The late great Arthur Müdry’s family home, now on the market some five decades after its creation, is both a lovingly crafted ode to West Coast modernism and a testament to Vancouver’s midcentury modernist architecture community.
Tour Müdry House, now for sale in West Vancouver
Müdry’s Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Beaton House, a paean to the Pacific forest, located eight miles from his family home in West Vancouver and once part of the annual West Vancouver Art Museum Homes tour, was sadly demolished by buyers when its original owners put it on the market in 2018. While West Vancouver – a treasure trove of midcentury gems – still lacks any substantive laws to protect modernist heritage, hopes are high that a preservationist will scoop this one up.
As a teenager in 1940s Calgary, Müdry dreamed of being an aeroplane engineer. But a chance discovery of a book on gothic cathedrals caught his imagination and changed his career trajectory to architecture. While grounded in local wood and stone, his work embodies a sense of nature as sacrosanct, and his family home was designed accordingly as a cedar-and-glass rich cathedral of light.
In his 1977 renovation, Müdry took a non-descript box-like 1937 bungalow, that like many of the surrounding homes was buttoned down, conservative and closed off to the natural world, and blew it up.
Opening it up to framed views of the surrounding fir and cedar trees with full-length horizontal sightlines and oversized panels of glass, he removed all the doors, took down walls and played with the roofline, shape-shifting what had been a typical suburban home into a temple to the genus loci. Strategically placed mirrors helped collapse wall planes, extend space, and provoke visual connections between rooms and to the outdoors.
The renovated house expanded to 3,790 sq ft over three levels, and the roofline was raised to use the original attic as a storey. The inside was wrapped in a wabi sabi-like combination of the rough and the refined – raw hewn cedar walls contrasted with smoother fir flooring. Custom cabinetry and judicious use of glazing transformed the interstitial into the intimate – like an upstairs study peeking over a grove of bamboo, or a downstairs bedroom overlooking a Müdry-designed reflecting pool - within the larger, light-filled spaces.
Rounded windows were salvaged from the old Edwardian Birk's Building in downtown Vancouver when it was demolished in the mid-1970s, and Müdry painstakingly stripped the paint and sanded them himself, in homage to a previous era. Now his own home has become a classic.
A chevron-capped cedar structural beam offers an Arts and Crafts-style nod, while much of the carpentry was done by Russell Hollingsworth (before he had his architectural licence), son of renowned West Coast modern architect Fred Hollingsworth, a friend and contemporary of Müdry, also known for his craftsmanship.
The journey down a stairwell edged by a concrete wall to Müdry’s ground-level study and reflecting pool made of exposed aggregate feels like an Ericksonian moment. Indeed, the house embraces both the surrounding environment and the architectural history of the region.
Its sale comes at an auspicious moment, with a new archive of Müdry’s work recently organised by his family at the CAA, recognising his legacy as an often undersung star in the West Coast modern firmament.
Müdry House is for sale for $2,195,000