Rooted In Time

Home By Design

For those of us with agrarian roots—pretty much everybody, if you go back far enough—there is nothing like a beautiful farmhouse. So when the longtime client of Montreal-based design firm Les Ensembliers tasked them to create a version of a British country cottage on his 160-acre plot in Hemmingford, Quebec, they jumped at the chance. “He said, ‘I want to feel like I’m on an old English farm,’” designer Richard Ouellette recalls. “So you know what that means: that means we need plaid, we need florals that feel a little dated and flushed out by sun. We need fabrics that feel like they’ve been there forever.”

This particular client longed to create a sustainable permaculture farm, and this farmhouse would be his outpost when he’s on-site there. The existing structure was “a pretty traditional old stone house connected to a barn,” says Ouellette. “The barn was more of a built from scratch, ‘making it work’ barn in the ’80s or ’90s, but the stone house itself is from maybe [circa] 1860s or 1875. It needed some work, but it still was okay. So we revisited everything, redid the fireplaces from scratch and from the original way of doing [it], and brought this little cabin of a house into a retreat.”

Inside, the designers mixed historical touches like rough-hewn beams and knubby stone with modern yet warm finishes to great effect. The results are thoroughly timeless, the type of farmhouse one would want to cozy up in today or fifty years ago or fifty years into the future.

While Les Ensembliers did revise much of the home’s original floor plan for modern-day circulation and flow, keeping plenty of age-old architectural elements and finishes intact was paramount, including everything from the stone to the windows (which they replaced with wavy glass “so you’re not seeing through them perfectly,” says Oullette).

“The beams themselves were kept in all of the places where we could, like in the bar and in the living room. And the original floors themselves were kept. They weren’t even touched—we didn’t even protect them while we were doing the work. We wanted them to feel as beat up as we could and we left them as is.” They made an especially unexpected decision in the living room: “The far wall back behind the sofas is actually the original patina from the walls; we didn’t paint that wall; we left it beat up as is. So it feels truly original to the space.”

Bringing it all very much into the present, though, was the client’s modern-art collection, which provides a very current juxtaposition. “For him, what was important was ‘give me a fantastic backdrop, then choose the art that you love from my collection and pop them on the walls,’” says Oullette. And quirk is key; many of the antique items here were found in outbuildings and other old barns on the expansive property. “You have a little chair instead of a nightstand, you have a comfortable, fantastic bed, but you have a small little lamp that’s more contemporary that comes to you so that you can read a book. But everything else is mismatched fabrics and it feels dated like a beautiful English farm. I dream of English farms in my life. It’s the perfect mix of every element that feels that it was built over time and nothing matches.”

The results are impeccable. Says Ouellette: “Everybody to this day, every friend that we know from this client that visited, talked to us about how wonderful that place is and how the soul of this place is kept,” he says. “That was really important for us.”

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