Type 7

Peninsula House

A hidden mid-70s gem restored and updated in the Vancouver suburbs.

Immaculate mid-70s modernism on display at the Peninsula House by James K.M. Cheng, an architect better known later in his career for practically defining the Vancouver skyline, contributing to many of the city’s most prominent buildings. Earlier in his life however, he was in the greener peripheries of the city designing homes like this.

Recently restored, the Peninsula house was given a few sympathetic updates to maintain some modern functionality, but it retains Cheng’s original cedar and glass framework, positioned carefully so as to invite plenty of light into the house without exposing too much of itself to views of the built up surroundings.

Though you wouldn’t know it, the house is actually positioned in a pretty dense suburb, which was still the case when Cheng first visited the site in the early 1970s.

His challenge was to preserve as much of the original woodland terrain he had, so as not to disturb the very aspects of the site that made it work building on in the first place. Fifty years of development later, the house still feels as cocooned as ever in its leafy Vancouver hillside.