CALL OF THE WILD

The allure of wide-open spaces drew Wispy Boivin and her family to a farmhouse surrounded by nature

- RACHEL LEEDHAM

Wispy Boivin was so taken with this farmhouse when she drove past it one day that she stopped and popped a note through the door asking the owners to call her if they were ever to consider selling. The owners did get in touch, but Wispy was in for a surprise. ‘I had estimated that the house had about five acres at the front but what I hadn’t realised was that there was another 23 acres of trails at the back,’ she recounts. ‘Of course, it meant that the owners wanted much more for the property than I had imagined.’

In spite of this, Wispy, who works as an estate agent, couldn’t get the farmhouse out of her mind. ‘We had moved up here to Collingwood from Toronto in 2009 and in the following four years we had lived in various houses but we were still hunting for that ideal property – somewhere with a bit of land that was not too far out of town,’ she recalls. ‘I felt this was the perfect house for our three young children to grow up in, and I begged my husband, Christophe, to come around to the idea.’