Lasko Visuals
136 Deerview Lane, Anmore, B.C.
Asking Price: $3,975,000
Lot size: 105.87 by 164.27 feet
Annual Property Taxes $13,489.05
Strata fees: $110 a month
Listing agents: Richard Deacon and Jamie MacDougall, Engel & Völkers
Living on the edge of town means different things in different places; in the tiny village of Anmore (part of Metro Vancouver) it means glacier-fed lakes and thousands of hectares of forest and mountain are in your backyard.
“Where our house is now, that was all just wilderness,” Wayne Keiser said of his first visits to the Anmore area in the late 1990s when he was a regional director for provincial highways for the ministry of transportation and infrastructure. “I’ve worked all over the province. I still think this is one of the most beautiful areas.”
It’s not a part of Vancouver metro area people just pass through, situated as it is north-west of Port Moody near the termination point of the long fjord of the Burrard Inlet. Among the attractions are trail networks that wind their way through the mountains to the north, and there are spots where you have a clear view of the ski hills of Mount Seymour (across the Indian Arm inlet), close enough to see the snow machines grooming the hills.
“When I first came up to see the house, it was a bit of a déjà vu,” said Richard Deacon, one of the listing agents with Engel & Völkers. “I took a wrong turn and saw signs for White Pine Beach. In the 80s when I grew up, this is where my family would come for picnics.” The recreation area of Sasamat Lake is just a 10-minute walk from the house where Mr. Keiser’s and his wife, Dianne Beck, have lived since it was finished in 2008.
Mountain lakes can be a little chilly thought, so after several years living in their new home – and in a very deliberate ploy to lure the grandchildren for visits – the couple decided to build a pool in the backyard (which, because it’s on a corner lot, is also kind of the sideyard). The first few pool companies they tried told them, with the greatest respect, that they were out of their minds.
“You can’t build a swimming pool there, it’s all sitting on solid rock,” Mr. Keiser said he was told. As it was explained to him: attaching a pool to a rocky slope 180 meters above sea level in an area with high seismic risk comes with a good chance that the concrete tub could literally come loose and slide down the hill in the event of an earthquake. He eventually found an award-winning pool design company that had built parts of the Vancouver Aquarium and civic pools in Burnaby, that brought in seismic and structural engineers to drill anchors deep into the granite and double up on rebar in the structure. In an area with a number of luxury homes, their infinity-edge pool with its western view is only one of a handful in the neighbourhood. Turns out “can’t” could be turned into a “can” if you’ve got the budget.
The house today
This isn’t the first house the couple had built from plans (and not the last – they built a lake-house in Kelowna, B.C., during the pandemic) but it was intended to be a forever home as they approached retirement a dozen years ago.
Previous homes were built very much with family in mind – they have four children – but as the kids had grown up by the time they were planning the Anmore house it was more about their own wish list.
“We wanted high ceilings, Dianne wanted a formal dining room, we’re both very much fitness oriented, we wanted to have a gym in our house and we always wanted to have a wine cellar,” said Mr. Keiser.
Among the wants was a home that resembled a French château, which is why the exterior is a mix of six-inch-deep granite pieces quarried on Haida Gwai (“This area has a lot of granite around here but it doesn’t slice for stonework, it fractures. Whereas the material we used slices quite nicely,” Mr. Keiser said) and bricks reclaimed from a 100-year-old-building that was torn down in Yaletown. The rest of the upper floor and attached two-car garage are clad in a mix of stucco and board-and-batten planks.
An award-winning pool design company brought in seismic and structural engineers to drill anchors deep into the granite and double up on rebar in the structure.Lasko Visuals
The main floor has rooms – such as the entry foyer and the dining room – with 13-foot-high vaulted and coffered ceilings. Just past the stairs the back half of the house is taken up by a great room that combines kitchen (with central island) and living room with walkouts to the rear pool deck on both sides. Interior access to the garage is through the laundry room behind the stairs, next to the main-floor powder room.
The double door to the primary suite sits at the top of the stairs, inside on the left is a 13-foot-deep walk-in closet and a separate ensuite bathroom that features a makeup table between the two sinks, a very large glassed-in shower and Ms. Beck’s claw-foot tub (another wish-list item). At the back of the bedroom is west-facing balcony that looks down on the pool-deck through a glass railing.
On the second floor the ceilings extend to take up most of what would have been attic space in another era, giving more vaults and dormer angles to the rooms. There’s two other bedrooms on this level, the larger of which sits above the garage and is accessed through a den at the the stairs in the L-shaped layout. The smaller bedroom has become Ms. Beck’s sewing room: a creative outlet for the former finance executive where she recreates everything from Chanel jackets to Hawaiian shirts for Mr. Keiser.
The fourth bedroom is in the basement, though because the elevation falls away from this side of the house it’s almost a ground-level room with large windows facing west. The home gym and yoga studio takes up the two central rooms of the basement; this space also has rough-ins to add a kitchen for an in-law suite or some other multi-generational living situation (aided by an exterior access door here, too).
The media room is accessed from the rec room, and the the wine cellar is on the opposite side of the stairs past the utilities room. The granite work (all done by a master mason from Quebec) makes a reappearance inside in the 450-bottle cellar and evokes the feeling that it could have been carved out of the mountainside.
So close and not so far away
Despite being on the northern edge of the lower mainland’s habitable land, there are a lot of connections between the town (of 2,200 people) and the rest of the city. Depending on traffic, it might only take 45 minutes to drive to Vancouver’s downtown core and only 15 minutes to get to the closest SkyTrain or West Coast Express train stations in Port Moody. “We were pioneers when we moved here,” said Mr. Keiser, only half-joking. “It’s amazing how many people commute from Anmore now, it’s all evolved over time.”
The new plan is to downsize into a condo nearer to the grandkids in North Vancouver. Luckily, there are more trails and mountains to explore on that part of the city’s urban fringe, too.