I've been wanting this blog to be a bit different. Not just the finished photos of a finished room, but what a real week actually looks like, and the towns and homes across the Montérégie where all of this happens.
When a renovation is underway, I'm on-site with the clients and the trades on a weekly basis, not just dropping in at the big milestones. Old homes have a way of surprising you mid-project. Last year, while digging a foundation for an extension on a stone house in Elgin, the crew hit a boulder too large to remove. The plans I'd drawn up had to be reworked around it, figuring out how to make it work instead of fighting it. That's the kind of surprise old homes hand you. Other times it goes the other way, we'll have new flooring specified, only to pull up the subfloor and find the original hardwood still in good condition underneath. The plan changes again, but always for the better, and I'm grateful to be there for every version of it.
Although I've always been drawn to old homes and fascinated by the stories they hold, I didn't expect to specialize in century homes specifically. I studied interior design in Montreal, worked at a firm in the city, and then started my own business. It wasn't until my partner and I bought our own 1830s farmhouse in Hinchinbrooke, and started renovating it, that it really hit me how much these homes deserve to be treated with care, and just how special it was. The craftsmanship, the history, the fact that they're still standing after all these years. Living through that process myself, at the same time I was helping clients through theirs, is really what turned that draw into a purpose.
Growing up on a horse farm outside Ormstown, I always knew I'd have horses around me. Once we had our own land in Hinchinbrooke, that's exactly what happened. Our timber-frame barn was built in 1923 for dairy cows, and there were sheep on this land before us. Having horses here now doesn't feel like something new, it feels like this place doing what it's always done, just with a different animal in the barn. These days that's grown into boarding a broodmare, her yearling, and this year's new foal, plus a small flock of hens and one miniature goat who acts like she owns the place. Barn chores are as much a part of my week as client meetings, and I wouldn't trade either one.
A while back I was standing in an 1880s farmhouse with a client in St-Anicet who'd just bought it, and he asked me why I chose to work on old homes instead of new builds. I told him what I've come to believe firsthand, that it isn't about convenience, it's what these buildings hold onto that new construction simply can't replicate. He clearly felt that pull himself. From day one, he was fully committed to keeping his home's soul intact.
One of my favourite details from that project was a kitchen cabinet we built on wheels, so it can be pulled aside to reach an old hatch door leading down to the original cistern. It wasn't a small ask, it was something he genuinely wanted to hold onto, and requests like that never fail to surprise me. I love getting to design around something that means that much to a client.
Two other projects I've worked on for clients in the dairy farming community ended up featured in Reno + Décor, a rural poolside escape and a century farmhouse addition. For the addition, we brought in beams over a hundred years old, pulled from an old barn. Using materials with that much history means nothing about the space feels added on, it feels like it was always meant to be there. For the pool, the clients dug the stones out of the ground themselves, from the excavation and from their own fields, and used them to line the fence around the new pool area. That's the kind of detail that makes a new area feel like it belongs to the land it's on, and it's exactly why I love working with people like this.
If you enjoyed this look behind the scenes, my newsletter has more of it, along with the antique shops, tile stores, and wood yards I'm digging through each week. Join here.