WHAT’S OLD IS NEW
Alberta native Carmen Joy King fell in love with Montreal during an internship at age 21. Seventeen years later, she calls the city home. She invited Helga Loverseed to visit the St-Henri triplex she has enhanced with vintage, refurbished furniture.
Carmen Joy King is an unabashed Francophile. The 38-year-old copywriter and essayist grew up in a small town in Alberta — hardly a bastion of all things French — but as a student she was lucky enough to live in France on two occasions, as part of an educational exchange.
King studied political science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and her degree required her to complete an internship in Montreal. Her French-language skills were already pretty good, so she was put to work writing statistical reports for Immigration- Québec. Montreal, with its mixture of Canadian and European culture, blew her away, and although she was only 21 at the time, she vowed that she would return one day to live and work in the city.
That didn’t happen immediately. Life intervened. She went off to Japan for three years to teach English as a second language, lived in Vancouver for a couple of years and then after a year in Sao
Paulo, Brazil, decided it was time to come back to Canada. In 2011, she moved to Montreal and she has lived here ever since.
King has made her home in a turn-of-the-20th-century triplex in St-Henri. (The landlords, a couple, live downstairs.) Overlooking a square off NotreDame St., which has a park in the middle adorned with flower beds and a fountain, her apartment has a double living room, two balconies (one at the front and one at the back) and a sizable kitchen and bedroom.
Q When you came back, did you head straight for St-Henri?
A Oh no, I was all over the place. I landed in the Plateau, went on to Rosemont, then Mile End and then Pointe St-Charles.
Q So how did you end up settling in this neighbourhood?
A I found the apartment on Craigslist. I’d borrowed a friend’s car for a couple of weeks — she was away on vacation — and I just drove around, checking out places that I’d seen in the ads. When I walked into this apartment, with the view of the beautiful park and the exposed brick walls, I knew it was for me. I have to say, of all the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in Montreal, I’ve felt most at home here.
Q Given that you’d lived in so many apartments, did you pick up your furniture along the way?
A I did. In my years of living in rented places, I’ve accumulated a lot of things. I have an eye for vintage pieces that can be fixed up. Most of the things you see here, I’ve picked up either on the street, in a second-hand store or found abandoned somewhere. I cleaned them up and repainted or refinished them. Here in Montreal, people leave out very nice things, even valuable things.
Q Can you show me some of your second-hand pieces?
A The kitchen table with the melamine top and chrome legs, that was one of my finds.
(We walk into her bedroom, which has an exposed brick wall. To the right of her bed is a large, eye-catching painting of a redbreasted robin.)
Q That painting is really striking!
A That was done by ARPI. He’s a street artist known for his depictions of birds, and he created this one with spray paint. The bed I got from a friend who was moving to New York. I picked up the night tables and the chair along the way.
(From the bedroom, we wander down a long hallway to the double living room. King uses half of the room to do yoga exercises and as a home office. Her work table, which is painted green, is a repurposed school desk. The other half of the room is her living area.)
Q Mid-century furniture I see? A: Yes. I like vintage styles. The sofa and matching armchair and ottoman were among the few things that I actually bought. Oh, and the patterned rugs.
Q Where did you get the sofa set? I love the oatmeal upholstery and the teak trim. It’s really typical of the mid-century era.
A I found this man and his sonin-law through a Facebook group. They specialize in finding midcentury furniture and refurbishing it. They even source fabrics from the 1950s and 60s.
Q And I see you have books. Real books!
A (Smiles.) I love books. I’m always surprised by how few people read anymore.
Q It’s fun the way you’ve arranged them on the floor with the large coffee table books on the bottom and the paperbacks on top, like a pyramid…
A (Smiles again.)
Q That poster of the abstract painting by Simon Hantaï. Tell me about him.
A He was a painter from Hungary, but he lived for most of his life in France. There was a retrospective of his work a few years ago at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and that’s where I got the poster.