Paintings have priority in this Plateau home
Walls showcase large canvases
Sandra Paikowsky is a retired art historian who for 40 years taught at Concordia University. Along with a colleague, Paikowsky also founded a scholarly publication called The Journal of Canadian Art History. During her time at Concordia, she met her husband, the late John Richard Fox.
Fox, who died in 2008, was a painter of note, specializing at various times in abstracts and figuration and working in a variety of mediums — from watercolours to acrylics. The couple used to spend several weeks a year in Venice (“unbelievably wonderful light”), and some of his work depicts the famous Italian city. The couple’s home was in the Plateau, where Sandra continues to live, in their “copropriété” (joint ownership) apartment.
Architect Claude Gagnon designed the low-rise complex, on land that once belonged to Henry Morgan (of department store fame). The interior of Paikowsky’s coprop, which has a split-level dining room and living area with beamed ceilings and a fireplace, showcases a number of Fox’s giant canvases. At one end of the living area is a large window, which floods the walls with light. Around the room are spotlights positioned in such a manner as to illuminate the artwork when day gives way to night.
Your walls are so long and high — almost like the interior of an art gallery — though, I must say, your home is much cosier than the average gallery!
It’s true, there are great expanses of wall with no doors or decorative stuff to divide up the space, but the trick is to hang the paintings first and then arrange the furniture to fit them. People often say to me that they’d like to have more pictures but they don’t have the room. In many cases, they actually do. It’s just a matter of moving the furniture … Speaking of which, you seem to have a lot of antiques.
Quite a f ew came f rom my family. I grew up in New Brunswick, and two hairpin-- back chairs and the bowfronted chest of drawers — they’re in my bedroom — came from there. There’s a bit of a story behind the other antiques. I bought most of them back in the ’70s. They came out of a barn. I had a friend who lived near Cornwall, and he’d been collecting stuff for years, but he got to the point where he wanted to get rid of it all. Basically he said to me, “Take what you want.” It was $10 for this, $20 for that … .
There’s another interesting story about the cupboard beside the window. (She indicates a handsome old cabinet with four doors and a drawer. The drawer pulls are white ceramic. Beside it stand several tall houseplants and a rattan armchair. On the parquet floor are a couple Iranian rugs with a burgundy and olive-
green design, and to the left, a brick wall, in the centre of which is the fireplace.)
Years ago, there was an article in Vogue magazine about Julian Schnabel, the painter and filmmaker. To our amazement, it featured a photograph of “our” cupboard. No doubt, Schnabel’s cost a fortune. When we saw it, John and I burst out laughing, because we’d paid all of $25! What’s the story behind the little blue ladderback chair?
I’m not sure what it would have been used for. It’s very low, so I suppose it might have been made for a child. That became almost a symbol for John because it appeared in so many of his pictures. He had the chair before I met him.
(We step up from the living area into the open dining room and kitchen. The dining table is an early 19th-century piece from Ontario. The floor in this area is covered with greige ceramic tiles, matching the ones that cover the top of the breakfast bar. The kitchen cabinets are natural wood with painted doors.) Your kitchen is pretty big.
The original plan showed a closed kitchen, but I really didn’t like that idea. We moved into this place when it was new, so we asked the architect, Claude Gagnon, if he could redesign it for us. He said that would be no big deal, so before we moved in, he reconfigured the space by taking down a wall and removing the doorway. At the time he was living downstairs, and he was so pleased with the end result, he did the same to his own kitchen!