style="font-size:15px;"> But when I walk in the door, my business line is ringing. Calling is my work pal Joe, a builder and real estate speculator who hires me once or twice a year to draw some plans for a redo when he decides (or heritage conservation zoning restrictions decide for him) not to demolish an existing house on a newly acquired property, not to build one of his upscale mock-Georgian manors.
Joe has made a small fortune catering to the desires of the rich and home-conscious, building houses with his and hers dressing rooms and wood-panelled libraries, marble and limestone kitchens, two-sided fireplaces, ground-floor great rooms, and luxurious basements outfitted with home theatres, wine cellars, and spas. But for all his apparent traditionalism (he’s my age, was married young to his high school sweetheart, has three kids all older than Jesse, and lives in the far suburbs, in a mansion of his own construction), and unlike other builders and contractors I can name, he’s comfortable working with a female architect. He has never made a sexist remark to me. He’s never once referred to my Japanese-ness, either, or asked me to put shoji screens into a house. And he gives me work. So I’m always happy to hear from him.
Can I meet him this afternoon, he wants to know, come check out a big old pile of a house for sale in the Annex, a few blocks over from me? He has a new, deep-pocketed client who’s thinking about buying it and wants a professional opinion on what could be done to restore and refurbish it and at what approximate cost.
I say yes, we set a time to meet, and I forget all about my aching arm, Spencer, and my resolution to destroy the joints. I’m no visionary, but I can visualize, and I enjoy walking into an old house and trying to see, through the worn carpet and shoddy drywalling and ugly wallpaper and tired drapes, the proud old bones that lie within. When I witness some of the gravity and grace an elderly house can bear, I feel a small spark of the same fire I felt when I visited ancient sites in Europe in my youth. Like when I stood within the Avebury stone circle and was blown about by the centuries of history swirling in the air around me. Or when I crouched down on the ground on the Blasted Heath in Yorkshire thirty years ago and picked up a two-thousand-year-old bronze armlet.
The house where I meet Joe is huge, about forty feet wide, twice as deep, three storeys tall, and adorned with a tall corner turret covered in fishscale shingles. It’s the work of a name architect of early Establishment Toronto and boasts the jumble of declarative (now decaying) architectural elements that local historians have dubbed the Annex style: a heavy stone base, Romanesque arches, terracotta embellishments, a red brick upper trimmed with more stone, and a third-floor sleeping porch framed by Ionic columns and turned woodwork.
Someone has clumsily divided the house into odd-sized apartments, now vacant. Kitchens and bathrooms have been wedged into corners and closets, and steel fire doors inserted into hallways, but the house has retained many engaging features — an intact stained glass window still graces the centre hall stairwell, a few original fireplace mantels remain in place, egg and dart ceiling mouldings adorn what was long ago a front parlour.
The real estate agent who admits us parks herself on a stray chair left in a ground-floor apartment and starts making calls on her cell phone, leaving Joe and I to go through the house together. We knock on walls, try to follow floorboards and baseboards from room to room to discern the original layout, lift up corners of broadloom, take some rough measurements, wonder aloud about covered-up back staircases, false walls, and blocked-in chimneys. We venture into the basement and look at pipes and wiring, poke at plaster and note down signs of patching and leaking, take a tour around the outside and examine the brickwork and trim.
We work quietly and thoroughly and quickly, Joe and I, and admire the solidity of the banister and disparage the hack jobs done to install window air conditioners, and an hour after we’ve arrived, we’re ready to deliver a qualified verdict for the client, whose name is Stewart something.
We’re standing gingerly on the sleeping porch — its wooden floor is rotting — when Stewart drives up in his expensive sports car. Joe says, “I should warn you: this guy’s a bit of a big shot.” Below us, an expensively dressed, silver-haired man steps out of the driver’s seat, his trench coat flying up behind him, and dashes up the walk to the front door.
My anti-authority sense starts tingling. “He thinks he’s King Shit, does he?”
“He acts like he’s a player.”
“How about if you do most of the talking and I stand there and nod a lot, back you up?”
“Good try, but he wants to hear from an expert, and when it comes to these old houses, that’s you.”
Stewart is in fighting shape — I can picture him doing his hour a day on an exercise bike, while checking stock prices on a high-end hand-held electronic device — but his face betrays his age, what with the deep lines, the network of spider veins on his cheeks, a nose that appears to be lengthening while we speak. He’s around sixty, I’d guess. Ten years and a generation older than me.
He says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve seen your work,” and mentions a Second Empire showplace I did a few years back for a wealthy woman in Rosedale, a foundation block on which I built my modest reputation. We chat briefly about that house and owner, and Stewart gives me no immediate reason to get my back up, not yet (he does not refer to my ethnicity, for example), but my first impression is that the design of his eyeglasses is too trendy, his dress shirt too white, his jacket lapels too sharply cut, his Italian leather shoes too shiny.
In the house’s front hall, I start with a few introductory words about the typical features of the Annex style, and Stewart cuts me off after one sentence. “I’m a little short on time,” he says. “Can we get to the specifics, please?” Okay. And strike one.
I lead the way through the ground floor, the real estate agent trailing along behind with Stewart and Joe. I point out what I think the original room layout and finishes were and explain what would have to be done to restore them, with Joe supplying rough estimates for costs along the way. Stewart is the smart sort of rich man — he must have earned his money rather than inherited it — and catches on quickly. He can visualize, too.
When we reach the back of the house and stand near the cramped galley kitchen outfitted for one of the apartments, I say, “The house’s original kitchen was not likely located in this area, but that may not be relevant — I’m assuming you’d want a large, modern kitchen that spans the back of the house.”
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