Your house was built before your grandparents were born, and it still has the leaded glass, the fir floors, the deep front porch and the proportions nobody builds anymore. It also has knob-and-tube wiring, an undersized electrical panel and very little insulation.
You don’t have to choose between the two. At VictorEric we renovate Vancouver’s character homes so the details you fell in love with stay exactly where they are, and everything you can’t see is brought up to the way you actually want to live. One team designs it, permits it and builds it.
Ready to bring your character home back to life?
In Vancouver, a character home generally means a house built before 1940 that still has its original, distinctive features. In some cases a home built later can qualify too, if it has genuine design merit and its original character is intact.
That covers a lot of this city. If you are not certain where your house stands, the City will assess it for you — and that assessment is the doorway to a set of incentives most homeowners have never heard of.
Here is the part most homeowners never hear. Vancouver actively wants these houses kept, so the city offers a trade: retain your character home, and the rules let you add more homes on the same lot than you would otherwise be allowed.
Depending on your lot, retaining a character house can open the door to a secondary suite, an infill house in the back garden, a laneway home, extra floor area and a set of relaxations — in some cases three or four legal homes on one property. Infill buildings are capped at two storeys and 8.5 metres, so the original house stays the star of the street.
That changes the maths completely. A renovation that looked like pure cost starts to look like a property that houses your family, your parents and a mortgage helper. We have spent 25 years working through Vancouver’s rules, and we will tell you honestly, early, whether your lot can carry it.
New-build trades open a wall and find what the drawings said would be there. In a character home, nobody knows what is behind the plaster until it comes off. That is not a reason to be nervous — it is a reason to work with a team that has done this many times and prices it honestly. Before we quote, we test for:
We test for all of it before we give you a price, not after we open the wall. And on a home this age we carry a 20% contingency rather than the usual 15% — because we would far rather hand you money back at the end than a change order in the middle.
Every house is different, but most character home projects we take on involve some combination of:
Whatever the house needs, we keep what makes it worth keeping — and rebuild the rest properly.
Designing and building in Vancouver since 1997, we have spent more than 25 years working on houses older than most of the city around them.
Everything You Should Know Before Renovating a Character Home in Vancouver
Most character home renovations land between $150 and $300 per square foot for a mid-range scope, and $300 to $450+ per square foot for high-end work with significant restoration. On a 2,000 square foot home that is roughly $300,000 to $600,000 mid-range. Older homes carry more unknowns, so we budget a 20% contingency rather than the usual 15% — and we test for asbestos, wiring and structure before we give you a number, not after.
No — that is the entire point. We document the original details before demolition starts, protect them on site during construction, and design the new work to sit beside them. Where an original element genuinely cannot be saved, we replicate it rather than substitute something modern that will always look like a repair.
Often, yes. Vancouver’s character retention rules can allow a secondary suite, an infill house, a laneway home and additional floor area on a lot where you retain a qualifying character house — in some cases three or four legal homes on one property. Whether your lot qualifies depends on its size, its zone and your house’s character merit. We check that first, before you commit to a design.
A character home is generally a pre-1940 house with its original features intact. A heritage home is formally listed or designated on the Vancouver Heritage Register, which brings additional protections and a different approval process. Most of the houses we work on are character homes rather than designated heritage properties — but we handle both, and we will tell you which one you have at the outset.
For a whole-home character renovation, almost always. Once wiring, plumbing, insulation and structure are all being replaced at once, the house is not liveable. We tell you at the scoping stage roughly how long you will be out, so you can plan properly rather than find out halfway through.
Design and permitting typically runs several months on a character home — longer than a standard renovation, because character and heritage review adds a step. Construction usually runs 8 to 14 months depending on scope. You get a real schedule alongside the fixed price, before anything is torn out.
It depends on the house and on what you want. A character home in sound structural condition, on a lot where retention unlocks additional homes, is very often worth keeping — you get a house that cannot be reproduced at any price, plus density you could not otherwise build. If the structure is failing and the house has little original character left, a new build may serve you better. We give you an honest answer after we have walked the house, not before.
Then we renovate it as a whole home renovation, and you still get the same team, the same process and the same fixed pricing. The retention route is an opportunity, not a requirement — and it is one of the first things we check so it never becomes a late surprise.
We handle them. We prepare the drawings, coordinate the structural and other engineers, and manage every conversation with the City of Vancouver — including character assessment and any heritage review your project triggers. Because our designers and our construction team are the same team, what gets drawn is what can actually be built and approved.
We renovate character homes across the city and the North Shore — Kitsilano, Dunbar, Point Grey, Shaughnessy, Kerrisdale, Mount Pleasant, Riley Park, Grandview-Woodland, Hastings-Sunrise, Strathcona and the West End — and throughout the Greater Vancouver area.
