Taste for drama runs in the family
Louisa Varalta opens the Toronto home she renovated with her late husband, director George Bloomfield
“(George) said, ‘I’ll give you the money to renovate if you let me buy it.’ I said, ‘Give me a blank cheque.’ ” LOUISA VARALTA RECALLING HOW HER LATE HUSBAND PERSUADED HER TO BUY THE TOWNHOUSE
Artist Louisa Varalta’s townhouse is a-door-able. Je t’adoor, even.
She has me at the magnificent pair of vintage doors inside her home’s entryway. They come from the Door Store, “our No. 1 destination,” she avows.
“They were quite reasonable — a couple of thousand. They were cut to fit and have the hand of Fatima on each door,” Varalta says of the symbol for patience, loyalty, faith and resistance against difficulties.
A ringer for Jane Fonda, Varalta stirs an inevitable flurry of reported sightings of the actress whenever she dines at a trendy restaurant.
She is the widow of venerable Canadian producer/director George Bloomfield, whose credits include SCTV, Due South, Fraggle Rock and E.N.G. He died three years ago at age 81; they were together for almost 40 years.
Bloomfield, uncle of the late actor Maury Chaykin, had open-heart surgery twice and two heart attacks but always got up, dusted himself off and went onto the next project. Bloomfield’s health issues were one of the reasons he and Varalta bought the Casa Loma-area townhouse eight years ago.
“It was all wall-to-wall rugs, stinky and old,” she recalls.
“It was gross. George fell in love with the elevator — the townhouses each have an elevator shaft — because of his heart attack, and said, ‘I’ll give you the money to renovate if you let me buy it.’ I said, ‘Give me a blank cheque.’ ”
The townhome was built in the 1980s and comprises almost 3,000 square feet over four floors, including basement, ground floor, second and third. They gutted the place, starting at the vestibule.
“The stairs were carpeted in white carpet with plywood underneath,” she recalls. “George said ‘That means we’ll have to do a major (stairs) reno and it will cost thousands.’
‘No,’ I said. I painted the risers.”
It’s good to have an artist in the house. She painted the entryway walls and fireplace trompe l’oeil to look like marble — and the effect is brilliant. There is actually a family of artists in the house. Her daughter, Daccia Bloomfield, a writer/author/artist, did the painting over the couch in the entryway.
Varalta, one of four sisters hails from Montreal and is of Italian heritage. “Three of us paint and draw — my younger sister Elena is a sculptor. The eldest is not a visual artist. She works for the Bank of Montreal — she is corporate.”
The dining room table is an old Italian harvest table. “George added on more panels of distressed wood,” she explains.
Two African carvings are among the 10 sculptures the couple collected when Bloomfield was shooting in Zimbabwe for the 1989 film, African Journey. The pair actually met on a film that Bloomfield was directing. It was in Montreal on the set of the1974 Child Under a Leaf (Love Child). starring Dyan Cannon. It was a coup de foudre — they were hit by a thunderbolt. Varalta was secretary to the film’s producer; he was exiting his marriage to Barbara Amiel, Maclean’s columnist and wife of Conrad Black.
Today, the Casa Loma-townhouse could double as an art gallery. On the staircase to the basement is a painting Varalta did which she calls Lola, inspired by the lyric in the Kinks song “she walked like a woman and talked like a man.” It is deliberately sexually ambiguous. “Do we know if it is a girl or a boy?” she asks mischievously.
Onto the kitchen, whose walls are painted a dramatic cranberry. The floor is tile simulating marble. The kitchen is Ikea. “I put in commercial shelving because I do catering on the side and everything needs to be ready at hand so I can see it all — the pots, pans, dishes and glasses,” Varalta explains.
Leather chairs surround the wooden island, which is actually a distressed wood cabinet from the bathroom.
Onto the second floor, totally dominated by a huge glass coffee table with a wagon on it.
“That’s my next dining area — there is no sitting room downstairs,” Varalta says. “The table is five-feet square. It used to be my dining-room table but I cut the legs down.”
As remarkable as the coffee table is, it is eclipsed by her paintings. One is a rendering of two women: one stylish with platform shoes; another disgruntled and unkempt. “It is a painting about aging women,” she explains. “One is accepting it and she is smiling. She has the great shoes. The other is scowling and not accepting.”
The painting on the opposite wall is called Who’s Afraid of Hollywood, and features a woman who looks remarkably like Bette Midler. “George was floored,” she recalls. “He said, ‘That’s my new agent, Sue Mengers.’ I didn’t know. It just came out of my imag- ination.” (Ironically, Midler played Mengers in the one-woman play I’ll Eat You Last which played Broadway in 2013.) Varalta’s bedroom, the master bedroom, is off the sitting room. Bloomfield’s is on the top floor and has been transformed into her studio. Her bedroom has a single bed — “George called it my nun’s bed” — a sleigh bed painted white, with a toy gun in a holster slung over the bedpost.
“It’s a BB gun,” she says matter-offactly. “It is just something I collected and always kept on my bed. Someone said that, in the U.S., every woman should have a gun next to her bed.”
Beside the bed is a lamp fashioned from a Royal Doulton figurine of a dog. There are more Doulton dogs in the bathroom, one of five bathrooms in the place. There is also a supersized, curled-up dog made out of papier mâché by controversial Canadian artist Eli Langer on the bedroom wall. “I love
it but a lot of people are scared of it,” she confesses.
The top floor is filled with her paintings, largely overblown figures à la Colombian figurative artist/sculptor Fernando Botero. “I did a lot in his style,” she admits.
“But I also did Mounties, and then George directed Due South. My new work is black paintings with pencil drawings which are all about skies and imagined landscapes. Apparently, there is a Colombian artist that is doing this. So I’m channelling Colombian painters and I had no idea.”
She swears she doesn’t rattle around in the large space, alone except for her black poodle, Brioche.
As homage, she keeps his leather Redskins ball cap on her easel. “He would wear that when he directed.”
Her decor style is “eclectic with a penchant for the baroque, putting it mildly,” she surmises. So when is her next show? “As soon as I have a gallery — hint, hint,” she laughs. She does, though, have plans in her future.
“We have had this standing tradition on New Year’s Eve where we go to Roy Thomson Hall and hear Bravissimo!, an opera concert featuring artists from around the world who delight us with the best-loved arias from our favourite operas,” she says. “We then head to a restaurant for a late supper. This year it’s at Buca, where we’ll have champagne. As far as I’m concerned I never, ever make resolutions since I live in the moment, — one smooth cocktail at a time. Cheers!”