The Globe and Mail

You might say the Toronto home of Elena and Jorge Soni has identity issues. But definitely in a good way.

While it is rooted in the cold Canadian landscape, its decor radiates all the warmth of Latin America. The inspiration for that came easy to the couple: She, a fashion designer and visual artist, hails from Caracas; he, a respected psychiatrist, from Mexico City.

The sound of maracas wouldn't be out of place in their Summerville area house. There are walls painted bright yellow and orange, and terracotta floors, the latter thanks to Ms. Soni's importation of saltillo tile from Mexico.

She has left the tiles raw - all the better to absorb the spills and thrills ensuing from her small, but busy, galley kitchen.

"With all the cooking and all the traffic, they have cured themselves," says the raven-haired beauty, glad that she was thus able to avoid aging them the Latin American way - with regular ladles of kerosene.

This illustrates another aesthetic evident in the house. "Fortunately, with all the abuse we subject them to, the tiles have also lost their shininess," Ms. Soni explains. "This is important. I cannot abide anything looking new and shiny. I don't want my house looking like a magazine picture. It's got to look lived in, which is why I have surrounded myself with things with a story, a history, a feeling of being connected to real people's lives. If it doesn't have a story then what's the point?"

It is morning. Standing in her kitchen, wearing a blouse sprouting roses that is one of her own designs, she is stirring an ice wine sauce that she will serve at a Canada-inspired dinner for 20, also starring braised pork and squash soup, to be held in her home later that evening.

She prepares all from memory, improvising as she talks, with herbs pulled from cupboards that have about them their own sense of spice in that each comes with a narrative that Ms. Soni, blessed with a wicked wit, hastens to tells as she leans over the stove.

To her right is a maple cabinet - formerly a workman's bench - whose top she uses as a cutting board. She has modified it to create additional storage space below.

She bought it seven years ago at the Aberfoyle antique market near Guelph, where she went one day with a friend, both dressed for the country in their best heels and wide brimmed hats - fashionistas gone to the fair.

The experience illustrates another of her interests: While her heart is in the southern hemisphere, she has a healthy appreciation for northern craftsmanship.

"All the dealers were bringing out their wares, it was 7:30 in the morning. ... And then 20 minutes later out came this carpenter's workbench," she continues, turning to her right, "which dates from the 1800s and which has a vise that I threaten my husband and children with all the time - to no avail."

Not missing a beat, she turns to describe a hand-carved pine wardrobe that is wedged up against the refrigerator and that she uses to store dishes.

"It comes from Austria," she says, "dragged into the wilderness of Northern Ontario some time last century by some immigrant family who wanted to bring with them a feeling of home into a strange and alien landscape full of bears and bugs and other things that didn't make sense to them.

"When I saw it, it was the first time in my life that I realized you could have magical realism in a place other than Latin America. And so I had to have it, if only to remind me of my own origins."

Elsewhere in her four-storey house are many more reminders - most of them inherited rather than purchased in fields far from home.

"As you will see, most things look like they have been here forever," explains Ms. Soni as she embarks on a mini tour, her sauce left to bubble on its own.

"We have decorated our house with the leftovers from family members, both Jorge's and mine, nothing with a set plan."

This means that in the kitchen an antique chandelier, made of Bohemian crystal, that she inherited from her Basque grandmother, hangs next to a statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, an icon popular in her husband's native Mexico.

In the living room, a collection of wrestling masks from Cuernavaca, sparring capital of Mexico, overlook a black upholstered antique French armchair that Mr. Soni's mother once housed in her New York pied-à-terre.

There is about the house a feeling of great style that has been smudged around the edges to make it seem lived in, as well as marked by generations of shared experience.

"I don't like things to be too formal," Ms. Soni says.

"My mother always told me that when you go out you get dressed up, but before you leave you pull one hair out of your do because you don't want anyone to accuse you of having tried too hard. Perfection isn't the goal. You have to look alive."

Helping impart that sense of vibrant elegance is the art collection on vivid display throughout the house.

The eclectic range includes black-and-white photography by Toronto's Michael Rafaelson and Mexico's Laura Cohen; and a painted oar, featuring imagery by Canadian artist Mike Taylor of a raven and a bear, that is suspended over the sunken living room from the ceiling; and a large painting on burlap by Helena Tyminski, a White Russian who was Ms. Soni's maternal grandmother's neighbour in Caracas.

More art lines walls flanking the spiralling yellow staircase that leads up to the home's upper two stories.

Dr. Soni's grandfather had been an art dealer in Mexico City and some of the work, including a portrait of the psychiatrist as a young boy of 11, is by Juan Sorieno, a celebrated artist in Latin America who had been a friend of Dr. Soni's family. Photographs of them also are richly on display, as well as images of Ms. Soni's family.

This is a home that feeds off kindred relationships. Follow the images and you go from what was to what is - from the ancestors to their offspring whose bedrooms are found at the top of the stairs.

The one belonging to the couple startles with its 18-foot ceiling - a zoom with a view. Across the hall are the bedrooms belonging to each of their children (their daughter's is girly pink and chicly black; their son's is messy and perfumed with eau de sports socks).

Up another flight of stairs and there is the atelier where Ms. Soni fashions her own artistic creations made of found objects, including garbage.

Furnishing the loft-like studio is a Depression-era multidrawer cabinet that once belonged to an East Coast fisherman. The knobs were made from wooden spools cut in half and the elongated rectangular drawers from cheddar cheese boxes deep enough to hold tackle. It's a relic from the past but one that dovetails well with Ms. Soni's postmodern sensibility.

"When I see an interesting piece of garbage, I just get a visceral reaction," she says. "I think, 'How can I use this? How can I make it work?' "

She is pointing to a picture she has made from the detritus of a party in Acapulco.

There had been a wedding and left behind after the festivities were the fallen petals of a camellia and bits of organza shaped as leaves that had probably adorned a guest's dress.

Also in the dust were gull feathers and the remnants of a sandalwood fan, perhaps crushed beneath dancing feet.

Ms. Soni took this raw material and reshaped it into a fantastical dress that she displays under glass like a painting.

That is her talent: to breathe life into things left behind and thought forgotten.

It's in large part what she has done with her house - filling it with old objects to underscore a sense of belonging in a new land.

"I am crazy about quilts," she says, mentioning one last tactile obsession of hers. "I like the idea of taking bits of things and weaving them into something whole, something new."