Design trends: A party-ready pad
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The front door opened to an enclosed porch followed by a narrow hallway that led to a maze of rooms. Upstairs, a rental apartment's nooks and crannies held more adventure.
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But the piecemeal layout was the pits for single-family living. The social couple, who have three young kids, couldn't entertain without banging elbows. Plus the 1,800-square-foot century house, nipped and tucked over the years, was dated.
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So they enlisted the principal designer of Valerie Meghory Interiors for a substantial revamp undertaken over 15 months. This included adding a third-floor sanctuary for the parents, with a swanky spa bathroom, office, walk-in closet and bedroom; the addition increased the house to 2,600 square feet overall. The architect on the project was Justin Sherry of Justin Sherry Design Studio with general contracting by Robert Cuch.
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In a lucky turn, the designer and the homeowners shared the same taste. 'They like simplicity and minimalism, so our aesthetics aligned,' says Meghory, who filled the home with soothing, easy-to-live-with tones and modern finishes, like oak veneer cabinetry, quartzite countertops and engineered white oak herringbone floors.
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Meghory's rule of thumb is to prioritize neutrals for tiles, cabinetry and other permanent design elements. 'Then we add colour in other ways that are easier to switch out to get a fresh look when you get bored of it.'
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But before any decorating, she tackled the main floor. She rejigged it to highlight the most important room in the house: the kitchen, which was built by Hays Woodworking.
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'We positioned the kitchen in the middle of the house, so it could be the centre of everything,' she says. 'They host a lot of people for holidays and parties.'
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For improved flow, Meghory shifted the staircase (formerly in the entranceway) to the back of the house, tucking it along the wall by the loungey new living room.
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'We did a long bench [for seating in the living room] to accommodate a lot of people,' says Meghory. The built-in is topped in a grey boucle cushion — perfect for perching with a cocktail — and has storage to keep the area shipshape. Display cubbies, a decorative slatted wall, fun pylon-shaped stair railings and an exposed red brick chimney trailing up to the second floor are embellishments that elevate the home.
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CTV News
37 minutes ago
- CTV News
Instagram-famous Gary the cat still turning heads on the trails and slopes
CANMORE — Gracing the pages of TIME magazine in 2020 and 2024 wasn't an international affairs story or the latest health discovery, it was Canmore's own Gary the cat. Fondly known as the 'poster cat' in the outdoor community, most days Gary can be found feeling the wind in his fur on a packraft, enjoying the views from yet another Rockies summit or shredding the pow on his owner's shoulders. ' I mean people bring their dogs everywhere. Why not bring your cat?' said Gary's owner, James Eastham. Rising to Instagram fame in 2018, Eastham documents Gary's adventurous life through the account 'Great grams of Gary' which has now garnered close to 600,000 followers — over 200,000 more than the Banff and Lake Louise Tourism account. He's been featured in more than seven publications and media outlets including the Calgary Herald, CNN, CBC and in outlets as far away as Australia and Germany — most recently featured on his first cover in the summer edition of Explore magazine. Gary's first foray into the great outdoors began when he would escape out of Eastham's Edmonton apartment into the front yard. 'Our front door opened onto a courtyard but it also didn't latch very well and so sometimes the door would blow open and I'd come out and Gary would be gone. He'd just be in the courtyard eating grass usually,' Eastham said with a laugh. ' We decided if he wanted to go outside, he'd have to learn how to walk on a leash because we were right near some busy streets near the river valley.' Eventually relocating to Canmore for his partner's job, what started as mornings on the front step progressed into short walks on the trails near Rundleview and eventually Gary levelled up to more adventurous pursuits in his new mountain town home. ' Training a cat is not quite the same as training a dog, so a lot of it was we started really slowly just introducing Gary to being outside,' said Eastham. Now having dipped his paws into the world of kayaking, packrafting, skiing, skating and mountaineering, Gary has been adventuring in the mountains for seven years. 'Skiing was almost an accident, which sounds kind of weird,' said Eastham. After a really big snowstorm in Canmore one year, Eastham used his skis to get around town on the unplowed roads. 'Gary was crying at the door wanting to go out so I put on the touring skis to take him out and just go for a little walk,' he said. 'We were coming back home and I took a look [at a hill] and I was like, 'Well, when am I going to get the chance to ski with my cat again?' So I pulled off the skins from the skis and did two very, very mellow, very short little laps with Gary.' Perched on his shoulders, Eastham's feline adventure buddy is now quite used to tagging along on runs at the ski hill. ' He sort of taught himself [to] crawl up and around onto my shoulders, and for skiing it's useful because I can feel if he is kind of solidly on my shoulders, if he's feeling tense or unhappy. There's sort of that instant feedback. You can either stop and readjust or … call it a day if he's had enough,' said Eastham. After hitting the slopes in the winter, summers brings hiking and paddling adventures, some of Gary's favourite activities. ' I've got a packraft and he loves to just kind of sit on the front of the boat and soak up the sun and get rocked to sleep by the waves,' said Eastham. ' He did fall off our boat one time, but he's got a life jacket that he wears so he was fine. He was just, I think, more offended about getting completely wet than anything else.' Now almost 11 years old, Gary has humble beginnings as a rescue kitten from the Calgary Humane Society. Eastham's partner adopted Gary at four months old after Gary was found by animal control in Calgary with a broken hip. 'Part of the reason that my partner adopted him was that her dog at the time had the same procedure at the same age as Gary,' said Eastham. 'The biggest thing you notice is that he can't jump as high as other cats and his back end wiggles a little bit when he walks.' Gary was originally named Bruce by the shelter after Bruce Wayne, but shortly after his adoption, Eastham's partner renamed him Gary after Calgary. Feline fame Eastham said a social media account for Gary started as 'a bit of a joke.' ' I work in communications and … when we moved to Canmore, I was looking for work and so I was like, 'Well, I'll post photos of my cat and find that I'm still keeping up to date on social media trends,'' he said. '[I] didn't really expect it to go anywhere.' Eastham recalls the first time the account really blew up when he posted a photo of Gary to Reddit and suddenly gained 1,500 followers in one day. '1,500 followers seemed like an amazing amount of people at the time … It's just kind of grown from there. It's become sort of its own thing," he said. Turning heads on the trail and the ski hill, Eastham says they can't go far without people flocking to say 'hi' to Gary. 'People definitely recognize Gary when we're out and even if they don't recognize that it's Gary and that he's on social media, there's not a lot of people who hike with their cats, so we get stopped from just kind of that perspective too. People want to stop and say 'hi' and he's cute and fluffy,' said Eastham. After posting about Gary's appearance in TIME magazine's special cats edition, a follower posted a comment on Reddit: 'When I'm old and alone in my nursing home, one of the memories that will never leave me will be meeting Gary on a trail. My friends still talk about how excited I was,' wrote user Fedorek68. 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Lots of people [will say] it's helped me and my partner get through this difficult time, being able to just share something nice and happy or maybe they're going through a period of depression.' ' It's just nice to get some of those messages and see the impact that you can have on someone's life, even for people who just scroll by and smile.' By Leah Pelletier, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Rocky Mountain Outlook
CBC
38 minutes ago
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Far East Asian Night Market returns to downtown Kitchener
The Far East Asian Night Market was back to transform Kitchener for a second time on Sunday. More than 50 vendors lined up on King Street to provide food, entertainment and a smorgasbord of cultural delights in the east end of downtown Kitchener. The event was organized by the Downtown Kitchener BIA, who said last year's event had nearly 10,000 people in attendance.
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
A new way of looking at architecture as museum puts on first exhibit
You can be forgiven if you've never heard of the Canadian Museum of Architecture. Not to be confused with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal – the scholarly behemoth founded by Phyllis Lambert in 1979 – the CMA is so new to the scene, its first exhibit, Architecture in Three Dimensions at Todmorden Mills (67 Pottery Rd.) has been put on display at the quaint, tucked-into-the-trees city-owned museum. The show, which closes on August 24, 2025, takes visitors on an architectural world tour utilizing models of various scales, beginning with a 1:200 version of the Roman aqueduct in Nîmes, France. But rather than showing it as it looks today, it depicts tiny workers chipping away at limestone blocks, assembled scaffolding, ladders, and hand winches/rope pulleys as the bridge rose in the first century. 'So, the arches here, those are printed in resin,' says CMA model-builder Jo Vincent-Evans. 'These brown wood pieces and latticework was all printed in plastic and then repainted to look like wood; the landscape is developed by us … these are real rocks.' While interesting for its meticulous detail, it's also a wise choice to begin a conversation about the importance of architecture, which is one of the CMA's mandates. This is confirmed with the next model, which takes a hypothetical southern Ontario landscape and presents it in two ways: untouched, and how (European) settlement/industrialization creates change, usually negative, vis-à-vis the creation of factories that produce greenhouse gases, the redirection of (now polluted) waterways, farm monoculture, fragmentation of the landscape and ecosystem loss due to suburbia, and so forth. The next model challenges gallery-goers to consider the life cycle of a typical 10-storey condominium building, from the manufacture of its various components (much of it concrete), its useful life, all the way to demolition or refurbishment. 'The building exists for [an average of] about 57 years,' says Ms. Vincent-Evans. 'And each of these [cycles] has a small graph explaining how much energy is used … the vast majority is used during the building's operation.' To avoid becoming too preachy, the exhibit takes a detour to the evolution of wood in construction via brush huts near the Sea of Galilee from 23,000 years ago–which may or may not be the beginning of architecture–to the hammerbeam ceiling at Westminster Hall (England, 1393) and, finally, to today's engineered wood products. The same is done for brick, tracing the oldest mudbricks from 11,000 BCE in Türkiye to St. Anne's Church in Lithuania (1500) and Grundtvig's Church in Denmark (1940). Stone's evolution is depicted as well, with a model of the Lower Temple of Unas in Egypt and a fun little row of tiny columns to help gallery-goers identify the differences between Doric, Ionic, the Roman versions, and the thin cast iron columns that held up Victorian buildings. To keep folks guessing (and learning), there are models of typical saltbox houses, the rowhouses of St. John's, Nfld. Known as 'Jellybean row,' the sustainably-overachieving Bullitt Center in Seattle (2013), and Toronto City Hall (1965) and Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut (1955) to represent Modernism. The exhibit also deals with the 'failure' of Modernism by discussing the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, which was so hated it was demolished in 1976 after only 21 years of service. There is also the Comfort for All model, a transparent tower showing the guts of a typical high-rise building: plumbing, electrical, chillers, boilers, sprinkler systems, natural gas lines, and wastewater handling. There are 18 models on display, but these, says Ms. Vincent-Evans, represent 'just a taste' of what the CMA hopes to exhibit when they achieve their ultimate goal of a permanent bricks-and-mortar location; with limited funding and a small staff, however, when the CMA will be able to welcome visitors year-round is anyone's guess. Founded by (and mostly funded by) retired University of Toronto faculty of medicine professor Peter Bruecker in 2015, the CMA has thus far kept a low profile as its handful of researchers and model-builders have toiled away, awaiting their moment to unleash the fruits of their labour on a (hopefully) willing public. And while there are precious few days left to see this particular exhibit (and for that this writer apologizes), it's worth keeping the CMA in mind. While Architecture in Three Dimensions is a little rough around the edges for a few reasons–it seems cobbled together quickly with no real focus other than 'architecture is important and interesting' and some of the interpretive signage didn't glue down properly–the models are worthy of consideration and praise. Perhaps, however, future exhibits could play with scale even more and allow attendees to enter full-size room mock-ups or strap on VR goggles to experience architecture in other ways. If not, there is the real possibility a visitor who tours Little Canada – that purely entertaining collection of miniature buildings at 10 Dundas St. E. – and the CMA in the same week might confuse the two in their memory. That said, there are so few places to engage in architectural discourse in this city, any newcomer, fledgling or not, is more than welcome. 'Peter [Bruecker] does not fit into any normal slot in the world of architecture,' wrote University of Toronto professor emeritus and former dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in an e-mail. 'He marches to some unknown drummer 'out there' on his own. But when I look at the CMA's freshly completed, highly realistic, colourful model of three vernacular row houses in Newfoundland … I'm enthralled.'
