Inside Roedde House: South East Corner

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South East Corner

North American Queen Anne style buildings usually have an unbalanced or asymmetrical arrangement of building parts. Usually, the roof lines are steeply pitched and the house will also feature many gables, tall decorative chimneys, dormers, and towers.

Example of Fenestration

Fenestration is the unbalanced arrangement of windows. This is a perfect example on the east face of Roedde House. The windows allow light into the front hall, the stairwell, and the kitchen.

Francis M. Rattenbury Who had recently immigrated from England, built the house for Gustav Roedde, a pioneering small businessman in the developing city of Vancouver. It is quite possible that the Roedde House was an early commission for Mr. Rattenbury.

As an architect who had just come from England, Mr. Rattenbury was in touch with what was then some of the more popular styles and fashionable developments in domestic architecture. Because Europe was filled with the latest kinds of building technologies and improvements, everybody wanted to follow suit and build the newest European styles. This made Mr. Rattenbury a very busy man, and allowed him to create many designs for houses as well as the Parliament Buildings in the capital of British Columbia, Victoria.