If walls could talk at Kingston manor
Bride’s horse ride up the stairs among tales of $3.3M heritage home,
It was dusk and bitterly cold when Marilyn Robertson Horton pulled up to a snow-shrouded limestone house in Kingston a year ago. She immediately warmed to the “magnificent” manor built by Scottish seaman James McKenzie in 1817.
“This house just spoke to me,” recalled the clinical research nurse from Toronto who stayed there while on assignment in Kingston. “I just envisioned McKenzie and his family in every room … the tales he told them and what experiences they had there.”
Originally called Greystone Manor, then renamed Whitney Manor for a later owner, the designated heritage building was divided into five luxury self-contained suites for shortand long-term rental almost 15 years ago. Overlooking the St. Lawrence River, the home was built with limestone blocks and hand-hewn beams typical of 19th-century Scottish architecture.
“I loved everything about it,” said Diana Smit, a nutritional therapist. She and her husband, Peter, became the manor’s 17th owners in 2017. She intended to add a wellness component to the little inn but the couple, who have residences in three countries and want to simplify their lives, have since decided to sell the $3.3-million property.
Robertson Horton, a history buff and aficionado of historical homes, felt compelled to dig up the actual facts of the manor’s past.
“I was burning up the internet with archival research and sending it along to (the Smits),” said Robertson Horton, who emailed 40 reports, according to Diana.
McKenzie settled in Kingston and became a steamboat captain on the Great Lakes after serving in the Royal Navy in the early 1800s. Legend has it the jovial Scotsman carried his English bride on horseback up the grand staircase to the ballroom of their just-completed home.
She fled back to London after deciding rural life wasn’t her cup of tea — a tale Robertson Horton doubts.
But Smit muses that “the main entrance is 15 feet, certainly high enough for a man on a horse.” Curiously, the mason who rebuilt the stairwell’s exposed limestone wall made a rare discovery of horsehair in the mortar.
A 200-year-old house “comes with many surprises,” acknowledged Smit, citing water damage in particular. Porous mortar and freeze-thaw cycles “created leaks all over and it was just a nightmare.”
The couple restored two exterior walls and one inside, and also renovated and upgraded the suites’ interiors, amenities and furnishings. Enhanced landscaping provided a private and pretty outdoor space for each suite.
While the units differ in design and size — from 900 to 1,500 square feet — the suites all exude the same “sense of history and romance,” Smit said.
With a kitchen in every suite and no common spaces, it’s the ideal retreat during COVID-19 times, she added.
For listing agent Todd Bickerton, of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, the “breathtaking property” can continue as a viable rental business or become home to a multi-generational family. Five minutes from downtown Kingston near the 1,000 Islands, it’s in a region that’s still a “well-kept secret,” said the Gananoque-based realtor.
Bickerton had a similar response to Whitney Manor as Robertson Horton.
“It’s an absolute feel when you pull in the driveway — it’s like a step back in time, (arriving) in a horse-drawn carriage.”
Robertson Horton was struck by the irony of being there just as the coronavirus pandemic was unfolding in February 2020.
The home was built the same year as cholera first appeared in India, developing into a deadly global scourge that later claimed the life of Whitney Manor’s builder, the Scottish seaman.
Robertson Horton recalls standing in the sun-drenched suite that was once his chapel, silently honouring his memory and “weeping for Wuhan and the world, and praying children would be spared.”