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The strawberry patch mansion
Monday, May 16th, 2005 by GetawayBC.com
When Grace Dixon inherited a large estate from her brother-in-law and Vancouver pioneer, A.G. Ferguson, she was left with a large amount of money to spend whatever way she wanted.
Grace decided to build a large country estate with her husband Henry Tracy Ceperley, virtually in the middle of forest and strawberry fields, on the shore of the majestic Deer Lake in Burnaby. The year was 1909. And now, 96 years later, the beautiful “Fairacres” estate that Grace built, still sits as the heritage home of the Burnaby Art Gallery.
Buying property in Deer Lake was very uncommon to most wealthy citizens in Shaughnessy, since Burnaby was an agricultural centre rather than a residential one. However that changed quickly once Fairacres was built in 1911.
“[Grace] was the first to recognize its potential of being a place of beautiful estates,” said Jim Wolf, heritage planner for the City of Burnaby. “So it really changed the perception of what Deer Lake and Burnaby could be.”
Henry Ceperley, one of the top real estate and insurance agents in the province at the time, was also very wealthy. However, Wolf said the estate was paid for with Grace’s money.
“Grace was like, queen of Fairacres,” said Wolf. “It was hers and everything about it really had that woman’s touch of beauty.”
Grace spent $150,000 on the English-style country estate that was designed by English-trained Vancouver architect, R. P. S. Twizell. Half of the 20 acre estate was landscaped, with gardens, fine lawns and rockeries, housing a number of outbuildings as well including a root house, steam plant, chauffeur’s cottage and garage and stables building.
The architecture of the building was, and still is, an impressive site. The mansion was a three-storey structure with characteristics of an English home with a West Coast influence. It was built primarily with stucco and stone, finished with Tudor half-timbering. There was attention to detail in the fireplace, doorways, windows and light fixtures. Grace even had a tower made, with walls made of glass, built to house her tropical and domestic bird collection.
“The Arts and Crafts style that [Twizell] conceived at Fairacres is really quite wonderful and sort of unprecedented because it’s just so high class in all of its appointments,” said Wolf.
After Grace died in 1917 at their Shaughnessy home, Henry leased the mansion but eventually sold the estate with proceeds going to the construction of Ceperley Playground in Stanley Park, as Grace wrote in her will.
A number of families bought and lived in the home from 1922 to 1939.
The next occupants became a community of Benedictine monks, who turned the building into a seminary to train young men for priesthood. In 1954, the Canadian Temple of the Universal Foundation of More Abundant Life, a religious organization who believed in communal living, moved in. The Municipality of Burnaby started to purchase some acres of the estate starting in the 1960s and eventually bought the whole estate for about $160,000 in 1966 as the city’s first heritage conservation project. In 1999, Burnaby council embarked on a half million dollars restoration of the house that restored the house back to its original 1909 configuration.
“There has been a big commitment on the part of the city to not only preserve what’s there but restore it’s beauty,” said Wolf.
The Burnaby Art Gallery officially opened in 1967 as a Canadian Centennial project and today lies as one of the hearts of Burnaby’s art community along with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and the Burnaby Village Museum.
It was designated heritage property in 1992 and will stay an important part of Burnaby history for as long as it stays standing in the picturesque location of Deer Lake Park.