For supposedly such a small place, Nova Scotia is really big. In a long peninsula it manages to contain a wonderful agricultural valley (the Annapolis), with apple trees and maize fields and veggie crops; a bay with the biggest tides in the world (the Bay of Fundy); one of the most famous seaports from the days of sail (Lunenburg); a muscular modern city (Halifax) with cranes and dry docks and shipyards along its river-sides; and an island (Cape Breton) with a French name and a remembrance back to a time when the English perpetrated a great crime against the first settlers of Atlantic Canada.
Nova Scotia as well has eight thousand miles of rocky coastline, liberally broken up with postcard harbours filled with yachts and fish boats, and a highland spine with a mix of conifers, deciduous trees and the occasional boggy lake, as if at least part of the province was also somehow in northern Ontario.
The natural beauty is one thing. But for me (and I would imagine most people), what really sets Nova Scotia apart are the houses. Something strange and magical happened in this place. In the 1800s, a whole lot of people in a whole lot of nooks and crannies all became fairly wealthy in a pretty short space of time.
They built houses of wood, cladding them in cedar shingles or weather-boards (called “clap boards”), using plans and architectural ideas from both just around the corner as well as places like France and Italy.
And then the money ran out. The age of wooden sailing ships was replaced with steel and motors. The whale oil needed to light houses gave way to electricity and petroleum. And eventually the fish that used to teem in the sea disappeared down the gullets of giant trawlers and seiners.
As a result, unlike other places in North America, Nova Scotia didn’t go through a transformation bred by economic growth. The old houses weren’t neglected or torn down in the mid-20th century, and replaced with “ranch-style” bungalows, aluminium windows and patio doors. Many people moved to jobs in other places, but the ones who remained just continued living in the houses that their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had built.
They kept them painted, and when a bit of rot set in they replaced a window sill or the fascia with an identical version, made of a good hardwood or cedar. Maybe they didn’t have the money to re-clad in stucco or replace all the windows with modern sliders. Or maybe they just had good taste.
Whatever the reason, they have done the rest of us a great service. Because when it comes to houses, Nova Scotia is like a little jewellery box containing gems from a by-gone era, a rural Eden of the 18th and especially 19th centuries. It sounds more than a little ironic, but fortunately, due to poor fortune, all these treasures have been left intact for tourists from around the world to see.
In fact, a great sport for people visiting Nova Scotia is house-gazing. However, there are so many beautiful examples, in so many styles, that eventually you realise you need a field guide, an architectural equivalent of those books the bird-watchers use.
Thankfully the many excellent bookstores in the province stock Heritage Houses of Nova Scotia, by Stephen Archibald and Shelia Stevenson, and you couldn’t ask for a better (and certainly more loving) compendium.
Archibald and Stevenson worked for years at the provincial museum, and since their subject is historical buildings, they were also in the fortunate position of truly living with their work, restoring several of their own homes.
They must also have a photographic collection that represents a high percentage of Nova Scotia’s total old housing stocks, given the range and quality of illustrations in their “field guide”.
There’s the Georgian Classical (or really the Greek Revival), with pediments and columns harking back to ancient Greece (and then the Romans, who loved the style so much they stole it, along with the Greek craftsman).
This is the style that informed so much of what became the most historic American architecture (think Monticello, and much of Washington, DC). But there are also good examples in Nova Scotia.
And since this was a smaller, less wealthy place, with a lot of wood instead of stone used as building materials, you’ll find there are at least references to columns and transoms in many less monumental homes.
There’s also the Gothic Revival, a style which is quite well known in New Zealand, since many of that country’s oldest buildings (and especially churches) have both the proportions and decorative work such as pointed windows.
And in Nova Scotia you’ll even find Italian designs, with at least a reference to some of the proud buildings on the Lagos. Wood was cheap, and skilled labour probably even cheaper, so back then in Nova Scotia someone from the middle class could indulge their operatic fantasies with ornate scrolls and turned railing corners.
And let’s not forget the French. Napoleon III was busy turning Paris into something glorious, and in Nova Scotia there are double-sloped mansard roofs, as well as little towers with cupped tops that are not just Parisian, but truly Second Empire.
Nova Scotia is also well known for houses with the “Lunenburg Bump”, buildings in that famous port (and elsewhere) with references to other styles, but at the same time also adding ornate dormers and bay windows (the “bump”).
To realise how amazing these houses can be, here’s how Archibald and Stevenson describe the Morash House, one of Lunenburg’s treasures: “A hybrid offspring of five-sided Scottish dormers ornamented with Second Empire and Italianate elements, and an occasional touch of Gothic Revival thrown in for good measure.” Wow!
ooOOoo
Finally, and for me just as wonderful, are the houses that common people lived in, the designs often referred to by architects as “vernacular”. These are houses that were hand-built by locals with little money, out of necessity and as they could, taking into consideration the location, as well as the needs of an extended family.
These vernacular houses never really had any ornamentation, but in my mind they were all the better for it. They have a cleanness of line, and a sense of proportion that makes them stand out, no matter whether they’re by themselves on a grassy hill with not a single tree or shrub, or set amongst the forest.
Sometimes, especially if they were clad in shingles, they weren’t even painted. When they were, white was the colour most preferred by English settlers, whereas the Acadians were apt to choose red, yellow, green or even pink.
And it is said that fisherman, after some good catches, would buy paint, and not wanting to be too extravagant, would cover both their house and their boat with the same batch.
ooOOoo
There is, however, one building that definitely does not fit in with all the wonderful weather boards, turrets and scroll work you see in Nova Scotia. In fact, that building looks almost identical no matter where you happen to be in this giant country.
It’s the modern post office, and in Canada until quite recently it was wholly and solely under the direction of the federal government.
When you look at most public buildings you can usually get some inkling of what the architect was trying to achieve. And since it is the government, you have to assume that unlike a lot of private buildings, they really did have a designer.
But architects, since they always study architectural history, generally link their designs to others in the past. If that’s the case, though, the only reference I can think they had in mind when it came to Canadian post offices would have been a jail.
Every one of these things is a rectangle made of red brick, with precious few windows, and really nothing in the way of ornamentation. If the designer was a modernist, and “form follows function” was his motif, he (it had to be a “he”) must have thought the building was going to house convicts, rather than bills, advertising circulars, and seasonal Christmas cards.
In a province like Nova Scotia, where so much of the architecture from the past is so well preserved, the modern post office is like a smudged finger-print on the storybook that is every village and town.
~originally composed in July, 2012~