Bruce Wilson Canada - Interiors, Environments, Buildings, Furniture
Do you love the home you live in? It is easy to love the home in which you were raised. But when it’s time for you to buy a house (or a second one), how do you make it fit your personality, goals, and agenda? How do you find the perfect house for you? Bruce Wilson may have the answer.
Bruce Wilson is a calming, confident person, and he has reason to be. Over the years, he has built an impressive catalogue of single family dream homes. He hails from the West Coast, but incorporates international sophistication and cosmopolitan luxury into his home designs.
How does one become a building designer? Bruce has always wanted to design, but after attending the California State Polytechnic in Los Angeles for a year, and one year at U.B.C., he realized the structured, academic approach didn't suit him. Instead, he went straight to the workforce. “You get thrown into something and it’s kinda sink or swim. I oversold myself on my first job interview and I was way over my head." Although he has an eye for the right angle and light, he has learned technique and specifics over the years. His work with Max Mara has honed his approach to light installation, but he says lighting for product and lighting for homes is completely different. Home lighting is much more subtle, and shadow is more important in the home, he explained.
Bruce is not only a creative person. He is also adept at running a job and controlling a budget. Bruce starts his homes at the building permit stage. “Building permits give you a very clear picture of what the exterior of the structure will look like. From them, you can tell what the windows will look like, the outside materials, the foundation, and the framing.” What the building permits don’t tell Bruce are the more variable things inside the home: the plumbing choices, the flooring and interior finishes, the mouldings, the built-ins, etc. For this, he hires professional contractors to work through the material costs and benefits.
Bruce is the youngest of three boys. From a very early stage, Bruce’s mother started asking him for design advice. She was a sewer, and whenever they would go to the store they would play a game. She would keep the fabric in the bag after showing Bruce, and then he would blindly pick the colour of thread that would match. He was right every time.
But for someone with such a knack for colour, Bruce often inclines toward using beige. “I love cream. It makes other colours just pop.” He pointed to his table. “You see how easily you can see the cut of the wood against the cream floor? Everything that is not cream is given great shape. I guess you can say it’s a bit of a formula: cream, black, and wood. I’ve been using ash for years.” It works.
Where is Bruce Wilson Canada headed? It’s easy to tell: increasingly bigger projects tend to fall in his lap. “I would love to work on a development project. I love diversity in architecture, but one of the things that is so appealing about the way older European developments have occurred is that everything is done in a similar style of architecture. There’s something very beautiful about repetition.” He certainly is located in the right place - Victoria’s outer communities are quickly developing.
I asked him if he ever encountered conflict in his work regarding cultural appropriation. Does he feel like he crosses any boundaries? “I have to be careful about that, he said. What I don’t like is design that is so committed to a particular style that it doesn’t have a soul to it. When I purport to use things from different cultures it is to enrich [the design] and put real life to it. In order to be human, it has to have some intricacy.”
Bruce’s projects are one of a kind. “I get up every morning and have so much creativity. I’ve always got some scheme for making design a bigger part of our lives.”
Bruce Wilson Canada
1435 Store Street
250.385.9204
Published March 2, 2010
Claire Atkin writes from Victoria, B.C.
