didn’t bother renovating the kitchen—she didn’t expect to spend much time there. The house came with some big old turn-of-the-century furniture that the previous owners had abandoned.
When Mum left behind our luxurious ex-pat lifestyle in Hong Kong and Singapore, she unwittingly left behind chauffeurs, houseboys, cooks, and gardeners. When Chris and Victor were born here in Oakville, Mum was shocked to discover that babies born in Canada didn’t automatically come with amahs. But although the staff was missing, this house in Oakville approximated the size and shape of the houses they’d left behind. It was expansive and commanding, just like their personalities, with strong bones, too, able to withstand the storms generated by their frustrations. It saved their marriage: Dad quipped that it had so many rooms they could go days without seeing each other.
Of the twenty-three rooms, eight are bedrooms and many have two doors, each room leading into the next. There are rooms for everything: a mudroom, workroom, TV room, playroom, kitchen, pantry, trunk room, pool room, laundry room, dining room, living room, and an attic running the full length of the house. There are two staircases—one for the main part of the house with a solid oak banister and one in the back, off the pantry, for the maid.
Masses of tall, four-foot windows open in on their hinges like doors, their panes rippling with hand-blown glass. Mum called them the shout-out kind, hearkening back to a friendlier time. The sightlines are extraordinary—the lake beckons from every window. Everywhere you turn, the sun streams in and the rooms are ablaze with light.
Facing the lake, the wide, full-length verandah is skirted by lattice and climbing wisteria vines. Fresh breezes waft through the screens, carrying the mingled perfume of hydrangeas and lilacs. Beneath the verandah there’s an ancient floor of beach sand and shale where raccoons and squirrels take shelter fromwinter storms and where, in summer, the creative energy of the winds ebb and flow unobstructed.
Mum loved the fact that Point O’ View had a limitless horizon. Big skies, like high ceilings and long horizons, allowed imaginations to soar, she told us, and looking up at the stars at night made you see how infinitesimal your problems really were. She hated to be boxed in by rules or structure of any kind.
The house had ample space for Mum’s clutter and she filled it with their joint acquisitions: Dad’s inherited British antiques, her Colonial American ones, their Malay busts, Chinese portraits, carved cedar chests, and the low opium bed that served as our coffee table. She set up her manual typewriter at one end of the dining-room table and wrote copious letters to her friends and family, describing her new life in Canada. But her letters didn’t stay away for long; friends found them so fascinating that they mailed them back, certain she’d want to save them. Mum stuffed them into plastic bags and chucked them in the trunk room, feeding her own personal compost heap that seemed to grow faster and steamier than Dad’s in the garden.
Dad’s bunker was the basement. This was where he escaped to putter: where he polished his shoes each morning on the long wooden bench; where he set up his pots of seedlings in a makeshift incubator under the windows; and where he kept his birdseed, gardening tools, and plant encyclopedias.
Dad was handsome—some said a Cary grant look-alike, tall and distinguished in his bearing—reserved, mannerly, disciplined, and fastidious. He was a perfectionist, used the King’s English, and lived the way he had during the Great Depression, with minimal possessions—only the barenecessities, each one neatly stored in its place: labelled, filed, shipshape. After surviving war in the jungles of Malaya, Dad saw self-denial as a matter of pride, a badge of honour; he learned to excel at it, and over time it became a lifestyle choice: cut the fat, stay lean.
Mum
When Mum left behind our luxurious ex-pat lifestyle in Hong Kong and Singapore, she unwittingly left behind chauffeurs, houseboys, cooks, and gardeners. When Chris and Victor were born here in Oakville, Mum was shocked to discover that babies born in Canada didn’t automatically come with amahs. But although the staff was missing, this house in Oakville approximated the size and shape of the houses they’d left behind. It was expansive and commanding, just like their personalities, with strong bones, too, able to withstand the storms generated by their frustrations. It saved their marriage: Dad quipped that it had so many rooms they could go days without seeing each other.
Of the twenty-three rooms, eight are bedrooms and many have two doors, each room leading into the next. There are rooms for everything: a mudroom, workroom, TV room, playroom, kitchen, pantry, trunk room, pool room, laundry room, dining room, living room, and an attic running the full length of the house. There are two staircases—one for the main part of the house with a solid oak banister and one in the back, off the pantry, for the maid.
Masses of tall, four-foot windows open in on their hinges like doors, their panes rippling with hand-blown glass. Mum called them the shout-out kind, hearkening back to a friendlier time. The sightlines are extraordinary—the lake beckons from every window. Everywhere you turn, the sun streams in and the rooms are ablaze with light.
Facing the lake, the wide, full-length verandah is skirted by lattice and climbing wisteria vines. Fresh breezes waft through the screens, carrying the mingled perfume of hydrangeas and lilacs. Beneath the verandah there’s an ancient floor of beach sand and shale where raccoons and squirrels take shelter fromwinter storms and where, in summer, the creative energy of the winds ebb and flow unobstructed.
Mum loved the fact that Point O’ View had a limitless horizon. Big skies, like high ceilings and long horizons, allowed imaginations to soar, she told us, and looking up at the stars at night made you see how infinitesimal your problems really were. She hated to be boxed in by rules or structure of any kind.
The house had ample space for Mum’s clutter and she filled it with their joint acquisitions: Dad’s inherited British antiques, her Colonial American ones, their Malay busts, Chinese portraits, carved cedar chests, and the low opium bed that served as our coffee table. She set up her manual typewriter at one end of the dining-room table and wrote copious letters to her friends and family, describing her new life in Canada. But her letters didn’t stay away for long; friends found them so fascinating that they mailed them back, certain she’d want to save them. Mum stuffed them into plastic bags and chucked them in the trunk room, feeding her own personal compost heap that seemed to grow faster and steamier than Dad’s in the garden.
Dad’s bunker was the basement. This was where he escaped to putter: where he polished his shoes each morning on the long wooden bench; where he set up his pots of seedlings in a makeshift incubator under the windows; and where he kept his birdseed, gardening tools, and plant encyclopedias.
Dad was handsome—some said a Cary grant look-alike, tall and distinguished in his bearing—reserved, mannerly, disciplined, and fastidious. He was a perfectionist, used the King’s English, and lived the way he had during the Great Depression, with minimal possessions—only the barenecessities, each one neatly stored in its place: labelled, filed, shipshape. After surviving war in the jungles of Malaya, Dad saw self-denial as a matter of pride, a badge of honour; he learned to excel at it, and over time it became a lifestyle choice: cut the fat, stay lean.
Mum
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