to Victoria with his family in 1931. Dorothy was a schoolteacher and she married Wayne Albert Butler in 1937. Mildred was a bookkeeper and she married Harold Percival Johns in 1939. Squire and Beatrice left this house by 1940 and moved to Vancouver.
William Herbert and Mildred Helen (Margison, 1911-1981) Warren bought this house in the mid-1940s and lived here until the early 1950s. Herb, as Parks Superintendent for Victoria from 1931 to 1970, directed the program that planted many of the boulevard trees and hanging baskets that continue to make Victoria a world-renowned city of blossoms.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION & IMAGES:
• This Old House, Victoria’s Heritage Neighbourhoods,
Volume Four: Fairfield, Gonzales & Jubilee
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