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-
 The
home or property owner, when faced with a building that needs
major repair in order to be habitable or significant renovation
to bring it up to today’s living standards or municipal
guidelines, has the difficult dilemma of choice between restoration
and upgrading or simply starting over. While the easiest route,
financially and technically, may be outright demolition and building
anew, other options do present themselves. These options can
provide viable alternatives, both financially and aesthetically.
The
Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation
of Historic Places in Canada1 describes
the various alternative approaches and the
standards for their adoption. There are three
main conservation approaches to protecting
heritage value:
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• Preservation -
protecting, maintaining and stabilizing the existing form,
material and integrity of a historic place
• Rehabilitation-
sensitive adaptation of a historic place for a continuing or
compatible contemporary use
• Restoration - revealing,
recovering or representing the state of a historic place as
it appeared at a particular period in its history, as accurately
as possible
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Each
choice is appropriate for different circumstances and
each has a different set of standards. This publication lists
nine standards2,
all of which must be applied in cases of preservation,
three more apply to rehabilitation and two more apply
to restoration. The
nine Preservation standards
call for, amongst other things:
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• Conserving
heritage value
• Conserving
changes to a place that have become character defining
• Minimal
intervention
• Recognizing
historic place as a physical record of its time, place and
use.
• Maintaining
character-defining elements on an ongoing basis
• Making
any intervention compatible with the historic place
• Document
any intervention.
Rehabilitation is
seen to be appropriate when repair or replacement of deteriorated
features is necessary, alterations are planned for new or continued
use and its depiction during a particular period is not appropriate.
Restoration can
be considered as a primary treatment when the significance of
a historic place during a particular period in its history significantly
outweighs the potential loss of existing materials, features
and spaces from other periods, where substantial physical and
documentary evidence exists to carry out the work and where contemporary
alterations or additions are not planned.
It
is worth noting that many of the older houses in Oak Bay are
larger than the current bylaw allows and consequently represent
value in their current state that would be lost if the house
was demolished. Before taking any irrevocable steps towards demolition,
property owners should assess carefully all the ramifications,
both pro and con.
Oak
Bay Municipality has several tools at its disposal to assist
the community and property owners in maintaining heritage value,
including site and home designation, grants for repair, sources
of practical information and revitalization agreements. These
are addressed in the papers to follow. Owners also have the option
of relocating a home when it no longer meets the owners’ living
requirements. As a last resort, homeowners who still wish to
demolish their properties are encouraged to dispose of much of
the original still usable parts (flooring, fireplaces, etc.)
to minimize the amounts going to the landfill.
Current
heritage thinking is that designation should not be considered
as resultingin a devaluation of property value. Rather, recent
evidence now points to the opposite, that resale value is enhanced.
1.
Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of
Historic Places in Canada, Parks Canada, 2003,
Standards for Conservation – Applying the
Standards, pp. 1-2
2. Ibid., p.3 This rendition represents
an abbreviated version; for the complete text,
please refer to the actual publication.
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