Copeland Park - Before and After

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, builder A.B. Taylor Construction asked architects to re-design the houses they were building in Copeland Park. Below is an article from National Builder Magazine (December 1961), showing the houses before and after.

The modern architect-designed houses must have been a success, as Copeland Park has many stunning MCM houses - perhaps the best examples built en masse by a tract builder in Ottawa. Thanks to Google Street View, here are some images of these beauties!

This is one of the plans that was 'modernised' as explained in the article above. Few of these were actually built.

While most of the MCM houses by A.B.Taylor were built on the north side of Maitland, a few examples can be found on the south side, like this one. Most of the houses on the south side were built by A.B. Taylor in the 1950s and are more traditional (like the house next door in this photo).

Comments

AnonymousApril 3, 2013 at 3:28 AM
We lived in a duplex on Ainsley Drive, at the corner of Erindale. We rented. We had moved in just after it had been built. We moved after two years when my parents bought a house in New Edinburgh. The house was well laid out but the gas furnace leaked (the house cobstantly smelled of gas and we constantly had Ottawa Gas in to repair it) and the concrete side stoop fell off because the builders had used the area underneath to dispose of their garbage and it subsided. We had never used the fireplace which was just as well because neighbours used theirs and had a chimney fire because the builders had never removed the wood framing after building the chimneys. It was discovered that most of the houses on our street which were identical also had the same problem.

When we moved out we were charged for "removing a wall" between the lower level hallway and the den... a wall that had never been built. I don't know if my parents were able to prove that they had just never built the wall.

We lived in the house in New Edinburgh for almost 30 years. But for alm the faults of the house in Copeland Park, I still love many of the mis-century modern style.
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AnonymousJanuary 28, 2019 at 8:06 AM
Late to the party here, but this blog post is a gem! I recently moved to Ottawa, Copeland Park more specifically, and adore the houses/architecture here. We have a 50s build (one of the plans in the attached article), but I have seen the MCM ones sprinkled around and wondered about them. I am so in love with our home here that I've been googling to find out more about it, so this info is really exciting. Thank you very much for digging it up and sharing!
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