ROOMY ELEGANCE WITH A FEW SURPRISES
Lower Westmount home stuffed with art, family heirlooms, antiques
Mary Larson and James Wuest, who are 65 and 70 respectively, were born in the United States and earned their university degrees and launched their careers there. But in 1980, they moved to Montreal.
Fluent in French, Larson attended Princeton University and earned an MBA from the Stanford School of Business. She began her career with the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company, moving on to senior executive positions with the McDonald’s Corporation, Alcan and Culinar. Nowadays, she works as a business consultant, helping manufacturers, transport companies and financial institutions to strategize and transform their corporate cultures.
The house was pretty well what we were looking for, but I didn’t like the colour of the interior ... so I decided a neutral ‘greige’ was the way to go.
Wuest, who has garnered many awards, studied chemistry and mathematics at Cornell University. He did his graduate work at Harvard University, where he subsequently earned a PhD and became an assistant professor of chemistry.
He came to Montreal because he was offered a tenured position at Université de Montréal.
There, he is a professor of natural sciences and engineering and holds the Canada Research Chair in Supramolecular Materials. This accomplished couple live in an elegant, semi-detached home in Lower Westmount.
Tastefully furnished with antiques, family heirlooms, floor plants and original artwork, it has 2,500 square feet of living space on two storeys (plus a basement), a deck and a backyard.
There are five bedrooms (two serve as home offices), an open kitchen/dining area and a large living room abutted by another (more formal) dining room.
Q Mary, you were explaining you lived elsewhere when you first came to Montreal?
A We were in the Le Château Apartments, right across from Holt Renfrew. We loved it there but after our son was born, we realized it wasn’t a very suitable place to raise a child. There were no green spaces nearby where he could play, so we decided it was time to move. We came here in 1996.
Q You said the semi had been renovated?
A It had, except for the kitchen. The house was pretty well what we were looking for, but I didn’t like the colour of the interior. The walls were dark and gloomy, so I had them painted yellow but that still didn’t look right. We have Oriental rugs with lots of bright reds and blues so I decided a neutral ‘greige’ was the way to go. Q Did you renovate your kitchen at the same time? A We did that about nine years ago. It was quite a drama.
Q In what way?
A The kitchen looked OK but it had old-fashioned appliances, including an industrial-sized fridge. Various things started to break down, so we decided to have a modern kitchen, custom-made.
We got a shock when the contractor removed the linoleum tiles covering the floor. Underneath was a layer of dirt and old newspapers. The flooring was completely rotten.
What scared us the most was the thought that the big, heavy refrigerator could have fallen through to the basement, right at the spot where my son used to sit and watch TV! The contractor had to take the floor right back to the joists.
Q Did you have any other ‘surprises’?
A Just the window frames in my home office upstairs. They were rotten too and we had to replace them.
(We climb to the second storey, past an exposed brick wall alongside the stairway. Larson’s office is bright and filled with photos and paintings.)
Q Your paintings look as if they’ve been done by the same artist.
A Her name is Elizabeth Rickert and she’s a friend of ours. Her specialty is plants and grasses and she lives in Santa Fe.
(Back down in the living room, Larson points out some of the furniture she inherited from her mother, such as the mahogany dining table and a couple comfy-looking armchairs in front of the fireplace.)
These are old but they’re good, solid chairs. I had them reupholstered.
(The walls on either side of the fireplace have built-in floorto-ceiling shelving, crammed with books. To the right of the bookshelves is a side table with a circular top and a pedestal base. Atop the table is a large decorative plate made of blue ceramic.)
Q What a beautiful colour!
A That’s a plate my husband and I spotted in Venice. It was in the window of an art gallery that was never open. Finally, one night, somebody was inside, so we bought it. The gallery owner took all our details to ship the plate to Montreal, but it never arrived!
Two years later, we happened to be back in Venice and the plate was still there.
We confronted the gallery owner who swore up and down that he’d tried to ship it to us but somehow hadn’t succeeded. Who knows whether or not he was telling the truth?
Anyway, the second time around, he did ship it and the plate arrived safely in Montreal.