The Painted Lady of MacNab and her revamp
Robin McKee’s labour of love never-ending ‘pride and joy’
Robin McKee would go see his Painted Lady most every day since 2008, spending a lot of time and money on her.
But it took 10 years before he got around to moving in together with her. Does that bespeak a fear of commitment?
Just the opposite. His Painted Lady is almost 150 years old and needed work, lots of it. So what was another decade, give or take, between friends? He had to wait until she was ready. Restoring her has been an act of supreme resolve, patience and perseverance for Robin.
And he highly recommends it. “Bringing back a historical building is something to be passionate about,” says Robin, a message especially pointed as Saturday is Heritage Day in Hamilton.
He is celebrating that heritage spirit and his nomination for a coveted Melville Bailey Heritage Award (winner to be announced Heritage Day) by finally crossing the threshold (three weeks ago). He now lives full-time in the building he has romanced lo these many years.
There’s still work to be done, but the place is eminently habitable. His Painted Lady, 262 MacNab St. N., is one of a beautiful terrace of four classic Hamilton buildings built by renowned Hamilton architect James Balfour (Treble Hall, Scottish Rite, etc.) back in the 1870s and 1880s when they used words like “bespeak.”
They are sleek, lyrically vertical expressions of Victorian confidence and agreeableness. Fanciful but showing judicious restraint. The buildings ascend in a graduation of tiered wooden pilasters, framing window treatments stacked within an impressive square bay projection, from the ground all the way up to the sharp arrowhead peaks on the handsome rooftop gables and dormers.
Hamilton’s Painted Ladies, as they are called, were partly inspired by Balfour’s visit to the prototype in San Francisco, the famously multicoloured rows of buildings, many of them conjoined, around neighbourhoods like Postcard Row.
Our MacNab Street version is striking. The colourful effects highlight numerous architectural details, from the bargeboard on the gables, the arched window tops with stone lunettes, the ornate bracketin, dentils and pilaster capitals.
Robin’s Painted Lady is done in six different, but complementary shades of blue and grey, which he chose to reflect the blue and grey of the American Civil War. When he painted the place, it was that conflict’s 150th anniversary.
He’s a Civil War buff, largely because there are some veterans buried in the Hamilton Cemetery, which Robin is famous for conducting his weekly tours in.
“It (the paint) is crumbling now and starting to wear away,” says Robin.
That’s one reason he’s put in for a grant to have the façade professionally brought back to its original glory.
History of all kinds, especially local, fascinates him. And as he restored number 262, he not only researched the building, he worked to have a heritage designation applied to it.
The exterior’s a big part of the work still to be done, but the hardest challenges were the ones Robin’s already tackled. The plumbing (“it was a b ...”); the interior; skylight; floors (now splendid); the pocket doors in the living room and, for Robin, the pièce de résistance, the curving staircases, featuring rounded newel posts, and double spindles at each step supporting the gorgeous serpentine wood rail with its shapely twists.
“I never went up the stairs without sandpaper in my hand, and I just worked it and worked it every chance I got,” he says, with a multi-tasker’s smile.
“I did everything by the book, everything up to inspections,” says Robin, who bought the house when it was a wreck.
He wasn’t in great shape, either. He’d been diagnosed with throat cancer. His own recovery mirrored the house. So 262 bears all kinds of meaning for him in its strength and renewed vitality. Robin did it all himself. “I worked my ass off,” he says. “It’s my pride and joy.”
(Heritage Day is Saturday with interpretive displays at Hamilton City Hall, from 10 a.m. to noon and awards ceremony at 12:15.)