Description of Historic Place

The house at 304 West 6th Avenue consists of a simple one and one-half storey wood frame house in a corner location in a predominantly industrial area on West 6th Avenue, two blocks east of Cambie Street in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver.

Heritage Value

Built in 1917 by the Standard Milk Company, located nearby at 405 West 8th Avenue, the house is important for its cultural and aesthetic values, and for its survival as a residence in what is now an industrial area.

The building’s cultural significance lies in its construction by a company for use as rental accommodation, perhaps for personnel in the dairy industry (the first tenant was an employee of the Fraser Valley Dairy), and its later sale to the individual listed as the Standard Milk Company representative at the time of construction. Its construction as a rental unit, while not entirely speculative, nevertheless makes the house an example of a somewhat less detailed residential development in this area in the early decades of the 20th century.

While as late as the 1980s this block was documented as having a strong stock of heritage houses, the house at 304 West 6th Avenue is now significant as a comparatively rare surviving example of the area’s residential development in the early 20th Century, testimony to the degree of mixed-use redevelopment now underway in this segment of the old residential area.

The house is aesthetically important for the use of materials common at the time, but just as important for some departures from typical detailing. The combination of both typical and unusual details is a significant example of an early 20th century Vancouver building constructed not strictly for speculative purposes.

Source: City of Vancouver Heritage Conservation Program

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the house at 304 West 6th Avenue include:

- Original siting on property with generous front and side yards
- Original building form of main cross-gable with narrow hip dormers front and back
- Symmetrically placed front porch with hip roof form
- Original high relationship of main floor to grade
- Idiosyncratic front porch details, including turned columns, and trim boards ripped to mimic turned column profiles
- Door and window locations, form and materials
- Original horizontal wood bevel siding, and wood trim
- Shaped purlin tails visible at gable end eaves