Take a look at all the new development in the Valley. Flashy, modern amenities reign supreme with the usual “live-work-play” lifestyle promises attached. Yet for a few ardent Okanaganites newer doesn’t mean better. It may mean cheaper and less exhausting, but also less rewarding. For these brave and committed souls, nothing is better than restoring a piece of our local heritage — through hard work and uncertainty (plus lots and lots of money) — to its former glory. Do these fixer-uppers have a few screws loose? They’d probably wear that distinction proudly, and they see every reason to connect us with our past, even at the expense of one more lock-and-leave play pad for a seasonal Albertan

By Karin Wilson

Between every floorboard in Sherry Hudson’s new store there are gaps so large you could lose an entire pocket of change and never find a penny. But Sherry doesn’t waste time thinking about what might be lost or even lurking inside those gaps. She just stuffs the nozzle of her shop vac lovingly between each board and sucks out the grunge. That is until a few days ago when she blew a fuse, which plunged her entire business into darkness.

Since then there’s been no phone, no computer and no overhead lights in her store that stands proudly next to the railway tracks and a few doors down from an old hitching post in downtown Armstrong. Workmen saunter in and out, offering tips on what might be the cause, but there are no quick fixes here. Nothing in this place is simple. The building went up sometime in the 1930s and in the following decades various owners have jerry-built the wiring in an effort to bring it cautiously into the 21st century.

Sherry’s electrician neighbour pops his head in. Sporting a bushy beard, straw hat and neckerchief, he takes the town’s affection for its cowboy roots seriously. “Anything on yet? I flipped every switch there is.”

It takes a bit more finagling before something twigs and the harsh fluorescent tubes Sherry plans to replace buzz into action. The light on the microwave flickers green. “I knew I’d figure it out eventually,” he smiles.

Mere days before her store opens, Sherry isn’t flustered a bit. Seated in her cozy kitchen at the back she just sips herbal tea, munches slowly on a health bar and sighs — another day in the life of renovating an old building.

You Get What You Pay For
Sherry isn’t really renovating this building; she’s merely tinkering with it to make the store her own. She claims she’s hung up her renovator’s hat for good after devoting 15 years to restoring heritage homes to their original grandeur.

Her first project was in the 1990s when she spent 10 years working on what would become the Heritage Homestead Inn in Spallumcheen. After that, she put another year into restoring the Patricia Ranch, a home built on a lot subdivided from the Coldstream Ranch (then owned by Lord and Lady Aberdeen), which she dubbed Aberdeen Manor.

When Sherry started out, she did the work herself, largely piecemeal. “The Spallumcheen home was in rough shape. I stripped off nine layers of paint and four layers of wallpaper on that one, right back to the turn of the century. I remember the paper — it was flocked like velvet.”
Sherry admits when she bought the place she had no idea what she was in for. “Inspectors told me I could fix it up for $20,000, but it ended up costing me $150,000 — there was the plumbing, the electrical systems — you really need building inspectors and appraisers who know something about heritage. And mistakes in heritage homes don’t come cheap.”

That’s the problem with the heritage restoration business — it’s not cheap, and it’s not straightforward. It’s far easier these days to tear down an old building and put up a new one.
Heritage is, well, so last century. People are looking for modern, contemporary even, and when the desire for something old does break through, the tendency is to artificially create an old look rather than put the work into restoring the original beauty. But heritage lovers like Sherry argue the rewards are immense — like uncovering a vibrant green and burnt sienna Emily Carr canvas buried beneath decades of grime.

“The cost of doing a proper restoration is sometimes prohibitive. You can build a new house for less, but what you get in the end is less too, so there is no comparison. In a new house, you don’t get the archway entries and the fancy woodwork.”

Ban the Bulldozers
Not too long ago, owners wishing to restore heritage homes could access provincial, and sometimes federal, grants. But in the last few years these have largely dried up. When there is any funding, it goes to public buildings or to municipalities to create heritage registries — a subjective list of homes and other buildings identified as worthy of preservation. “It’s up to the local community to determine which buildings end up on that list. Just because it’s old doesn’t automatically designate it as heritage,” says Charles Suenderman with the BC ministry of tourism, sports and arts.

Robert Hobson knows all about heritage registries. A long-time regional director in the Central Okanagan, Robert has also been a heritage planner since the mid-1980s covering almost every community in the Okanagan and Kootenays. When he first arrived he completed a heritage inventory for the city of Kelowna that became the seed for the Kelowna Heritage Foundation.

“It was kind of pioneering work at the time. Kelowna had lost a lot of its heritage and there was not a lot being done at the time to preserve it. I remember going before council and them saying to me ‘how could you possibly halt progress by conserving these heritage buildings?’”

The first project undertaken by the heritage society was saving Guisachan House. “I remember that well. It was challenging getting the parkland. The developers grudgingly gave five per cent and not one inch more. There were all these perennial gardens — Mrs. Cameron’s beds were 30-feet deeper than they are today — and we wanted to preserve it.” The developers won.

Awareness about heritage may be more than it was in the 1980s, but it’s still got a long way to go — particularly when you consider what Robert calls “the tsunami of development” that threatens to bulldoze what little heritage remains in the Okanagan. And honestly, there wasn’t too much to begin with.

Two of BC’s best-known heritage communities — Revelstoke and Nelson — experienced their economic boom at the turn of the last century. The towns were prosperous in those days and buildings like the Francis Rattenbury courthouse in Nelson reflect that. When government programs kicked into gear in the 1980s and 1990s, the two communities benefited. By comparison, there really wasn’t much to preserve in the Okanagan, especially in Kelowna, Robert says.

“At the time Kelowna was not a particularly wealthy place. We didn’t have a lot of really expensive buildings. Vernon was the economic hub of the Valley and they had a richer heritage resource to draw from than anywhere else in the Valley with buildings from the 1890s to World War II — a lot of interesting heritage. Same with Summerland with its stone buildings. There was a lot of quite good craftsmanship, but again, it was a wealthier community.”

Kelowna, meanwhile, was largely agricultural and it’s hard to get anyone too excited about preserving an old barn or a square commercial box built in the 1940s on the main street of town.

“People look at some of the buildings in downtown Kelowna and ask: why would you want to preserve that,” Robert says. “But what we have is what we have. Saying it’s not interesting is like saying we’re not interesting. This is where you came from. It may not be the Louvre, but it’s us. And without it, people are losing their sense of place in the community.”

Restoration vs Renovation
When people in a community do get fired up about heritage, they can make a big difference, says Peter Ord, manager-curator of the Penticton Museum. He watched as the community rallied a few years ago to save the 1912 Ellis building, which the school district threatened to tear down as part of its renovation of Penticton High School.

And he’s seen former museum curator and now city councillor, Randy Manuel, gradually influence council into paying more attention to heritage.

“The city just completed a first draft of a registry of heritage places in town. We now have a list of the top 100 historical heritage sites within the boundaries of Penticton.”

One of those properties was the old Empress Theatre located on Front Street. For years it operated as cold warehouse storage for tires — until Peter Achtem spied it and thought he could restore its original character to create a combined commercial and residential space.
The curator is thrilled. “He’s doing a great job. He made a presentation to the heritage advisory committee stating that he was going to be keeping much of its original façade and integrity. It’s good news for the city and it’s a model of what the city is looking for.”

In fact, the city was so taken with Peter’s plan that it agreed to provide a combination of tax relief and funding. Once complete, the downstairs will be rented out as commercial space and the upstairs will become his funky residence.

Like Sherry’s projects, this is a labour of love. But Peter balks at the suggestion that he’s passionate about heritage, even though he tackled a similar project in Edmonton some years ago.

“I wouldn’t say I’m passionate about it. I just get stuck into projects,” he laughs.
The city approved a $10,000 grant to help defer costs in refurbishing the exterior. The money hasn’t changed hands yet, and won’t until the job is finished, which Peter hopes to achieve sometime in October 2007.

“It’s been expensive — it’s not for the faint of heart. There are lots of problems associated with doing this kind of thing,” he says. “At the end of the day, doing this renovation is going to cost more than less, if that makes any sense. People think you get free money, but once you really start getting into it, you get caught up in it. It would have been cheaper for me not to get the funding, because then I could have done a look-alike for a lot less by simply making it look oldish. But the city said, if you want this funding, then you have to do it right.”

The building dates to 1910 with a renovation in the 1930s. In order to get things just right, Peter spent time in the museum archives. “The mouldings were tricky. We had to look at photographs and the next door building to get a clear reference point to how big and wide they were.”

And he certainly has been digging up history. When his crew started tackling the interior ceiling, they found a gem — a six-foot movie poster for Racing Luck starring Monty Banks — a comedy from 1924.

“The way ceilings were done, there were slats of wood that were put on the diagonal and then the plaster was put over top. And as we were removing it, there were bits falling out of the ceiling, and when we looked at it, we realized this poster had been shipped up into the attic.”

Like the poster, the theatre is long-past its movie screening days, but Peter believes programs like this make an impression — not just on tourists, but on other people in the community. “It gets people into thinking about restoration rather than renovation. Then people get excited about it and start doing it themselves. But really, it’s not free money,” he warns. “Funding like this gets people’s brain into a historical viewpoint mode.”

Lasting Legacy —  Maybe Not
Who wouldn’t want to save an old building like the Empress? The truth is, people don’t always see value when things are old. In a way, that’s the real purpose behind the heritage inventories which create the lasting heritage registry. The BC government helps the process by offering a variety of grants, up to $20,000, to assist communities in identifying their heritage sites, because the reality is, the uneducated sometimes need a guide that says: this is worth taking a second look at. Ultimately, it’s a bit of a PR game designed to attract buyers like Sherry and Peter. They can go to the list, find a property they like, see if it’s up for sale and determine if it’s worth making the investment.

Although, there’s the rub. Sometimes even if a property is on the list, its worthiness can still be questionable. Before Sherry opened her retail shop in Armstrong, she came across a heritage-listed property on Highway 97 in Vernon. It was tempting, but in the end, she couldn’t justify the purchase.

“It’s a beat-up crackhouse, but it’s also one of the original O’Keefe Ranch houses,” she says. “It was built in the late 1800s and it’s in rough shape. It’s a great business location, but to bring it up to commercial code would be hugely expensive, and the lot is so tiny it probably wouldn’t even meet the city’s bylaw requirements for parking spaces.” As for leaving it as a residential home, the cost of restoration would make any purchase prohibitive.

“Probably someone will buy the land and bulldoze the house — it has historical value, but heritage value? I don’t know.”

Finally, there is the issue of long-term preservation. All this talk about heritage restoration and heritage registries is really nothing more than a wish list. Municipalities realize that when it comes to restoration, homeowners are on their own. Unless they put some kind of restrictive covenant on the building, there is nothing to prevent the next owner from demolishing the building in favour of something new.

Sherry’s anger still flares when she thinks of what happened to the Spallumcheem home she left more than five years ago. It now bares little resemblance to what she created.
“They put vinyl siding on it, gutted it, sold the maple cabinetry, ripped the hell out of it and threw whatever they could in the dumpster. They replaced all the windows that were double-hung sliders. They ruined the look, the value and the history. It’s sad that it has survived 100 years to be ruined by one person. The whole history ends right there.”

Robert Hobson admits, these things can happen. Even when the Kelowna Heritage Foundation provides a grant, it only stipulates that nothing can be done to change it for at least five years. After that, it’s as though the restoration never happened. Property owners can do what they will.

Robert says the philosophy behind the approach is to create an atmosphere of incentive rather than one of directive.

“It was thought it was more important to get the work done on heritage and if that happened there would be a greater chance of it being preserved. It’s hard to beat people over the head for a $5,000 grant when you know that’s a fraction of the real cost of restoration. It’s a matter of providing an incentive and creating awareness. So far it has worked (in Kelowna). I don’t think any of the buildings that received a grant from the foundation has been demolished.”

Sometimes communities will take that next step. Penticton certainly did when it crafted a covenant for Gibson House. The aim is to preserve that home for generations to come. As for the rest of the homes and buildings we try to save in the Okanagan, they’ll all need work as they age, and they’ll all need more money. If it’s a public building, we’ll share in the tax burden. But if it’s private, who knows.

Sherry, who has avoided government grants every step of the way and admits she isn’t a big fan of government interference, has one suggestion — make sure the people who buy heritage homes are rich. If they are, there’s at least a small chance they’ll have enough to care for the homes well into their old age, and maybe even into the next century.

Read more about our heritage in the October issue of Okanagan Life - on newstands now!