HOME TOUR | OTTAWA VALLEY
Love at first sight with an 1890s white farmhouse sitting on 60 acres along the river.
While the ground was always shifting beneath us, moving into our home felt like sturdiness.
Meet Stephanie & Alexander, who live in Ottawa Valley with their daughter Rory and dog Ferris.
The heritage of this house commands a certain level of design-admiration and respect, so I am always trying to honour that when making any changes. I like to think that the house and I have worked together to develop a distinct personal style that I would summarise as warm neutral spaces, edited and uncluttered, on a high-low budget, full of cosy texture and mixed wood tones, local vintage finds, and always a few foraged treasures from the yard.
Read the full story below..
My name is Stephanie Kenny and I live with my husband Alexander, our baby daughter Rory, and our wolfhound-husky-shepherd mutt Ferris (10) on the shores of the Ottawa River close to Ottawa, Canada. I work as a doctor and my husband is in the military.
Home is…
Our love story. My husband and I have been a couple for 15 years since our university days and have spent more than half of our relationship living long-distance in temporary housing. We have had year-long military deployments, lived in different countries while I finished my medical training and spent too much time in hospitals while Alexander underwent chemotherapy for testicular cancer. Through all of that, it was the dream of one day making a home in our own big country house on the water that kept us going. For a while the ground was always shifting beneath us, but moving into our home felt like sturdiness. Alex lived here alone for a year while I finished my schooling and the day I moved in we drank fancy champagne on the front porch and cried happy tears.
My home story...
I have a habit of falling in love with old homes. I had searched for homes in the area for months and the second I saw this listing, it was love at first sight. We were planning to move after I finished my medical residency training so I was in the middle of a stressful time studying for my certification exams. I would toggle between my study notes and looking at photos of this house, which became my safe lighthouse in the storm. This was just before the pandemic and at that time nobody wanted a big house in the countryside so it sat on the market for close to a year but I never doubted this was the one.
Our home is an 1890s white farmhouse sitting on 60 acres along the river. It was one of the early homes built in the area by German farmers and still has original beams on the ceiling and 3 original barns outside. Last spring, a car randomly drove up our driveway and it was a woman with a photo of the house from 1910 whose grandmother was born in our home. Locals tell us stories about how an apple orchard on the property used to feed the military base. Surrounding our house is 5 km of walking trails through the forest, 30 acres of meadows, and 2 km of riverfront. It sounds like a storybook home and it is.
What inspired the design of your home?
The footprint of our home is original, but we have done 2 large renovations and countless smaller projects. The heritage of this house commands a certain level of design-admiration and respect, so I am always trying to honour that when making any changes. I like to think that the house and I have worked together to develop a distinct personal style that I would summarise as warm neutral spaces, edited and uncluttered, on a high-low budget, full of cosy texture and mixed wood tones, local vintage finds, and always a few foraged treasures from the yard.
What are some of the biggest lessons you learned while creating your home?
I learned how important it is for me to have a creative outlet. I put so many of my artistic passions on the back-burner during medical training, and I didn't realise how much my soul was craving to design something.
I learned how important it is for my mental health to have a beautiful well-designed home. My husband and I both have demanding careers, which makes it all the more important for us to have a calming sanctuary at the end of the day.
I learned not to rush to failure. You always hear people say that home takes time. The rooms in my home that I love the most are the ones that have evolved naturally. Some corners sat empty for years while I waited to find the perfect vintage mirror instead of rushing to buy everything in one week.
And most importantly, I learned to create a home for the people I love, rather than to impress strangers. I recently designed a nursery for my daughter shortly after finishing a very expensive kitchen renovation. Creating her nursery felt so much smaller but also much more special. I will tell her one day about how I saved wildflowers (honestly mostly weeds) from the fields around our house and made pressed flower art for her so she would grow up with that sense of place.
What do you love about your home?
The people in it. The way my home nudges me to spend quality time with those people. The way my home feels like a giant exhale.
What do you enjoy about living in the Ottawa Valley?
I love living on the water, surrounded by nature. My favourite part of the day is walking our trails with the dog and the whole family.
What does simple living mean to you?
Simple living sounds like it should feel like walking through a meadow in a sundress. But the truth is that it feels quite a bit more ruthless. I think of simple living as improving the signal-to-noise ratio of my life. The signal is dinners with friends, kissing my baby, passion projects, swimming in the river. The noise is emails, distractions, paying taxes, cleaning the bathroom. Increasing the signal and reducing the noise requires a sometimes ruthless pursuit of efficiency to trim away time from all the things that don't matter so that I can spend time lavishly on the things that do.
If you were to have a spare free morning, how would you spend it?
Life here is so seasonal. In the summertime I would walk to the river for a morning standup paddle board, then drink coffee on the dock, then come home for avocado toast in my kitchen with my family. In the wintertime I would snowshoe our trails with Ferris then warm up in front of a cosy fire.
What are three words that best describe you?
Driven. Detailed. Passionate.
What book can you recommend?
It might scare some people off because it's a personal finance book, but I highly recommend Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. It's a thought-provoking look at how to make the most of life.
Also, please share 3 of your favourite products from Imprint House, including links.
https://www.imprinthouse.net/products/cloud-linen-pendant-round-in-taupe
https://www.imprinthouse.net/products/seagrass-runner
https://www.imprinthouse.net/products/ceramic-breakfast-bowl