A MID-CENTURY MOOD

A low-slung Guelph home blends vintage whimsy with colourful, sleek decor

- Isabel B. Slone

EVER SINCE CASS GOULDING was a child, she's been drawn to vintage kitsch, watching old episodes of Bewitched and scouring thrift stores for 1950s rockabilly-style dresses. Her husband, Chris Bowman, prefers clean lines, Scandinavian minimalism and the modernist designs of Louis Kahn, Marcel Breuer and Pierre Koenig. "I'm mid-century, he's modern, so together we're mid-mod," she says.

In 2017, Goulding, now a social media manager, and Bowman, a pilot, were living in a cookie-cutter three-bedroom Oshawa house furnished in typical millennial fashion, with a nightstand doing double duty as a TV table. They fantasized about taking their atomic-age aesthetic obsession to the next level and buying a mid-century home. They started their hunt the next year, limiting their search radius to within an hour's drive of Pearson airport.

In December of 2018, Bowman saw a listing online for a low-slung rectangular structure by architect Richard Pagani in Guelph, Ontario-but at $850,000, it was out of their budget. The three-bedroom house languished on the market for a few more months, and its price fell by $100,000. The day they viewed the house, it dropped even further, to $699,000. They put in an offer for that amount in 2019, and once it was accepted, the couple only had 11 days to sell their townhouse.