Last weekend four of us stayed at Baldwin House on the south shore of Deer Lake in Burnaby. J had been the successful bidder at a silent auction fundraiser back in the spring, raising money for the West Coast Book Prize Society (the organization which administers the annual BC Book Prizes).

Baldwin House is a single-family residential home, designed by Arthur Erickson in the 1960s and completed in 1965 (the same year that Erickson’s SFU Burnaby campus was finished). The house was bought by the City of Burnaby as part of their project to acquire properties around Deer Lake for park land, and was later taken on to be administered and maintained by The Land Conservancy (the same folks who have recently acquired the Joy Kogawa House).

Reading on Dal Lake, 1987

The house was conceived as a pavillion, with the houseboats of Dal Lake in Kashmir being a specific inspiration. Almost every room has a door opening onto a deck or balcony, and the shifting light upon the lake, flooding in through the floor to ceiling windows, is stunning; it’s like living inside a painting by Monet. Just down the lake there’s a place to rent kayaks and canoes, and often we would look up from whatever it was that occupied us — reading, preparing food, and eating, for the most part — to see a boat full of curious paddlers drifting past just offshore.

The house is quite sparsely furnished — perhaps a bit too spartan for my taste, which tends to walls full of books and chairs nearby to curl up in — and a few more reading lights would be welcome. But what a great place to get away to for a weekend! Even though it is just across town from home we packed as though we were going out to the country (which, in a sense, we were): suitcase crammed with clothes, a stack of books (this would be a perfect place to read Timothy Taylor’s Story House), some movies on DVD, and the cooler full of food and wine.

A leisurely walk around the lake to the Burnaby Art Gallery on Saturday, picking up the weekend newspapers on the way back, and the weekend had flown by before we knew it.