(Images: Michael Graydon )
OK, what’s wrong with this picture: white ceilings, white walls, white mouldings, white lacquered floors and two kids under five. Robyn Scott, a 37-year-old former institutional equities trader, freely admits to being a textbook type-A personality, which may explain why she chose such a crazy-making colour scheme. When she and her husband, Steven, the owner and CEO of Access Storage, decided to gut their newly purchased Forest Hill home, her friends tried to dissuade her from the all-white crusade, but Robyn was determined. She wanted a striking backdrop for her eclectic antique furniture.
Robyn approached 10 different contractors before she found an industrial flooring company willing to take on the lacquering job. Most of them balked at the idea of covering the beautiful hardwood. Then she found Michael Pelaic of Paint-Co in Mississauga, who approached the commission as an art project. The process was gruelling: sanding, epoxy primer, more sanding, more primer, then four coats of semi-gloss epoxy coating and two coats of high-gloss polyurethane topcoat—on all three storeys. The job took three weeks to complete. Read the rest of this entry »
Elte’s Second Life rugs ($545–$2,565) are a great way to bring a pop of colour to the home: they can pretty up a masculine black and white space, or add interest to a neutral palette. Each piece is recycled from a traditional Turkish rug over 40 years old, which is stripped of its colour and given new life with a modern-day dye job. The rugs are available in a range of sizes, from three-by-five feet to six-by-nine feet, and a rainbow of colours.
