A MID-CENTURY MOOD
Maclean's|August 2023
A low-slung Guelph home blends vintage whimsy with colourful, sleek decor
Isabel B. Slone
A MID-CENTURY MOOD

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.

This story is from the August 2023 edition of Maclean's.

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This story is from the August 2023 edition of Maclean's.

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