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"View Slideshow\n\nKatherine Newman, the founder of the Toronto-based company Katherine Newman Design, builds every house she decorates. While originally her practice was conventional\u2014she did interiors for houses designed by others\u2014today she will not accept a residential project unless it is to be designed and constructed jointly with her partner, architectural designer and builder Peter Cebulak. Together they accept five full architectural, construction and furnishing projects a year, a method of working that developed as they collaborated on a very distinguished house in Toronto.\n\n\"Although our commission was simply to design the interiors, Peter and I felt that this was an incredibly promising project, and we wanted to do it all,\" Newman recalls. \"We just got into the doing and very slowly convinced the clients of our skills in coordinating the entire project.\"\n\n\"They wanted a handsome, serious residence with a strong sense of permanence,\" Cebulak says. It was left to the designers to decide that the house should be classically symmetrical and built of local materials. Cebulak acknowledges the influence of Sir Edwin Lutyens on the architecture, including its elevations, the shapes and proportions of the rooms and their ornamental details. Architects sometimes cite the master's country houses from the Arts and Crafts Movement as a source of inspiration, but Lutyens, equally attracted to classicism, created many grand and deftly designed neo-Georgian and neo-Palladian residences.\n\nCebulak explains that learning from Lutyens enabled him to control the formal symmetry of the Toronto house and give the broad main fa\u00E7ade a bold, well-scaled and focused entrance by means of the triple-arched stone portico. Other Lutyens references include the imposing, steeply pitched roof, the high profile of the chimneys and the tall, narrow casement windows with their stone surrounds. Cebulak's use of cut limestone and Indiana rubble stone for all the fa\u00E7ades associates the new house with older Ontario building traditions, and the stonework itself is of a quality that Lutyens might have approved. \"The care with which the classical orders and ornaments were designed and cut was very ambitious,\" Newman reports. \"In our effort to ensure that an Old World aesthetic be authentically reproduced, Peter made all the drawings himself.\"\n\nThe most elegantly shaped spaces in the house are the entrance gallery, the dining room and the two-story elliptical library. The gallery is five bays wide and connects, at opposite ends, the dining room and the living room. The ceiling is a series of groin arches that spring from Doric pilasters, and its floor consists of three Italian marbles in a diamond pattern. Gilt-bronze hexagonal lanterns hang in each bay. A fireplace facing the front door is there to warm family and friends coming in out of the Ontario cold and is flanked by a pair of Louis XV painted armchairs with the original lampas upholstery fabric. The mantel, inspired by a 16th-century Elizabethan mantel at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, is made with a variety of softly colored stones.\n\nA striking Russian chandelier, circa 1860\u2014a confection of ormolu, rock crystal and cobalt glass\u2014is the showpiece of the oval dining room. Centered in the room as well as on the gallery's long axis is another fireplace, with a hand-carved marble-and-onyx mantel, deliberately simple and without embellishment. The wall paneling is also quiet and, as Newman notes, \"is rooted in the strong classical architectural detailing we devised for the exterior.\" Against this subtle background are Adamesque dining chairs and, on the dining table, a pair of circa 1920s delft pottery tulipi\u00E8res, Newman's favorite accessories.\n\nAccording to Cebulak, the design of the library interested the husband most. It consists of furniture-quality cabinetry with the kind of mahogany and satinwood inlays normally associated with small furniture. Apart from finely carved Ionic capitals, the interior paneling is only minimally configured, yet the room has a great number of noteworthy antiques, among them a circa 1790 satinwood worktable. Throughout the house, it is evident that Newman has the knowledge and resources to draw from almost the whole history of furniture and style. It is a very free mix, with no attempt to conform to a single style in any particular room.\n\nAnyone visiting this house would assume it to be like most of its quality\u2014designed by an eclectic architect, constructed by an experienced builder and furnished by a sophisticated decorator. And so it is. But the extra ingredient is Newman and Cebulak's concept of single and full service to every residential client, and it is working very well for them."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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