THE MORRIS HOUSE

At 259 years old, the Morris House is the oldest wooden framed house in Halifax and amongst the top few oldest homes in Nova Scotia. The project was saved by development downtown by being picked up off its foundation and being moved (not for the first time in its long life) 3 kilometers up the steep streets of Halifax to its new home in the North End where it has becomes affordable community housing for single mothers.

I stepped in near the end of the renovation to help with the front and back entries.

The front entry stair was a complex geometry with very tight parameters. There were two original stair designs that we found in old pictures and neither meet code. Add to that a very limited clearance to the property line and we had to revise the form while keeping the spirit intact. Overall, the stair was a balancing act between the prestige of the house and finding a way to soften it and make it welcoming to the neighbourhood. One way we did this was to extend the bottom tread so that it was wide and inviting; this in turn doubled as a good stoop for lingering.

CBC Coverage of the 3km move through Halifax.

The back entry was a full addition that added a mudroom, bathroom/laundry room and boiler room to the house. Given the heritage value of the house, this was an equally interesting design challenge. We ended up deciding that a shed roof was the simplest most functional form. The big liberty was the large overhang which, like the front entry, looked to welcome people into the life of the house. It was seen as a place for social lingering within view of the side street and adjacent school yard; a good place to be in the rain when social activity of the house became too much.

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OWNER RELATIONSHIP

There were many partners in making this project possible. The work that I was involved with was done through the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia. For this project, my work needed to advocate and support both the renewal of heritage initiatives in the city as well as to keep a designer’s eye on how to facilitate its role of “a home as a social institution in the neighbourhood”.