At first glance, the board and batten-clad barn next to interior designer Emily Griffin’s cottage on Balsam Lake, Ont., is a bit of an enigma. Is it a new building or an old one that’s been renovated? The answer, it turns out, is both. While the 1,200-sq.-ft. structure was built from scratch in 2019, its salvaged windows and doors (not to mention its furniture, rugs, and staircase) date back much further. In fact, tracing all their origins maps out Emily’s family tree.
In the late 1800s, Emily’s great-great grandfather, Sir William Mackenzie (one of the founding figures behind Canada’s railway system), purchased a 600-acre plot on Balsam Lake. Emily’s grandparents, Kitty and Tony, inherited the property and the main residence’s icehouse. Later on, they divided up the remaining land into parcels, one for each of their four sons. By the time Emily was visiting the lake as a kid, there were five cottages scattered across the 80-acre compound—including a log cabin, built from a Pan- Abode kit in the 1960s that belonged to her parents. Now, the cottage has passed to her and her husband, Norman.
But as the couple’s three kids (Grace, Max, and Oscar) reached their teenage years, the family began to outgrow the Pan-Abode. “It was a dark bungalow with low ceilings, and we were all just living on top of each other,” says Emily. She and Norman started dreaming of a next-door addition—somewhere simple yet spacious that would provide more room for fun and games, while also giving the kids their own dedicated late-night zone and sleeping quarters. For design inspiration, they thought of their weekly drives up to the cottage. “We tend to take the backroads, and everywhere you look, you see this beautiful Ontario barn architecture,” says Emily. “It’s towering and majestic, and it felt like the right shape for what we wanted to achieve.”
Partly to save money and partly to give the barn character, she decided to incorporate building materials that her aunts and uncles were tossing out as they embarked on their own renovations and rebuilds of neighbouring properties. “I kept getting calls saying, ‘We’re redoing the windows—you want them?’ ” she says. “The barn is only for seasonal use, so I could get away with old windows because I wasn’t concerned about heat seeping out.” Drawing on her expertise as one of two principals at the Toronto interior design firm Griffin Houghton, Emily planned a build that’s an architectural smorgasbord, mixing together windows and doors originally installed on the old icehouse and the main cottage. (A few additional windows sourced at a country yard sale rounded out the project.) “Any chance that you have to integrate old pieces into a new build, take it, because they just bring something that’s hard to get from new things,” says Emily.
Inside the barn, she continued to honour family lore. The design of the upstairs loft was inspired by memories of sleepovers that she and her cousins had as kids in the communal boathouse. It includes two supersized platforms that support eight double mattresses—enough for her three kids, plus any visiting friends or cousins. To keep things somewhat orderly, Emily added under-bed drawers that give everyone a place to store their belongings—in theory, at least. “There’s clothes strewn all over the place and music blaring—it’s total and utter blissful chaos,” she says. In another boathouse-inspired move, metal straps secured to the ceiling can prop open the windows to let in light and breeze.
Meanwhile, downstairs functions as the ultimate hangout zone. “We’ve tried to make it low-tech, which can be pretty hard with teenagers,” says Emily. Along with board games and a tickle trunk full of costumes, the space is filled with instruments for frequent jam sessions. A monumental 1950s snooker table originally belonging to a now-defunct Toronto snooker club (a Facebook Marketplace find by Norman) rounds out the rainy-day attractions. “It’s, like, twelve feet long,” says Emily. “It came in a zillion pieces, so for the following two weekends, my husband had YouTube on his phone walking him through each step of assembly. It was a true labour of love.”
The scale of the pool table meant the barn’s real crown jewel—a staircase repurposed from Emily’s grandparents’ cottage, the property’s onetime icehouse—had
to be shifted from a planned spot near the centre of the building off to the side. “We were designing on the fly, based on what windows we got, what pool table we found,” Emily says. Also in the mix: vintage rugs and an old wooden vanity in the bathroom (both, again, salvaged from the cottages of Emily’s aunts and uncles), along with well-worn skis and snowshoes picked up in antique shops to serve as decor against the white-washed pine walls.
While the improvisational approach that she took to designing the barn differs from much of the work that Emily does in her day job, the project nevertheless inspired a new business venture. On a trip to Jaipur, India, for a wedding in 2017, she visited a textile warehouse to source heavy cotton fabrics for the barn bedding. After several years of personally stress-testing them, she later returned to the same warehouse to develop and launch her own bedding brand, Imli. “To this day, that barn bedding looks the same—it’s been washed a million times, but it’s still sturdy, none of the colours have bled, and it’s softened so that it feels even better,” says Emily.
“So many people are focused on new, new, new, and I will always be looking back. I love old things because they have patina and soul.”
Eric Mutrie is a senior editor at Azure magazine. He wrote “One Small Box, Three Ways,” in our May ’24 issue.
Take the stairs
When her aunt and uncle started a renovation of the icehouse that had been her grandparents’ cottage, Emily salvaged the building’s staircase to transplant into the barn. The heirloom has many stories.
GAME, SET, AND MATCH
For Emily, the staircase holds memories of fetching tennis balls from the icehouse’s loft for games on the nearby court as a kid. “We weren’t really supposed to use new ones, so we’d have to sneak up those stairs past where my grandparents were napping to get them,” she says.
A SINGLE STEP
As a freestanding element, the steps were fairly straightforward to relocate. “It’s not really a staircase, but more like a ladder,” says Emily. “Moving it was just two guys walking it from one cottage to another—there were no delivery trucks needed.”
SCALING NEW HEIGHTS
When it was originally mounted against a wall in the icehouse, the staircase had no railings. Its latest incarnation now includes them, as well as two more treads (disguised with a new stair stringer to feel like they’ve always been there) to span the extra distance up to the sleeping loft.
CLIMBING GYM
Thanks to the staircase, Emily’s grandparents maintained an impressive exercise regimen. “They were still going up those stairs right until they turned 91,” she says.
This story originally appeared in our August ’25 issue.
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