Avenue Magazine Edmonton

Colour, colour everywhere, and nary a spot of white or boring builder's beige to be found. When it comes to putting hues together in daring combinations, Leanne Gallagher and fiancé J.C. (John Campbell) bravely go where other, safer homeowners fear to wander.

Take just the main floor, for instance. The wide, galley-style kitchen in their 40-year-old home is a spring posy of bright blue floors and backsplash tiles, chartreuse walls and green-apple counters. It opens out onto their L-shaped living room and a dining room at the other end, both a semolina yellow. The walls going inside the media room vary in vibrancy. The ambience of that space is relaxed, with walls painted in mink-fur brown and a deep, sombre red.

"My philosophy is no white walls. I work at home and need a bright, colourful space that makes you feel good. It does so much for your mood," says Gallagher, a jewellery designer and artist. Her studio, Queen Bee Design, with its eggshell blue and chartreuse green walls, fills the basement of their 2,200-square-foot home in Greenfield.

Always having fresh flowers in the home is another reflection of this sensibility for colour. She also uses them inspirationally as subjects for her paintings. "After art school I did the flower [arrangements] at The Artworks for five years," says Gallagher, who graduated from Grant MacEwan's fine arts program two decades ago. "They're a big thing for me. Why not have that beauty in the house, you know?" 

She, J.C. and daughter Rynn, 12, moved into the house four and a half years ago. For J.C., a video games producer with industry giant BioWare, it wasn't like coming home, it was coming home. When he was a young boy in 1978, his family moved into the place after having lived around the corner for years, back when Greenfield was on the edge of town. "In all my adult years I thought, if I ever could find a house like this - or this house - [I'd buy it]," says J.C., who did just that when his dad sold the home to him in 2005. "There's so much about it that I love."

He lists among its lovable assets a pair of wood-burning fireplaces on the main floor and a huge, pie-shaped backyard with several mature trees, including one he planted for Arbour Day as a child, which is now 12 metres tall. As a bonus, the large grassy areas means there's not too much sidewalk to shovel in winter.

Since moving in, the couple has completely modernized the 1960s-era kitchen by removing walls and opening it up to the rest of the main floor. They've transformed the upstairs bathroom, installing a sleek walk-in shower and a more luxurious tub. They're also finishing up a reno in the main floor powder room, with just a few more updates to come as time and budget allow.

J.C. has done much of the work himself, installing the flooring, the light fixtures and cabinetry. "All the money I saved by doing the work myself I spent on tools," he says, laughing.

Along with the strong preference for colour, their design approach is to mix modern-style furnishings with treasured antiques and items collected over the years.

One recurring motif is the presence of locks, latches and doors: on an antique escritoire in the living room; on a large Moroccan spice box in the dining room; on a narrow cabinet in the TV room; on the cabinetry used for jewellery supplies in the studio. Another motif involves the use of niches (what Gallagher calls "little shrine-ey kinds of spots"), above a fireplace, on a feature wall with pot lighting and in the shower.

Formidable and earthy wooden elements make up yet another reoccurring theme: in the primitive, trough-like fruit bowl on the dining room table; in the imposing "king's chest" from India, purchased from a now-defunct antique store and transformed into a unique living room divan; and in the one-of-a-kind banister going to the second floor made of a giant, twisting piece of liana vine from a rainforest. It's like what Tarzan would swing from, but hardened and re-purposed as a stair railing and conversation piece. "We'd been looking for something interesting and unusual, a birch log or steel pipe," says Gallagher. For J.C., who did the sanding, routing, varnishing and mounting, "it was a labour of love, for sure."

Ultimately, the idea with the home's design was "to find a way to integrate everything," says Gallagher. And she thinks they've accomplished just that. "It's like this multiple personality, of loving little doors and hidey-holes and locking places, and the modern kind of esthetic ... I can never imagine moving. We've made it, within our means, our dream house."