Description of Historic Place

The historic place is the one-and-one-half-storey wood-frame Willis Schell House, built in 1913 with Arts and Crafts features, and located at 1024 Rutland Road in Kelowna's Rutland neighbourhood.

Heritage Value

The Willis Schell House is valued as a relatively rare example of a pre-World War I housing in Rutland. At the time of construction, the Rutland community was a largely-agricultural area outside the City of Kelowna. It also has value for its association with the Schell family, who were important both as builders and as one of the early families that established fruit farming in the Rutland area.

The house displays an interesting combination of the stalwart farmhouse form, with Arts and Crafts details on the original 1913 main block, and a 1920s bungalow addition that reflects changing family size and economic means.

Willis Frederick Schell (1880-1944) and his family were important in the history of Rutland both as builders and, in Willis's case, as an orchardist. Three Schell brothers (Willis, his twin Will, and younger brother George) came to Rutland in 1908. They were Americans who came by way of Napanee, Ontario. They were all big men and all carpenters, and built many of the homes for the settlers at Rutland, as well as for themselves. The Schell brothers donated an acre of land on which the first church in Rutland, Mountainview Methodist, was built in 1908, and they built the parsonage in 1910. Willis Schell was an official of the Methodist Church, and later a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Church.

As well as building houses and developing land, Schell planted an orchard. In 1913, he married Lillian Bird (b. 1891), whose family had come to Rutland in 1906 from Grenfell, Saskatchewan. In that same year he built this house. Schell grew fruit here until his death in 1944. Lillian Schell remained in the house until 1977, and her nephew Milton Bird continued to live here until at least 1982.

Source: City of Kelowna Planning Department

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Willis Schell House include its:
- mature trees on an open lot, with continuous columnar cedar hedge on left side and a continuous lawn to the street
- residential form, scale and massing, as expressed by its one-and-one-half-storey height and rectangular plan with a porch extension
- medium-pitched gabled roofs over both the main block and the porch, with wood brackets supporting the eaves
- bracketed roofs over windows along the sides
- shed dormers with wood-sash windows
- narrow, horizontal beveled wood siding on the walls above a projecting wood beltcourse moulding, below which are wood shingles
- one-over-one double-hung wood-sash windows with plain wood trim
- large open porch, with square wood columns supporting roof beams, and a wood-shingle bulkhead and wood handrail