Description of Historic Place

Hill Farm is a large two-storey British Arts and Crafts house with Tudor Revival details and an irregular facade with three prominent gables. It is set back from Wilkinson Road on a corner lot, overlooking Panama Flats. The large property retains some of the original landscape including mature Douglas firs.

Heritage Value

Hill Farm is valued for its rarity, both of scale and architectural quality, in this neighbourhood of Saanich. Built in 1913, the house is a fine example of a residence in the British Arts and Crafts tradition. It is a sophisticated design, exhibiting an eclectic arrangement of vernacular British precedents. This ten bedroom house originally stood on approximately one hectare of landscaped gardens and was approached by a wide curved drive.

This house is significant as a commission of British Canadian Home Builders Limited and its managing director, Edward Kennedy, for whom the house was built. Incorporated in 1912, with offices in Victoria, Vancouver, and London, England, the company was a land development, home building and insurance company, and was representative of companies that appeared in Victoria during the pre-First World War building boom. Many of the company's houses were in the popular British Arts and Crafts architectural style and Hill Farm would have been a stylish advertisement for the business.

This house is significant as one of the few local commissions designed by British-trained architect, Harry Bryant Newbold (1883-1952), who designed a number of houses in the British Arts and Crafts style for the British Canadian Home Builders Limited. Newbold was prominent in England and wrote extensively on architectural issues; he lived only briefly in Victoria, arriving in 1912 and leaving for active service overseas during the First World War.

Additionally, this site is associated with Commander Edward Atcherley Eckersall Nixon, R.N., who lived in the house from 1922 until his death in 1925; his widow owned the property for another forty years. Nixon was significant for the establishment of the Royal Naval College at Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1911. The college was moved to Kingston after the Halifax explosion of 1917, and in July 1918, a second campus was opened in Esquimalt, B.C. Nixon headed the institution until it closed in June, 1922.

Source: Heritage Planning Files, District of Saanich

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of Hill Farm include its:
- location, set back on its large corner lot with landscaped front garden, overlooking Panama Flats
- residential form, scale and massing as expressed by its two storey height, asymmetrical plan and generous proportions
- steeply pitched gabled roof with gabled dormers, projecting eaves and corbelled chimneys
- British Arts and Crafts features such as the combination of rough-cast stucco and half timbering, attenuated Arts and Crafts brackets on the verandah, hanging gables with eave brackets and a complex and irregular roofline
- additional exterior elements such as the side verandah
- irregular fenestration
- landscape features such as a stone retaining wall and mature Douglas firs