west point grey

Basement Workshop

Photographed on expired Kodak 64T 4x5” film.

20161103_DeVries_basement.jpg

My wife and I were staying with some family friends in the autumn of 2016 while she completed her first semester of medical school at UBC in Vancouver. Jan DeVries had been a professor at UBC and had built the West Point Grey house in the 1960s. Coincidentally, he had been my wife’s father’s professor in agricultural science when he was a student at UBC. An even stranger coincidence: the basement suite that my wife and I stayed in was the suite an ex-girlfriend had first moved into in 2001 when we had both moved to Vancouver to attend Emily Carr. Many of the older houses, especially the more modest-sized ones, were being torn down around Jan’s house. Since he had lived there for decades, Jan had collected a lot of things like bikes, tools and other things that had accumulated in and around the house. The richest area of accumulation was in the basement where Jan had his workshop.