Couple searched online from Alberta for condo
Benny Farm home part of complex that offers condos, co-ops, rentals
Jacquie and Ben Wallace, who are both 36, hail from Alberta. They had well-paying, highpressure jobs in Calgary, but in 2009, they decided to completely change their lifestyle. Packing up their worldly goods, the couple headed to Montreal, enrolled back at university and bought a condo at Benny Farm in N.D.G.
Jacquie, was it hard to find place in Montreal while you were still living in Calgary?
It wasn’t a crazy long search. I started researching online and this place popped up as being an “eco-development.” The condo is part of the makeover of the Benny Farm that used to house veterans from World War II. It’s a LEED certified building and the heat is geothermal. Not all of the apartments are condos. Some are co-ops and others are rentals. Philosophically, we liked the fact that it’s a mixed income and mixed age group development.
Did you know anything about N.D.G.?
Not really, but we flew out in June and spent some time in the neighbourhood to get a feel for the area. The condo was just what we were looking for. I’m studying at the Loyola campus of Concordia, which isn’t far away and Ben takes the shuttle to the main campus downtown.
Everything we need is close by – a drugstore, a supermarket, a sports centre … We love Montreal and it’s been very easy to make friends.
How did you go about furnishing your new home?
When we bought the condo, it was a bare shell, so we were able to decorate it exactly the way we wanted. I worked with the designer who did the show suite here, so what you see is a combination of her ideas and ours. I had a sense of what colours we wanted, the type of wallpaper and so on, but it was great having her help because we were still living out West and couldn’t be on the spot to find tradesmen and supervise everything. By the time we moved into the condo in August, everything was pretty well finished.
I see you’ve gone for a minimalist look to the point where you’ve incorporated some of the bare concrete.
We like clean, simple lines and we opted for keeping all the rooms, other than our bedroom and bathroom, open plan. (She points to the living/dining area, kitchen and corner home office.) At the same time, we didn’t want the place to be too loud or overly designed, so we chose warm tones for the décor.
I like geometric shapes and colours. We’ve gone for a kind of Mad Men esthetic, with black, silver and grey on the walls and floors and colourful accessories and upholstery. (She indicates a crimson leather chaise longue, a Royal blue suede sofa and brightly patterned orange and turquoise scatter cushions.)
Your oval coffee table with the tapered legs looks Scandinavian.
That’s a reproduction, but the dining table is an original from Denmark. We bought it from Couleurs on St. Denis, a company that sources vintage furniture and refurbishes it. The table is teak so it has to be oiled from time to time.
And the white plastic chairs?
Those are original 1960s moulded Eames chairs, also from Couleurs. The legs are metal. Ben calls them pieces of art you sit on!
What’s the story behind the black and white picture that’s above the table? It’s huge!
Yeah, I think it’s about five feet by six. It’s a black corset dress on a white background – charcoal – done by an art student. I mounted it in this fancy, old style frame, because I wanted to create the juxtaposition between a modern image and the past.
(To the right of the dining table is another piece of original artwork – a tall, skinny image of a prairie landscape, with three brightly coloured grain elevators.)
This was a birthday present from Ben when I turned 30. You could say that the painting is our “ode” to the West!