This page was created by Sean Fu.
The Veranda - A Taste of Luxury
The inclusion of the veranda serves to domesticize the mixed-use building, clearly demarcating the residential portion of the second storey. Covered landings that provided open-air relaxation with partial protection from the sun and weather were usually present on higher-end, more luxurious homes and mansions (one does not need to venture far from Keyes Block for an example of this - the home of the Findlay Family on 207 High Street is a case in point). The style of living present in Keyes Block, where the storeowner resides directly above their commercial enterprise, was the norm for those of middle-class strata, and the veranda was a means of both making the second floor more hospitable and injecting an air of luxury into the exterior of the quaint living quarters and the Keyes Block as a whole.
Inspirations of luxury were not only sourced from homes. Another particular inspiration for the veranda could very well have been the shopping arcade, glass-roofed causeways with windowed shops on both sides that were the sites of luxurious leisure in cities on both sides of the Atlantic. A typology rooted Italian Renaissance piazzas, the arcade flourished in Europe before being introduced to North America on a grander scale, spearheaded by the Arcade in Cleveland, Ohio.² The veranda overtop of the plate glass ground floor on the street gives the appearance of a cut-out from such an institution, an image of urban leisure that would most certainly have reflected well upon George Keyes and his store.
In short, the veranda of Keyes Block is an invaluable original example of the early-20th-century dispersion of urban design into a small-town context, which was a by-product of shifting urban-rural patterns in a quickly industrializing Canada and well-reflected in Carleton Place's own history as a site of agriculture, logging, ironwork and appliance manufactory. The veranda is also exceptionally effective as a domesticizing feature of the home and an ornamental illustrator of the Keyes Block's residential and commercial combination.
