138 Dallas Road

138 Dallas Road is a symmetric, two-storey, flat-roofed, brick building set well back from the road and overlooking the Ogden Point shipping piers and Victoria Harbour. It is situated in the southwestern part of the James Bay neighbourhood, a peninsula southwest of Victoria's Inner Harbour and downtown core.

138 Dallas Road, built in 1908, is valued as an outstanding and unique example of the Classical Revival style that was popular with Victoria homeowners at the turn of the twentieth century. The style was fashionable in the United States and frequently manifested itself in Victoria simply in isolated architectural elements evoking the values of classical culture. Elements such as columns, dentils, or pediments were added to a house with a different dominant style. This house is also important because it was designed by William Ridgway Wilson, an architect who made notable contributions to the commercial and domestic structures of Victoria. Many of Wilson's houses appealed to the large Anglophile upper middle-class public in Victoria because they were based on distinctive English examples. This house is unique in Victoria because its front façade echoes the Classically-inspired architecture of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century English colonies, most notably India, Hong Kong and the southern United States.

This house is also valued because it was built for the widowed Charles Frederick Newcombe, who was an amateur naturalist and British Columbia's first psychiatrist. British-born Newcombe is best known as a controversial collector of First Nations totem poles and artifacts for foreign museums and for what would eventually become the Royal British Columbia Museum. It is valued as well as the residence of his reclusive bachelor son, William Newcombe, who was a close friend and early supporter, through his purchase of her works, of artist Emily Carr.

Sources: City of Victoria Planning & Development Department; Victoria Heritage Foundation

The character-defining elements of 138 Dallas Road include:

- its position set back from the street, overlooking Ogden Point and Victoria Harbour

- its unimpeded view of the ocean and the Olympic Mountains

- its brickwork

- its full-width double loggia on the front façade

- its Classical Revival architectural features, such as the balustrades on the roof and first and second floors with their engaged balusters, the square brick piers on the first floor, and the Tuscan columns on the second

- its strongly horizontal features, such as the belt course and wide eaves and frieze

- its two-storey angled bay windows, one on the front and two on the south side