FRENCH FLAIR, INSIDE AND OUT
Homeowner’s love of French culture can be seen in every room of the house and in the garden
With small succulents, delicate ferns, water lilies and Japanese irises, the creator of this landscape evokes botanical magic along the banks of a meandering stream, two ponds and all through her North Saanich garden.
Leda Bower also reveals her design inventiveness inside her home, using her salvage talents to combine French antiques and artworks with eclectic materials. It all started in France. “There is something about France and the way people live there that has always fascinated me,” said Leda, who also has a French poodle.
She appreciates the joie de vivre the French pour into every aspect of their lives, from food and family to fashion, wine and romance.
“I really love the French philosophy of life, the way they walk down the street, the way they use their beautiful things every day, they way they live with a style that’s both simplistic and elegant.”
Her passion can be seen in every room of her house — and outside, too, in the newly constructed conservatory and stone terrace that looks as if it’s been air-lifted from a chateau in the Loire Valley.
Her garden is featured in the upcoming Victoria Water Garden Tour (see factbox). Visitors will see alliums, salvias, clematis, roses, lavenders, astilbe and other annuals and perennials. Leda also warns visitors they might get lost in her property.
That’s because it’s full of hidden spaces, little green “rooms” that look utterly different depending on which way you enter them. Here and there is the faint burbling sound of water flowing down a long, winding stream.
Leda’s husband, Rick, a consulting chemical engineer who commutes to Alberta, does the heavy labour. “None of this would have been possible without him, if he hadn’t entertained the fact I have an unusual personality,” she said with a chuckle.
Rick hasn’t always shared his wife’s passion for France, “but it is slowly establishing itself and I’m a Prairie guy, so I go with the flow,” he said.
“She’s the one who knows what’s nice and is able to put it together, while the only talent I have is to move a wheelbarrow. I think what she’s done here is spectacular. It’s all Leda.”
Back in 2007, when they were looking for a waterview home, property values were going through the roof. When they saw this North Saanich place, they fell in love with it.
They decided to replace the 1970s home’s windows and add wooden floors, but that led to the discovery of more essential work.
“When we told people we were renovating, they said knock it down and start over,” said Rick. “We probably should have blown it up, because when we had torrential rains, the water … flooded the basement. We had to do all the perimeter drains and redirect the water to a creek at the edge of the property.”
They also found the house needed 14 new laminated beams and posts to support the roof. While they were at it, they raised the ceilings on the top floor, to look like a Paris apartment, with sloping ceilings and unusual angles.
Having launched her own antiques business at age 27, Leda was keen to start decorating. Her home now features charming French décor — monogrammed linen drapes that date from the 1700s, handpainted leather screens from France and Italy, fleurs-de-lis on top of the conservatory and grills in the terrace walls from a castle in France. The terrace is a work of art. Made of “full bed stone” from Montana, it required the efforts of Saltspring stonemason Roben Doobenen, who cut and placed the four-by-four-foot blocks, Keith Hayton Construction to build it and Farmer Construction to pour the concrete foundation.
The owners decided which rocks would go where, hand-picked feature stones, had a frieze embedded along one section and made sure some of the rock edges disappeared into the wall. Leda gleefully points out green algae that is starting to add to the patina.
The Bowers’ kitchen is another showcase of continental style.
“It’s called a furniture kitchen, because all the pieces can stand alone,” said Leda, noting custom deep drawers resemble those she’s admired in France. The stove is French, of course — a La Cornue enamel range with a hood that Leda designed and had fabricated from old tin.
French doors throughout the house were salvaged, as was wood for the staircase, which came from an old school in Vancouver. Railings are from an old Queenswood home and floorboards are from army huts formerly on the University of Victoria campus.
Backsplash tiles in the kitchen and terrace alcove are from Belgium, vintage light fixtures are all from France and the living-room mantle came from a demolished Vancouver home.
Many pieces were sourced through Leda’s connections in the antique business, as well as stores such as Traders of the Lost Art in Calgary and the Antique Warehouse in Vancouver. But her Europeaninspired, steel-frame conservatory was built by Alliance Engineering Works, and lifted by crane over the house when it was installed in 2015.
Some of her 400 orchids live here, while cool-tolerant varieties from the mountains of Ecuador grow outside in the one-third-hectare property.
“We changed the garden to a tremendous degree when we moved in, because what I found missing was the mid-storey of plantings,” she explained, noting the previous owner, co-creator of the Yukon gold potato at the University of Guelph, loved trees.
“We removed some of them and I added shrubs and smaller trees that are less labour-intensive,” she said. “This garden is a lot of work, but it’s my therapy.”
Rick said he and Leda are happy to support the For the Love of Africa Society, which has built four schools, a medical dispensary, an orphan centre and a trade school in Tanzania.
Several years ago, he and Calgary partner Brent Allardyce created a foundation of their own to support children’s dreams.
Their projects include creating hockey camps, baseball diamonds and a high school garden in Canada, as well as a school dorm in Lesotho, a small kingdom encircled by South Africa.