The owner’s tour | Opening onto Villa Chapelle

Owners open the doors of their exceptional homes to us, offered on the resale market.

Church or house? This enigmatic and atypical place has undoubtedly intrigued many passers-by. The mystery is now solved…

Rue Shefford, in Bromont, the aptly named Villa Chapelle piqued the curiosity of Lisa Marois six years ago. Finally, the building could only be beautiful in her opinion, so she first headed to the back lot. After several years living on a 120-acre equestrian estate, she always needed greenery and this four-acre space dotted with century-old trees won her over.

Then, when she opened the doors of the church, she felt very moved.

Sharing place

The place also represented the opportunity for a return to basics, with the creation of a dance school. After a long career in the television communications sector and several years caring for her children, she was happy to give ballet lessons again.

At that time, a wall was erected in front of the new kitchen and the staircase was in the small entrance. Lisa had therefore installed mirrors on the partition, after repainting everything white, including the embossed ceiling to bring in more light and highlight the stained glass windows. “I was really happy to allow people from Bromont to come to this extraordinary place. » But in 2020, because of the pandemic, she had to change course and created her online stretching platform Terraquaflo.

Lisa and her partner Jean-François Lepage then took the opportunity to undertake major work in the chapel in order to give it another vocation. They therefore called on the entrepreneur Guillaume Beauregard (Prestige G. Beauregard). They want to maintain the conviviality of the place, but this time to welcome family and friends.

Restore without distorting

The central wall was knocked down to create a warm open area, responding to today’s lifestyle, but whose furnishing elements such as floors and kitchen cabinets (kitchen designer Dominic Roy; Centaure cabinetmaker) respected the ancestral style of the chapel. They also moved the staircase into this space in order to have direct access to the first floor, now open to the mezzanine. Aerial, the latter is made without risers and equipped with glass railings which allow light to circulate.

From a structural point of view, the owners have done a titanic job in terms of insulation, plumbing, electricity, and roofing. They took time to find a competent expert to renovate the bell tower (painter Gaétan Poirier).

The owner of the house says that several owners have succeeded one another since the construction of the chapel in 1916. At one time, a lady from a wealthy family asked her husband to add a house to it. This L-shaped extension, discreet and perfectly integrated, was built on one level. It includes a boudoir extended by a glass roof, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, then ends with a slender room converted into a cloakroom and summer kitchen.

“I reused the furniture from the old kitchen to create this one which opens onto the terrace,” explains Lisa, who rethought the entire design, focusing for example on bold wallpapers in the bedrooms, colors and European-inspired textures.

Today, the couple decided to return to Montreal, because Lisa misses her children a lot. “I have no regrets in leaving this house, because I never felt that it belonged to me, but rather that it was lent to me for a certain time to take care of it. » His only desire is that the person who buys it also feels the happiness it gives off.