SANDERS, George Hipsley (1838-1920), active in British Columbia in partnership with John Wright, as Wright & Sanders, Architects, and a member in the following offices:
Wright & Sanders, Victoria, B.C., 1859-1866
Wright & Sanders, San Francisco, Calif., 1866-1900
G.H. Sanders, San Francisco, Calif. 1901-1914
Born in Canada on 2 August 1838, perhaps in Hamilton, Ont., he may have been educated there, and it appears he articled with an architectural office in Hamilton. In a newspaper article published in 1860, he was referred to as an architect “….who served an apprenticeship with Mr. Thomas of that city” (Globe [Toronto], 12 March 1860, 2). This undoubtedly was a reference to the well-known Toronto architect William Thomas, who was active in both Toronto and Hamilton, and who had completed several commissions in both cities. By 1859, at the age of 21 years, Sanders was living in Victoria, B.C. where he was invited by John Wright to form a partnership (see list of works under Wright & Sanders). Their practise in Victoria was remarkably successful, and, during the next six years, they received nearly thirty major commissions for ecclesiastical, institutional, commercial and residential buildings in Victoria and from as far away as Nanaimo and New Westminster, B.C.
Their success in British Columbia was merely a prelude to even greater achievements in California, where both Sanders and John Wright moved in 1866 to open an office in San Francisco. Over the course of the next 30 years, their firm became one of the busiest architectural offices in the state. Recent research conducted by Norman J. Ronnenberg Jr. of Berkeley, Calif. has identified over 100 buildings designed by the firm in the Bay Area, many of which are listed in monthly issues of the local architectural journal called The California Architect & Building News [San Francisco].
When Wright decided to retire from the profession in 1895, Sanders continued to operate the firm under its former name of Wright & Sanders, but much of the work carried out by the firm from 1895 to 1900 can be credited to Sanders. That same year, in 1895, Sanders was invited by Bernard R. Maybeck, one of the leading architects in San Francisco, to join the staff of a new School of Architecture at the Mark Hopkins Institute, and to teach the subject of architectural history (Morning Call [San Francisco], 22 Aug. 1895, 7). Sanders continued to practise in San Francisco under his own name from 1901, and it is likely that he made a professional contribution to the rebuilding of that city after the disastrous earthquake in April 1906.
After closing his office in San Francisco in 1914, Sanders moved across The Bay to Berkeley, and later died there on 24 January 1920 (death notice San Francisco Chronicle, 26 Jan. 1920, 8). An obituary article on Sanders, published one day earlier in the same newspaper on 25 January 1920, page 5, refers to a person mistakenly named “Robert A. Sanders“, but correctly describes him as a “Pioneer S.F. Architect….who was associated with the firm of Wright & Sanders”. An illustrated essay on the architectural work of Wright & Sanders in Canada was published in Donald Luxton, Building The West: The Early Architects of British Columbia, 2003, 36-40, illus. Many articles published in American newspapers on the work of the firm in California between 1866 and 1900 consistently misspell the last name of Sanders as “Saunders” [sic].