His serious antiques, her quirky contemporary finds. How a couple of romantics reconciled their divide By Victoria Webster
(All images by Michael Graydon)
He has a fondness for 18th-century French armoires and credenzas. She has a thing for unusual feather lamps and penguin-patterned loveseats. When Bernard Le Corre, born in Brittany, and Lesley Macmillan, an Ottawa expat, moved in together 10 years ago, their Candy Factory loft on Queen West became a melting pot for their disparate tastes. The result is eclectic but unmistakably French: a 2,700-square-foot space with an early 1900s wrought iron garden gate at the entrance (they bought the nine-foot-tall piece near Giverny) and a stash of 500 wines tucked away in a nook. All those bottles come in handy for the couple’s weekly dinner parties.
They met in 1989 at a mutual friend’s get-together in the south of France. Macmillan was an interior decorator; Le Corre had built a career in marketing for multinationals. An instant connection was followed by a long-distance courtship. Four years later, he was ready for a change and agreed to move to Toronto, where Macmillan lived. On the then-sparse retail strip of King Street East, the couple opened Trianon, an interior design and furniture store named after a palace at Versailles, where at the beginning of their relationship, Le Corre and Macmillan would ride their bikes. (In the store’s early days, his English not yet perfect, Le Corre put customers on hold by saying, “Can I hold you for a second?” Most people replied yes.)
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