Vancouver Special

Vancouver Special is a term used to refer to houses built in a particular architectural style in the period from roughly 1965 to 1985 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and its suburbs.

It must be noted that there are houses in the Lower Mainland dating back to the late 1940s that look almost identical to the Vancouver Special -- so the housing design ideas predate the 1960s mass popularization and mass production of this kind of housing.

Vancouver Specials are characterized by their extremely typical "box-like" structure, low-pitched roofs, balconies across the front of the house. Brick or stone finishes on the ground-floor are characteristic of the ground level facades, with stucco on the 2nd or 3rd floors.

Vancouver Specials have similar floor plans with the main living quarters on the upper floor and secondary bedrooms on the bottom, making them ideal for secondary suites.

From a bulider's point of view, this is a very sturdy -- yet cheap in material and time -- design to build.

In response to public reaction to the proliferation of this design, the City of Vancouver made changes to the single-family zoning regulations in the 1980s with the intent to stop additional Vancouver Specials from being built. However, other Lower Mainland cities have not substantially changed their housing codes over the past 25 years with respect to this kind of housing design. Thus it is still possible to build (and buy) new houses (of very similar design to the classic Vancouver Specials) in the Lower Mainland.