Patio Covers, Screens & Awnings in New Westminster

Inside the Queen's Park Heritage Conservation Area the City's guide states that on a Protected property a Heritage Alteration Permit is not required for interior alterations, or for exterior alterations to a building that do not affect the front or sides of the house or the roof form visible from the street. The paired requirement list covers changes to the front or sides of a Protected house and changes to the roof form that will be visible from the street. That one line decides more projects in this neighborhood than any area threshold does.

The same guide exempts new construction or demolition of a non-residential accessory building, such as a garage or shed but not a laneway or carriage house, and additions or alterations to it, from the Heritage Alteration Permit on a Protected property, and it exempts construction, renovation or maintenance of a detached accessory building on a Non-protected property. The guide is explicit that building permits are still required for some of these activities. In our experience freestanding is often the cheapest way through Queen's Park when the back of the house is awkward to attach to. But the guide names a garage or a shed. It does not name a pergola or a louvered roof, so whether a freestanding cover reads as a non-residential accessory building is a call for the Planning Division at 604 527 4532, not one we make here.

Section B of the Queen's Park design guidelines opens by stating that it must be followed for any proposed changes or additions to the front, or sides, or visible roofline of protected buildings in the neighbourhood, including those already designated or listed on the Heritage Register. So the guidelines themselves, and not only the permit, are aimed at what the street can see. Within them, metal, glass and vinyl on porches and verandahs sit in the column headed NOT RECOMMENDED, alongside aluminum, vinyl or plastic sidings.

The guidelines also state that owners should not install visible attachments on protected homes that could be considered obtrusive and incongruous with the historic style of the building, giving as examples satellite dishes or other antennas, exterior generators, or air conditioning units. Every example the City gives is mechanical equipment. Applying the clause to a shade structure is an inference, and it is ours rather than the City's.

Outside the conservation area the City separates Designation, which puts changes through a Heritage Alteration Permit, from the Heritage Register, which needs no heritage permit at all. Even under Designation the City says standard maintenance such as in-kind replacement of materials does not require a permit. Inclusion on the Register still matters to a schedule, because Council has the option to temporarily withhold a Building Permit, temporarily withhold a demolition permit, or require a Heritage Assessment. What we take from that is a calendar risk rather than a design risk, and it is worth checking the Register before anyone is promised an install date.

The City lists Designation, a Heritage Revitalization Agreement, a conservation covenant and a Heritage Conservation Area as four separate reasons a Heritage Alteration Permit may be required. A Heritage Revitalization Agreement is a voluntary agreement negotiated between an owner and the City on a specific property, so two neighboring houses that look identical can sit under different rules. There is no fee for a Heritage Alteration Permit for changes to a protected building, though fees do apply to demolition and to design review of new construction in the Queen's Park conservation area.

The Downtown Community Plan development permit guidelines for the Columbia Street Heritage District do two things at once. They set a direction of their own, stating that new awnings should have a traditional profile with sloped awnings being preferred and that material should be of high quality canvas or glass. And they hand size, colour and material over to the H.A.R.P. design guidelines. An awning quote on this street is therefore judged against a design document before the fabric book is opened.

The H.A.R.P. guidelines list the acceptable types as fabric awnings in three point configurations with or without a valance, retractable awnings of appropriate period design, glass canopies and theatre marquees, then state that these are the only types recommended and that arched, barrel, dome, convex, concave or random-shaped awnings are not considered appropriate. Elsewhere the same document states that projecting box canopies and flat fixed canopies should not be permitted. That is a specification constraint rather than a taste note.

Acceptable materials are only non-shiny opaque outdoor awning fabric, metal for fabric awning or glass canopy frame systems and for theatre marquees, and glass. Unacceptable materials are sheet metal unless part of a theatre marquee, wood panelling, shakes, shingles or siding, plastic or fibreglass, and concrete. In our experience the finish clause surprises people more than the shape list does, because sheen is not something most fabric selections are made on.

The guidelines set a minimum height to the bottom of 2.75 metres, a preferred projection from the building face of 1.5 to 1.8 metres, a preferred awning or canopy height of 1.5 to 1.8 metres, a minimum 0.60 metres clear of the curb, a maximum 0.30 metre valance and a preferred slope of 45 degrees, noting the slope may be shallower where it cannot otherwise fit the structural opening provided there is adequate minimum height clearance.

The Downtown development permit area exempts maintenance work including replacement of awnings, but only where the work does not involve a change in the exterior design or material composition of the building or structure. Changing profile, fabric type or color while replacing a worn awning takes the job out of that exemption. The same exemption list releases construction of accessory buildings or structures with a floor area equal to or less than 10 square metres from the development permit.

The same development permit area guidelines ask for exterior shading devices to manage heat gain from solar exposure, naming fixed awnings and retractable canopies among the options, and asking that shading work in summer while still providing solar access in winter. That is unusually useful language to have in hand, because it means the case for shade downtown can be made in the plan's own terms rather than against them.

The H.A.R.P. guidelines carry no publication date, reference an older bylaw number and descend from a program the City began in 1990. They are current because the Downtown Community Plan, consolidated to June 2020, incorporates them by reference, and because the City's Columbia Street Historic District page still links them and states that proposed external modifications to Heritage Register properties in that area are evaluated using them. Confirm their status with Planning before any figure above carries a contract.

The City's residential building permit page states that new accessory buildings over 10 square metres, such as a garage, require permits. It is written for accessory buildings rather than for a cover attached to a house, and it releases you from the building permit only. Not from zoning, not from heritage, and not from the tree bylaw. Confirm your own structure before treating it as exempt; the City's building permits page lists 604 527 4580 for general inquiries.

In the RS-1 Single Detached Residential District the bylaw defines attached accessory area as the measured horizontal cross-sectional area of all attached accessory buildings and structures on a site, including but not limited to carports, gazebos, porches, decks and covered patios. Most Lower Mainland bylaws make you reason by analogy from a definition of building. Here the product is written into the text, which removes a whole category of argument at the counter.

In RS-1 and NR-1 the bylaw runs two caps in parallel: the combined area of all attached accessory structures shall not exceed ten percent of the site area, and the maximum permitted detached accessory area is a further 10 percent, counting the site coverage of unenclosed things such as carports and gazebos, with maximum site coverage in the district at thirty five percent. Queensborough's RQ-1 district instead applies a single combined cap of fifteen percent across attached and detached together. Confirm your own zone on the City's CityViews map before assuming either.

In RS-1 a detached accessory building with no dwelling unit is limited to one storey and to a maximum height measured from its own finished floor rather than from grade: 4.57 metres for a peaked roof, or 3.6 metres where the roof pitch is 4 in 12 or less. It shall not be located in the required front yard, and it shall not be less than 1.52 metres from any rear or side site line bounded by a street. A flat roofed or closed louvered structure lands in the 3.6 metre bracket.

The general regulations set out what may project into the front, side and rear yards. Unenclosed porches, eaves, balconies and cantilevered canopies over entrances are allowed 4 feet, or 1.22 metres, into the required rear yard, and the rest of the list is steps, stairwells, sills, belt courses, cornices, chimneys and bay windows. Awnings and sunshades as a general category are absent, and the only canopy named is a canopy over an entrance. Read against that, a cover over a deck is not a projection with an allowance, so our reading is that it has to live inside the setback unless the City says otherwise.

The bylaw defines an attached accessory structure as a structure attached to a principal building which is not enclosed 60 percent or greater for the exterior vertical planes, such as decks, porches, balconies and carports. That matters directly to screens, because a cover that is comfortably an attached accessory structure with the screens up may read differently with fixed side glazing or permanent infill. Our view is to confirm the enclosure calculation with Planning before specifying anything permanent on more than one side.

The Tree Protection and Regulation Bylaw protects any tree of 20 centimetres diameter at breast height or more, and separately any tree or shrub of any size located on City-owned or occupied land, which is the limb that bites on boulevard work near a downtown frontage. It bars excavation, demolition, construction, fill or engineering works within 4 metres of the drip line of a protected tree until a tree protection barrier is installed around the critical root zone and either a permit including that tree in a tree protection plan or, where nothing is being cut, a critical root zone work authorization is obtained. It reaches a protected tree on an adjacent lot. No building permit is issued before the barrier has been installed and approved in writing by an arborist, so on the tree lined streets this is a real line on the schedule.

No slope or escarpment overlay appears anywhere in the City's published list of development permit areas. Those areas cover residential neighbourhoods, corridors, commercial nodes, mixed use areas, employment lands, the Brunette River, two study areas, the Downtown area and, in Queensborough, flood hazard. What governs a sloping lot instead is a discretionary power in the Building Bylaw: where the Building Official considers that construction is on land subject to hazardous conditions including concerns regarding slope stability, the Building Official may require the owner to provide a report at the owner's expense, certified by a professional engineer with geotechnical experience, that the lands may be used safely for the intended use. So the slope question is answered by a person rather than by a map, and it is worth asking early.

The Queensborough Community Plan sets minimum construction levels of 3.53 metres above Geodetic Survey of Canada datum for Area A, generally downstream from Derwent Way on the south side and Wood Street on the north, and 4.20 metres above the same datum for Area B upstream of those lines. The levels govern the lower surface of the floor system of the lowest storey containing habitable space, so a deck or an open cover is not what they are written at, but which area a site falls in changes the finished floor that everything else is measured from.

The exemption list in the flood hazard development permit area releases detached accessory buildings and structures such as garages, tool sheds and greenhouses that are not used for human habitation. Elsewhere in the same document attached carports and porches are treated as space that is not habitable for the purpose of the guidelines. Our reading is that most patio covers here sit outside the flood permit and inside the ordinary building and zoning process. The City decides that, not this page.

The plan states, in the same paragraph as the flood levels, that placement of imported fill to achieve those levels could produce local settlement problems and undesirable diversion of flood water, so a combination of fill and structural support may be required. The City's own Building in Queensborough page lists drainage plans, fill requirements, pile foundations, geotechnical reports and details dealing with soil gases among the special permit requirements that the soil conditions and high water table create.

The Zoning Bylaw's height datum definition carries a Queensborough specific proviso: on any site charged by a section 219 flood covenant, where the average elevation of the portion of the site not within any required side, front or rear yard is a minimum of two feet below the flood construction level established for the one in 200 year flood, the height datum shall be the flood construction level. That moves the reference point for every height figure on the project.

In the RQ-1 Queensborough Neighbourhood Residential Dwelling Districts the bylaw states that covered decks or porches attached to the rear or side walls of the house shall not exceed 250 square feet, being 23.23 square metres, and that covered decks or porches shall not be permitted above 3.89 metres. This is the only place in the City's published material where our product is named and given dimensions of its own.

The City defines a small patio of tables and chairs, a seasonal patio that may be set up from April 1 to October 31 each year, and a year-round patio that stays in place. All sidewalk and street patios require approval from the City and a signed encroachment agreement to operate, and the application is reviewed by Building, Fire, Licensing and Bylaws, Planning, Public Realm and Arboriculture together. A patio on private property is a different route and requires a minor development permit.

The guidelines permit portable umbrellas that meet a fire safety fabric standard, are weighted rather than permanently fixed to City property, are brought in at the end of business each day and stay inside the patio footprint. A building permit is required where a roof, an enclosure or an affixed awning is proposed, and separately where the occupant load of an enclosed patio would exceed 30 people or 70 square metres under the BC Building Code. That is the single clearest fork in the road for a downtown or quay operator.

Siding must be soft-sided, with wood, metal, hard plastic and cementitious materials named as out along the facade, and siding must be transparent along the facades to maintain visual connection with the public realm. This is the hospitality version of the same idea running through the heritage documents. In practice it points a patio enclosure toward clear or mesh fabric in a track rather than toward solid panels.

Portable heating devices must be CSA or ULC listed, designed for outdoor use, and installed to the manufacturer's own clearances to the building and to combustible material, with a fire extinguisher inside the closest building entrance and no spare propane stored on the patio. A permanent hard-wired heater must be installed under a building permit and incorporate the manufacturer's clearances to the building and combustible materials, and plumbed gas or electrical work goes to Technical Safety BC. Note that the City defers to the manufacturer for clearance rather than publishing one blanket number, which is how heating should be quoted anyway.

The area of an outdoor patio may not exceed the interior floor area of the business. The guidelines also require 1.5 metres of clear walking width, ask for a 1.8 metre setback from the face of the curb where the patio is on the sidewalk, require a building permit for a raised deck or platform over 61 centimetres with a guard, and require year-round patios to give level entry from the sidewalk.

All patios are subject to the Tree Protection Bylaw, which means decks, structures or platforms planned within 1 metre outside the drip line of a protected tree must be reviewed by the City arborist. The downtown street and the quay are both planted, so this is a live constraint on where a post or a weighted base can land.