Cleo and Duke, Labrador retrievers, can't be budged from their spot in front of the great stone fireplace. They've spread out on the thick, cream carpet of the family room basking in the glow of the fire. Occasionally, someone wanders in to poke at the logs and the room reverberates with the thud of two tails hitting two-inches of wool pile.
The setting could be a Charlotte Brontë novel, and homeowner Bram Kaufman, leaning the way he often does against the slabs of stone surrounding the fire, might be Heathcliffe. But this isn't Wuthering Heights. And we aren't on the English moors, but rather in a suburb of Montreal, where Susan and Bram Kaufman and their two teenaged daughters have eloquently recreated a piece of English Country charm in the heart of Quebec suburbia. But that polite piece of English Country is punctuated with the occasional outbursts of bold Kaufman style – a cow-print carpet in the staid entryway, for example, that Susan Kaufman couldn't resist because she has to have “the furries.”
“This certainly isn't the kind of house you'd expect to see around here,” she laughs. “Most of the houses in this neighbourhood are modern. And very new. I didn't want that. I wanted a country house.”
The trouble was, Kaufman didn't want to live in the country. So she bought an 18-year-old brick house with a great view and transformed it into her dream home. Four years later, all that was left of the original structure was a bathtub and that Brontë-esque stone fireplace.
“The first thing to go was the brick,” says Kaufman, who is not a designer by trade but is a decorator purely by instinct. “It was replaced with stone, sourced through the Yellow Pages. I found the distributor and got the best guy they had to offer, Tony Monaco. He was such an artist that I made him carve his name in one of the stones.”
The raw stone slabs were offset by warm, broad barnboards that Kaufman had discovered before the house was even purchased. She plunked a rustic mailbox at the end of the driveway and from the outside, the illusion of an English manor house was flawlessly complete. Then Kaufman turned her attention to the interior.
Inside the 4,500-square-foot home, the English Country theme continues. The walls, with the exception of the mauve and green hues used in daughter Kim's bedroom, are painted in a warm, cozy palette of yellows and reds – a harmonious colour story that unifies all the rooms of the house. Even the French-Country inspired kitchen, with its warm-toned woods and terra cotta tiles, blends with the palette.
“I really love red,” says Kaufman. “It's bold but it's also warm, and that's what I wanted for the entire house. It looks nice without being stuffy. I don't want people to walk in and feel like they have to take their shoes off.”
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