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With impish understatement, Salah Bachir calls his vacation home in Paris, Ont., a "country house," conjuring up the bucolic vision of a thatched-roofed cottage — an image he takes no pains to correct. Which is what makes the property so hard to find for a first-time visitor from Toronto.

You drive in circles around the town, expecting to find a cutoff that will take you to a log cabin in the woods. Then, believing you are lost, you stop to ask for directions. You are surprised when the person on the street immediately knows the address you're talking about: "You mean the mayor's house? Why, it's right over there."

Craning your neck in the direction of the pointed finger, you see an enormous gated fence. You blink because there's a sculpture you'd expect to find only in the other Paris. You push a button on the intercom, ready to apologize for being in the wrong place. But the gate swings slowly open, and then you see him: not the mayor, but the next best thing — the new lord of the manor, living a life of relaxed elegance.

"Come in, come in," Mr. Bachir says. "You don't mind using the servant's entrance do you?" He is grinning ear-to-ear, aware of the impact his so-called "cottage" has on those seeing it for the first time.

On occasion, Mr. Bachir has heightened that element of surprise by deliberately driving guests up the wrong path to a true rural abode, sinking verandah and all.

"They tell me how charming it is, thinking to be polite," says the well-known Toronto business executive and philanthropist, relishing the tale. "And then I tell them that if they tire of it, they can meet me up at the house, which, when I finally take them to it, they stare at in disbelief."

Quaint it isn't. At more than 9,000 square feet, the sheer scale of the place — not to mention its many rooms filled to the rafters with museum-worthy art — make anyone visiting it for the first time think they've arrived at the real centre of civilization.

Toronto and its gold-tinted condo towers, located less than an hour's drive to the east, seems crass in comparison.

A silk purse of a house, it astonishes all onlookers, including drivers who slow down as they pass, enchanted by its suggestion of old-world grandeur.

"When I'm here, I feel as if I'm really away from it all," Mr. Bachir says. "It's my retreat and my spa, where I surround myself with beauty, where I completely relax."

The former home of Charles Whitelaw, first mayor of Paris, it was built in 1842 in a mélange of Tudor, Victorian and Georgian architectural styles borrowed from Mr. Whitelaw's native England.

The mayor was friends with Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone who lived in nearby Brantford, and was a frequent visitor to the house in Paris. (In 1876, he received the first long-distance call — from Brantford — in a telegraph office a short walk away at 91 Grand River St. North.)

In those days, the 17-room house featured five bathrooms, and nine fireplaces whose mantels were made of hand-carved Carrara marble. Six remain in the house that today boasts 21 rooms, including five bedrooms and six remodelled bathrooms.

Despite an extensive renovation in which Mr. Bachir created a Zen-inspired, second-floor spa with a steam room, whirlpool tub, walk-in shower and soaring skylight, the house seems like it belongs to another place, another world. A feeling of stateliness remains, even in the renovated basement where the video game Wii dominates a large flat-screen TV.

Made of solid brick with pointed fretwork gables, the home still has such original details as etched-glass windows and ornamental plaster mouldings inside. Carved into a series of window frames in the front foyer are trilliums, the floral emblem of Ontario, a reminder that this was once home to the highest-ranking man in the town.

Giving the home its due, Mr. Bachir has decorated it with hand-cut Murano chandeliers that he purchased in Venice, and antique furniture and rugs bought in part at Jonny's Antiques in nearby Shakespeare, and Stanley Wagman & Son Antiques in Toronto.

Some of the more remarkable pieces include an 18th-century Chinese opium bed in the foyer, and a pair of large wooden angels in the dining room. Once part of a Baroque church in France, the angels adorn the red walls of the dining room, which also features a gold-leaf ceiling. The dining room table, dating from 1870, once belonged to Roland Michener, a former governor-general of Canada. Sitting on an antique carpet from Iran, the table can seat as many as 14 people.

Other rooms have a more contemporary feel, among them a front sitting room with adjoining sunroom, for which Toronto's LA Design created sage-coloured couches. Mr. Bachir encourages his guests to sprawl out on them, in order to better watch the sports channel.

"It's about creating the ultimate in comfort," he says. "I want everyone who comes here to feel that there are no airs, no ceremony. It's about kicking off your shoes, laying back, and feeling like you've come home."

That said, it is a weekend house. Mr. Bachir lives and works in Toronto, where he is president of Cineplex Media, which provides cinema advertising. He is also publisher of the in-theatre magazines Famous, Famous Québec and Famous Kids.

He also serves as vice-chairman of the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research, as well as chairman of the 519 Church St. Community Centre capital campaign, to which he personally donated $1-million.

As an arts patron and collector, he specializes in contemporary art, and has one of the world's largest private collections of Andy Warhol, in addition to many works by Canadian artist Attila Lukacs, many of which have never been shown publicly.

In addition to works by those two, his Paris house contains art by dozens of other artists, such as Keith Haring, Betty Goodwin, Frida Kahlo, General Idea (a collective that included Canadian artists Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson), David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jim Dine.

Bronze animal sculptures by Tom Dean, Canada's representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and pieces by other sculptors dot the immense, landscaped garden, which offers the fragrances of orange blossoms, roses and hydrangea flowers. This is where Mr. Bachir's beloved Tibetan terrier, Ella — named for jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, whom Mr. Bachir knew and admired — chases the many chipmunks who freely roam the manicured lawns.

Martin Kohn of Kohn Shnier Architects executed much of the renovation of Mr. Bachir's Paris house, converting a first-floor breezeway into a contemporary entranceway featuring cherry wood, slate and glass, and a new window through which natural light floods.

"I wanted to mix the old style with a modern look," Mr. Bachir says, underscoring his appreciation for the here-and-now. "You can't copy something built 160 years ago and pretend it was built at that time. The trick is to make something that goes and flows and complements the architecture of the time, like the I.M. Pei pyramid at the Louvre, for example, which I think is a perfect blend of old and new."

Working in collaboration with local architect Paul Dowling, Mr. Kohn also executed the conversion of an upstairs bedroom into a spa-like retreat that, while it was being built, was the talk of the town.

"I was stopped in the local IGA by a woman who was scandalized that I would even dare to update the plumbing in such a historic home as this," Mr. Bachir recalls. "I turned to her and said, 'If Queen Victoria could have had heated floors in her day, she would have installed them, too.'"

Friends of Mr. Bachir quip that he bought the country house because he needed more wall space for his magnificent art collection. But Mr. Bachir says he just wanted to get away from the hectic pace of the city.

"I was travelling so much, and wanted to get away from downtown," he says, relaxing into the gentle sway of a rocking chair in his kitchen.

He hatched that plan 16 years ago, while sitting in a Toronto traffic jam.

Wishing for an escape, he flipped open a newspaper lying on the front seat of his car, where he saw an image of the house listed for sale. He noted it was stately.

"I asked a friend if he knew anything about Paris, Ontario," recalls Mr. Bachir. (He eventually discovered that the town, first settled in 1829 along the banks of the Grand River, was named for its nearby deposits of gypsum, the material used to make plaster of Paris.)

The friend did, and coincidentally, was going to a dinner party there the next day. He asked Mr. Bachir to come along.

As fate would have it, the dinner party took place in the very house he had just seen in the newspaper.

Mr. Bachir remembers every detail of that first encounter.

"I was sitting in the living room, admiring the mouldings, the high ceilings, the astonishing architectural detail, and I thought, wow, what I could do with a place like this." The rest, as they say, is history.