BRICKWORK TIPPED THE SCALES
Victorian-era home has welcoming feel
Nancy Essebag and Greg Christie were raised in Montreal. Essebag, a marketing and communications specialist for a global translation company, grew up in Côte St-Luc. Christie, a financial adviser, spent his childhood in the West Island but moved to Westmount when he was attending university.
The university in question was Concordia, where Essebag was studying journalism and communications. But she quickly realized she wanted to focus on business and marketing, both of which are part of her current job. Christie, on the other hand, studied anthropology, a subject far removed from the financial world. He “loved the discipline,” but couldn’t see himself forging a career in that field.
During her studies, Essebag went off to Amsterdam on a student-exchange program. She spent a year in the Netherlands’ capital. She flew back to Montreal with the intention of renewing her visa. That’s when Christie appeared on the scene. Essebag fully intended to go back to Europe because she enjoyed living there, however, Christie dissuaded her from leaving and asked her to stay in Montreal.
The couple married in October 2013, but a couple of months before that they went house hunting, knowing that things would get a bit frantic as they approached their wedding date. They ended up in a 1890s copropriété in Lower Westmount where they occupy the ground floor. (The other owner lives in the upstairs apartment.)
Their Victorian-era home, which sits at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac,
has lots of wood trim and exposed brick walls, which give the apartment a warm, welcoming feel. The living room window, which has a deep sill and original wooden shutters, looks out over parkland.
Q: Given that your wedding was your deadline for finding a place, did you have enough time to shop around? A Christie: We did a lot of research ourselves before we found an agent to represent us. We spotted this place through realtors.ca. A Essebag: The website gives you a lot of information, like the exact location and the price range. You can zoom in to the interiors for more detail. Christie: Actually, the pictures
didn’t really do the apartment justice. No one was living in it at the time and it had been neglected. We probably looked at around eight possible homes. We came back to visit this one four times before making up our minds, but the whole process didn’t take longer than a month.
Q: What was it that finally made you decide? A Essebag: The exposed brick walls!
Q: Other than the apartment having been neglected, was it in good shape? A Essebag: The previous owner had renovated it about six years earlier and put in new floors made of recycled wood. We did some updates — insulated the downstairs, modernized the bathrooms and changed the paint colours.
(The walls of the open kitchen/ living/dining area are painted pale green to match the tiles in the
kitchen. The kitchen gives off a mellow glow from the wood cabinets, drawers and ceramic flooring. There is a built-in wine rack to the right of a tall, skinny window, which admits plenty of light.)
Q: I like your wine rack. Did you have that made? A Essebag: No. The wine rack was already there. I think the kitchen units might have been custom made. We’re not sure.
Q: What about furniture? Did you have to buy a lot of new stuff? A Essebag: Some of the things were wedding presents, but we also bought some furniture, like the couch in the living room. It came from Ethan Allen. The coffee table is an antique. Another piece from Ethan Allen is the dining table, but it’s an old one. It was in the family cottage. We restored it with a matte finish and had the chairs reupholstered.
(The backs of the chairs are embellished with a carved pineapple motif, part of a line called Ethan Allen Legacy. From the dining room, we walk into the terrace at the back of the apartment and then into one of the bedrooms, a home office for Christie. He has a glasstopped desk, to the right of which hangs a map of the world, marked with pins.)
Q: Do the pins mark the places where you’ve travelled? A Essebag: The red pins are the places that I’ve been and the green ones are where we’ve travelled together. We spent a month in South America on our honeymoon. A Christie: We travelled on 24 flights. I don’t think we’ll ever do that again! We saw a ton of places, but that’s a whole other story.