Description of Historic Place

Emily Carr House National Historic Site of Canada is a two-storey Picturesque-Italianate style house located on a residential lot in the James Bay district of Victoria, British Columbia, which was the childhood home of artist Emily Carr. The formal recognition refers to the building on its lot as of 1964.

Heritage Value

Emily Carr House was designated a national historic site of Canada in 1964 because:
- it is associated with artist and author Emily Carr, who was born in this house.

Emily Carr (1871-1945), one of Canada’s most famous painters and a well-known author, lived most of her life in this neighbourhood of Victoria. Built for her father, Richard Carr, the house and its environs had a profound impact on Emily Carr’s formative years, as she acknowledged in her books. It was here that her desire to create and her appreciation of art were kindled. The location of the house is significant because of its proximity to Beacon Hill Park and to the ocean shoreline, which played important roles in shaping Carr’s lifelong appreciation of the natural environment and her unique vision of coastal British Columbia.
The house is an excellent and well-preserved example of a Picturesque Italianate villa designed by John Wright (firm Wright and Sanders), a prominent early West Coast architect.

Source: Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Minutes, October 1964.

Character-Defining Elements

The key elements relating to the heritage value of this site include:
- the relationship between the house, Beacon Hill Park and the shoreline;
- the placement of the house on the property and the historical relationship between house and garden landscape;
- the Picturesque Italianate treatment of a two-storey, three-bay house form, with its projecting central bay with balconied entrance, ground floor verandah, round-headed paired windows on the upper storey, roof finials and decorative wooden trim, and paired brick chimneys;
- the surviving original interior plan, including the upstairs bedrooms, in particular the one in which Emily Carr was born;
- any surviving historic woodwork, wall finishes and detailing dating from the time of the Carr family’s residency from 1864 to 1937.