House
The Hunter Residence was never finished in any conventional sense. Hunter began designing for the property in 1970 and was still drawing additions in 2020 — three years before his death. The archive spans that period without interruption. 147 catalogued items · 203 Goward Road · Prospect Lake, Saanich BC.
This is the archive's central quality. It documents an ongoing negotiation between an architect and his own home across five decades: schemes abandoned, permits pursued for years, rooms built and then removed, ideas held in reserve for a decade before reappearing in built form. The drawings are not a finished story. They are a working record.
The house reflects this directly. Two architecturally distinct wings, built a generation apart, embody different phases of Hunter's design thinking. A dining room conceived through eight iterative schemes over more than a decade finally reached permit in 2018. A speculative Zen scheme drawn in the 1970s found its descendant in a Japanese garden built decades later.
Before East & West wings
The Hunter House Collection is the working core: drawings Hunter made, kept, and annotated across four decades on his own property. It is not a polished set. Speculative sketches sit beside formal permit submissions; undated schemes beside dated construction documents; Hunter's own drawings beside engineering work commissioned from outside firms.
The Canadian Architectural Archives holds the complementary record. Hunter donated his original build documentation to the CAA in 2019 and 2021 — the 1970s drawings and early photographs. What he kept were the working files for everything that followed. The two collections describe the same building from opposite ends of its lifespan, held separately and designed to be read together.
Several long threads run through the drawing record, each crossing multiple project sets and years.
Eighth scheme · 2018 permit
The ideas on these pages are efforts at reaffirming values of personality, feeling, and owner participation in the construction of a more diverse and human habitat. Richard Hunter · notebook, undated
A curated set of items will be linked here as the archive is published. Each is chosen because it opens onto a longer thread of the record. Curated entry points include speculative pre-design drawings for the 1974 East Wing, the mid-1980s coloured legend that anticipates the West Wing palette, key correspondence framing design decisions across decades, the Fulker Collection photographs of the original structure, and the Gary Snyder letters.