Descendant of a long line of maritime carpenters, Jean-François Lachance today “resurrects” the gestures of the first builders of Montreal.
Even though the city is still young, its pediments are beginning to age. Most of the apartments in the central districts are now reaching or exceeding the venerable age of 100 years. These buildings, erected between 1850 and 1930—recognizable by their brick walls, exterior staircases, and ornate wooden facades—are now experiencing increasingly visible deterioration. The overloaded order book of the L’Établi workshop is proof of this.
Martin Gilbert doesn’t hide his pride. The workshop manager is one of the few to restore the thousands of wooden facades in Montreal. “When it’s straight, it’s easy… When it’s curved, then we have fun,” he says between two railings decrepit by time. Rotundas, cornices and other columns pile up around him in the L’Établi warehouse. “We are sometimes surprised by the talent of people from that era. We don’t question their ways of doing things: on the contrary, we highlight them.”
To keep the face of Montreal intact, “we make an exact copy,” explains the craftsman. “Sometimes, we take out the gouges and we sculpt. Sometimes, we take out [l’appareil de découpe numérique]. We try to be the fastest, the most efficient — we want to innovate, but often, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.” Montreal storefront designs may end up looking similar, but the creativity of the craftsmen of yesteryear seems endless. Between ever-larger columns or ever-more detailed cornices, “there’s always a pattern we’ve never done, a style, a piece…”
In about twenty years, more than 2,000 Montreal facades have been restored thanks to the work of this team of around ten people.
From Île d’Orléans to Montreal
Tens of thousands of Montreal pediments will need to be restored sooner or later. To tackle this public beauty problem, Montreal can count on a craftsman from Île d’Orléans: Jean-François Lachance, owner of L’Établi and the last in a line of marine carpenters. His grandfather François-Xavier “FX” Lachance was “the greatest builder of custom pleasure boats that Quebec has ever known,” he says in an interview.
Lachance grandfather and Lachance grandson were never able to work wood together, the former having died when the latter was 20 years old. Two decades of coexistence nevertheless allowed the younger to be fascinated by this “colossus” and to undertake “small jobs” on Île d’Orléans, itself rich in heritage restorations.
“Purely self-taught”, he returned to work twenty times on the job. His first business led him to make stage sets. A little disappointed to see them disappear too quickly, he finally moved “from stage sets to urban life sets”.
In this very real scenography, “the era determines the style,” and over time he obtained the equivalent of “a postdoctorate in Victorian carpentry,” he jokes. No choice, since Montreal was largely built in the same New England style as the rest of the continent’s east coast, with enormous quantities of wood.
The history of local builders nevertheless colors the facades here, observes Jean-François Lachance. The craftsmen of the time were much less urban than today. “The decors in Montreal are a little piece of countryside in the city,” he says. “To reconcile with the lack of nature, we need beauty in the house.”
His workshop is not, however, frozen in the Quebec of the past. His team of craftsmen brings together Colombian, Polish and Ukrainian origins. Woodworking is universal, says the master carpenter, and the tools are the same everywhere.
To take care
Tracing the authentic forms of Montreal’s residential face also pushes Jean-François Lachance to improvise as a historian. The negligence of the post-war years has made the meticulousness of times gone by disappear, and often only a few “phantom traces” allow him to imagine what it was like before.
“When there has been zero maintenance, sometimes I prefer it,” says the master carpenter, as he is used to seeing the results of previous haphazard restorations. “It was not out of bad faith, more out of cultural or economic poverty,” he specifies, however.
Otherwise, archival photos are enough to reconstruct the original appearance of a facade. An old street shot can show the period style, especially since Montreal houses were often built in clusters, each one resembling the other.
What is sometimes missing are the manufacturing techniques for certain pieces, whose secrets were jealously guarded and have since been buried in the tombs of cabinetmakers. The L’Établi team still manages to “resurrect” certain processes through observations, dismantling and trial and error. “We think we can do better, but in the end, we come back to the methods of the time. In general, when you look closely, not much has changed,” notes Jean-François Lachance.
For those who want to preserve their own wood ornaments without having to redo everything, he advises cleaning them regularly and avoiding black paint. “Wood is durable for life… if it is well maintained.”
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.