An inky canvas of sky pin holed with stars.
Dancing diamonds of moonlight on the lake.
The house, glowing lantern-like, unabashedly reveals its every function.
Each vies for my attention as I stand on soft ground listening to a cacophonic symphony of crickets and Lake Erie surf. Since I'm here at the invitation of architects James Brown and Kim Storey to experience a house designed by Ms. Storey's late father, Chatham-based architect Joe Storey, I'll let the house win: surf, stars and crickets you can get anywhere, while Mr. Storey's sublime modernism is confined mainly to southwestern Ontario.
During his prolific 28-year career, Mr. Storey designed just about every type of building imaginable — flower shops, office blocks, band shells, chapels and even an unrealized dream of converting sugar beet silos into apartments — but, as is usually the case, it's the intimate scale of the single-family home that allows for a tangible connection to his work. This house, designed and built in 1960 for the Ough family, makes connecting even easier: save for a sunroom addition done in the 1970s or 1980s, it remains untouched by the heavy hands of renovation.
Owner Charlotte McKeough, 54, should know. Not only did she buy the Cedar Springs residence — which she's christened "Bally High" — to use as a summer home in 1999, she grew up next door and befriended the Ough children until the family moved away in 1970. She still refers to the bedrooms by the names of the various family members who slept in them, and she remembers how strangely modern the place looked to her young eyes: "I didn't have much appreciation for architecture, really," she says, "[but] that bathtub just sent us to the moon because it was like a swimming pool."
The bathtub is still there in the master bedroom en-suite, and it does indeed look like a mini in-ground pool: all right angles, it's recessed into the floor (the house has no basement) and dressed in shades of baby blue tile. There's also an original vanity and an overhead trellis in baby blue; in true Joe Storey fashion, the grid-like trellis borrows and extends space by marching out into the foyer. Now empty, the trellis and its accompanying planter were once the domain of Ms. Ough's philodendron.
Since so much of the home is original — light fixtures, slate floors, fireplace — it's easier to note what isn't. Appliances have been updated, of course, but many of the things Ms. McKeough has done are of the unsexy — and therefore unnoticeable — variety: a new roof to more closely match the original, flooring in the kitchen and adjoining playroom and a painstaking restoration of the home's most striking feature, the wall of southern-facing windows, courtesy of handyman extraordinaire Bob Denkers in neighbouring Charing Cross. Funny to think that, when Ms. McKeough bought the place, that majestic view of Lake Erie was blocked by heavy drapes and foggy Plexiglas panels installed over the glass.
It's this wall of windows that has me entranced as I stand outside and watch salad-spinning and stove-tending in one area, conversation and radio-fiddling in another, and a walk across the length of the long house to the bathroom, as if it were some beautifully choreographed ballet. It's not that the home's occupants perform these rather mundane actions more gracefully in this space, but rather the reverse: The graceful space elevates ordinariness into something extraordinary for the viewer. In other words, the packaging makes the product seem more exciting.
The modernist dream of a voyeuristic glass house is nothing new — take Mies van der Rohe's 1946 Farnsworth house, for instance — and the notion of architecture as exciting 'packaging' for people isn't either, but it's always interesting to see how these ideas manifested themselves in Canada.
Back inside, I enjoy sitting on the living room couch and looking straight through the galley kitchen to the far wall of the 1,800 sq. ft. home; during the month Ms. Storey and Mr. Brown have rented from Ms. McKeough, Ms. Storey has enjoyed ferreting out similarities between this house and her childhood home (a 1957 Joe Storey design), which is just 20 minutes to the north on Chatham's Victoria Avenue.
It's easy to understand why Ms. McKeough enjoys this place, a 1962 CNE award-winner for being an "all gas" house: not only are there sentimental reasons (her parents are still next door), it provides a welcome weekend distraction from running her funky Brave Brown Bag empire in Cambridge (www.bravebrownbag.com) and, additionally, it's a wonderful example of mid-century modernist architecture, which she's loved since her "provincial eyes" were opened to it while working at Nienkamper in the late 1980s.
Thankfully, Ms. McKeough has decided to allow others to open their own eyes to modernist architecture by renting her Joe Storey home on a monthly or yearly basis. "Maybe it's a writer that just wants to chill for a year," she offers. Provided they don't mind allowing the surf, stars and crickets to take a back seat, it'll work out just swimmingly.
In Pictures:
