Room under the trees
From morning coffee to evening entertaining, rebuilt back deck and patio have it all
(One in a series featuring rooms beloved by their owners.)
OPERA SINGER Kimberly Barber’s leafy, terraced backyard is truly an extension of her Kitchener home, with glass doors in the dining room leading directly to the sheltered cedar deck that is her own “little Italy.”
“It really is a room, or it feels like one. We really lived there last summer,” Barber says of the deck and stone patio which take up much of the upper level of the backyard.
A mature apple tree, which Barber’s husband, Markus Philipp, gradually pruned into an umbrella shape, shades a long teak table and chairs that seem to promise elegant al fresco hospitality.
Each fall, they invite faculty and their families of Wilfrid Laurier University’s >>
>> music department, where mezzo-soprano Barber is an associate voice professor and administrative co-ordinator of the opera program, to a backyard party. “It’s astonishing how much shade the tree provides,” she says.
Swaths of ivy and clematis scaling their side of a neighbour’s garage give an impression of both festivity and coolness. With tiny lights that Philipp tucks into the vines, “it is idyllic in the evening.”
The deck is the place where Barber relaxes with her morning coffee and the day’s crossword puzzle, and where their daughters, Jana and Alice, have spent the night in sleeping bags.
The backyard was already terraced when they moved in 10 years ago, but new owners enjoy making a garden their own. In the first few years, Barber and Philipp trimmed shrubs and moved plants around, staking out a vegetable patch which they enlarged this year after Jana got more interested in gardening. Decorative heads of curly lettuce are nurtured in an oblong planter, while hosta, white bleeding hearts, rose of sharon and solomon’s seal grow around the perimeter of the property.
The deck was aging, and last year Philipp went to Timeless Materials to see what they might suggest. He wanted to establish a gently cascading effect in the backyard and he wanted to honour the past, as he and Barber did indoors by restoring rather than replacing or painting the original gumwood trim in their house.
They ended up rebuilding the floor of the deck with interlocking cedar boards salvaged from the roof of a farmhouse. They also purchased heavy square-cut timbers of Douglas fir that had been retrieved from an old barn. The timbers fill in the space under the deck and also serve as steps to the patio, becoming extra seating for larger groups.
The patio is made of manufactured stone of varying sizes and colours, which Philipp laid over a bed of compacted soil and pea gravel. To one side are cedar Muskoka chairs and a teak table, all of which have been allowed to weather naturally.
He is puzzled by so many Canadians choosing to stain or paint outdoor cedar furniture when, like teak, the unprotected wood has natural oils which enable it to acquire a soft grey patina that he and Barber love. Philipp is a major exporter of Ontario cedar chairs made by Bear Chair Co. in South River, and 90 per cent of his German customers leave them unpainted. In a corner, tucked up against the house, is a stack of logs he split and trimmed after an old tree in the front yard fell last spring. The logs will feed a decorative cauldron on the patio as well as the small fire-pit dug into the lawn.
Barber, Philipp and their daughters are a trans-Atlantic family. They moved here a decade ago after being primarily based in Germany where she sang with the Frankfurt Opera and many other companies. It’s also where their daughters were born. But when Philipp wanted to try living in a different country, Barber took a sabbatical year in 2001 to settle back in her hometown of Toronto.
That’s where Laurier associate music professor Daniel Lichti, “quietly, in his Mennonite way,” started talking to her about teaching. “I didn’t know if it would give me a kick like performing does, but it did,” says Barber, who is passionate, lively and very engaging on stage.
“There’s something incredibly exciting when you see the spark — that moment when the penny drops for a student.”
She likens it to the thrill of teaching a child to ride a bike, running alongside with a steadying hand, then letting go and watching the child take off, all alone, for the first time.
“There is a performing element to good teaching; it’s a passion that’s infectious,” she adds. “Honing my performance really feeds my teaching.”
She taught a workshop at Laurier that sabbatical year and was gratified when voice professor David Falk, who recently died at the age of 80, sat in on a few sessions and then said to her, “You’re a natural pedagogue, aren’t you?”
Barber had several mentors in her career as a musician and she enjoys helping students find their unique voice: “We tend to think there are formulas to succeed. Yes, there are prescribed paths, but we need to find our own ways — to feel empowered to say ‘this is my way.’ I tell students, ‘You’re the artist. You decide’ instead of worrying about what the composer or someone else thought. I say ‘sell it to me.’ ”
When Laurier offered her a provisional appointment, she accepted, commuting back to Germany several times during her first year of teaching. In 2002, when it became a tenure-track position, she and her family moved permanently to Waterloo Region.
Philipp’s work as the principal European dealer for New York-based Stickley furniture now is entirely internet-based; his customers have no idea he’s an ocean away. He returns to Germany four times a year for business and personal visits with friends and family.
He and Barber have kept their house in Wiesbaden, but they all agree that Kitchener is home.