News

On a leafy boulevard near Dundas and Ossington, this partitioned and disjointed Victorian offered the kind of challenge that Suzanne Dimma revels in.

Ms. Dimma is the home design editor of a cluster of magazines, including Wish, Canadian Family and Gardening Life. She also frequently uses her house as a laboratory on HGTV's The Style Dept., which chronicles the art of primping a room for a magazine spread.

During her downtime, Ms. Dimma starts looking around for walls to demolish in the start of a gradual process of reuniting parts of the house carved up by previous renovations.

In the midst of all this, she is planning her wedding with fiancé Arriz Hassam. Mr. Hassam is one of the three visionary principals of 3rd UNCLE design Inc., and what really makes for an interesting challenge is the creation of one shared house when the owners are both so immersed in design — and so divergent in their tastes.

"We worked on it together, which was interesting," Ms. Dimma says. "I had to shift my style, but I was ready to do that."

In fact, Ms. Dimma had decided to sell her former house in another Toronto neighbourhood because she felt ready for a change from the more rustic, country ambience that had appealed to her in the past.

When she purchased the new property, in a neighbourhood gradually losing some of its grittiness, the house was chopped up into apartments. With tenants still living around her, she carved out her own niche in the centre. Later, she and Mr. Hassam set out to reconfigure the ground floor.

The front hall and entranceway were reclaimed from the tenants and restored with paint, a hanging wall cabinet and new floor tiles.

"It's got a nice, old-world feel," Ms. Dimma says. "I like mixing up the old and the modern."

The pair enlarged the door to the living room — opening it right to the ceiling and making it as wide as possible — to provide views from the front of the house to the rear.

"When you're in the living room, you can actually see right through to the garden."

Ms. Dimma disguised the stairs to the basement with a cabinet that also shelters a cat litter box.

"I hate cat litter boxes so I've got all these ways to hide them," she says.

The current dining room housed Ms. Dimma's office for a while. Always looking for ways to "repurpose" items on The Style Dept., she moved a wall cabinet down to the level of the table, put a marble top on it and now uses it as a buffet.

"It fit perfectly. I couldn't believe it," she says.

The maple floors were in good shape, so Ms. Dimma had them stained ebony.

She and Mr. Hassam kept the cherry base cabinets in the kitchen but moved all of the upper cabinets to the basement apartment.

Ms. Dimma leaned toward painting the cherry wood but Mr. Hassam talked her out of it. Surrounded by the warm wood now, she's glad he did. He designed the gleaming marble island, which has become the locus of the main floor.

"It makes the kitchen a really nice place to hang out," she says.

New windows were added at the back and a rickety backyard deck was replaced. Now the rear garden is a wonderful place for entertaining, she says.

After a time, another tenant moved out and the couple annexed the second- and third-floor rooms at the front of the house.

Because on the show she talks about such topics as setting up lighting, mixing modern pieces with antiques and arranging art, her home is always changing.

In one episode, for example, she uses a vividly patterned carpet, lacquer pieces and artwork to turn the upstairs living room of the rental apartment into a home study for her and Mr. Hassam.

Next, the couple will tackle the master bedroom, which is currently on the second floor. Ms. Dimma hasn't decided yet whether to remove the sound-insulated wall that separates the front of the house from the back.

It works well currently, she says, because Mr. Hassam can listen to music in the front study without having the sound reverberate throughout the house.

She wants to build more storage space and bookshelves to complement the walnut cabinets she already has.

"We needed to max out on the storage," she says.

In the living room, they refinished the fireplace surround, stained the floor and put up curtains. The couple worked together on placing all of the art.

During the decorating of the living room, the pair sometimes wrangled, Ms. Dimma says.

"He's much more of a pure modernist."

Mr. Hassam wanted an iconic Eames chair in the living room, for example, instead of the more deep-and-comfortable style that Ms. Dimma was proposing.

Ms. Dimma relented, and now she appreciates the Eames.

"That really simple gesture — it took me a while to say 'that works,'" she admits.

But ultimately, it's the melding of two styles that makes the house so much more interesting, she believes.

"It's layering up really nicely. And it will get more layered over time."

Ms. Dimma sees lots of people who become intimidated by decorating when they should just have fun with their experiments. If you don't like something, just shift it around, she advises, while admitting to constantly putting new holes in the wall as she tries out different pieces of art in various spots.

Ms. Dimma also thinks about how pieces will work if she moves on to another house. She likes built-in cabinetry, but she also buys things that will work in lots of different settings.

The designer also advises people to mix things up.

"Try not to put like next to like. Create contrast as you go."

While Mr. Hassam's influence can be seen throughout, Ms. Dimma says she spends more time working on the city house while he is engrossed in designing their off-the-grid cottage in Northern Ontario.

"This is my baby for sure."