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Don’t call it laziness: If anything, it’s confidence that kept this sprawling modernist home on the outskirts of Barrie virtually unchanged for more than half a century.

And in an age of big box renovating and flipping, of television before-and-after “reveals,” and of granite and stainless madness, a home that has stayed true to itself is, well, truly special. From heated terrazzo foyer floors that kiss knotty pine walls reaching up to an expansive Douglas fir-beamed ceiling, and to a semi-circular staircase leading to fieldstone pony walls that provide the perfect backdrop for Swedish fixtures and swoopy Danish furniture, this 5,200-square-foot home is still, today, a work of art.

Photos by Alexander Rothe

“Wild Oaks” was the brainchild of Donald Richard Emery (1912-1982, and “Don” to his friends), a carpenter-turned-engineer and self-made man who grew up in Hamilton but chose Barrie to set up Emery Engineering in the 1950s after a stint building highways to Northern Ontario – often by blasting through solid Canadian Shield – in the 1940s.

“He thought that Barrie was a huge opportunity at that time,” explains his grandson, Stephen Butson, 48. “It was the gateway to the north, but it was close to Toronto.”

By the mid-fifties, the company he’d co-founded with brother-in-law Doug Tate had moved from building single-family houses to commercial and institutional buildings in downtown Barrie and beyond. This success enabled him to buy a large piece of property overlooking Kempenfelt Bay on Shanty Bay Road, where Mr. Emery would build a dream house for himself, his children, and his second wife Irene.

You might say words that are the opposite of lazy – active, attentive, careful – best describe the construction process. In order to manage every detail of the home’s creation and “do a lot of the finishing himself,” Mr. Butson explains, his grandfather first built “a miniature version of the big house” at the bottom of the driveway, complete with a Douglas fir post-and-beam ceiling and knotty pine walls. Then, over the next three years, the home that Mr. Emery and Irene would live in for the rest of their lives was meticulously put together up the hill among the oaks.

Mr. Emery used only the best material and manpower. For instance, local fieldstone for the pony walls and indoor/outdoor supporting columns was chosen, split and stacked by his father, William Emery, a builder and stonemason who had also relocated to Barrie. When there were overages of concrete at an Emery Engineering job site, trucks would be directed up the Shanty Bay Road driveway to pour Mr. Emery’s foundation or pool; similarly, pine rejected as too knotty at another site was trucked home and transformed into tongue-and-groove boards so the walls of Wild Oaks weren’t sullied by nails.

Legend has it the projecting piece of granite over the living room fireplace was transported via canoe from Georgian Bay by Mr. Emery and his friends: “I don’t know if that’s true,” Mr. Butson says.

What is true is that the L-shaped home’s interior design, with its clever use of the circle as a motif – there’s a wooden circular planter in the foyer, a custom-built light fixture that looks like a Star Trek transporter pad over a hallway leading to the dining room, curved walls in the master bath, and circular pavers by the round pool – was penned by Mr. Emery.

His love of wood and its many imperfections led to it being celebrated everywhere, and his love of entertaining and mixology saw the creation of a glassy great room that had both a custom-built wet bar and a Hammond organ.

“Clients would be entertained there,” Mr. Butson says. “They had big New Year’s parties there with a live jazz band.” In fact, it’s more than likely Mr. Emery joined in, as he played both saxophone and organ; he also had a “huge” jazz record collection, and would take Irene to see the greats when they played Toronto’s Colonial or Town taverns, or the Royal York.

Furniture, most of it swoopy Danish teak, clusters of colourful, hanging Swedish light fixtures, artwork, and shaggy area rugs were all selected by Mr. Emery. Custom-built teak furniture, such as the curved, grasscloth-clad wet bar and whimsical boomerang-shaped vanity in the powder room beside it, were drawn by Mr. Emery and brought to life by an English carpenter who worked for Emery Engineering.

Relief from the woodsy riot came in the form of robin’s egg blue kitchen cabinets and a (then) state-of-the-art Frigidaire “Flair” wall oven with pullout electric burners. Because almost every room enjoyed floor-to-ceiling windows (often “pierced’”by the roof beams) diners could watch squirrels frolic as they ate.

Because of this purity of vision, Mrs. Emery (1922 – 2014) never thought to change a thing (family accounts vary, but the Emerys moved in and decorated either in 1960 or 1962); when original hanging lights in the kitchen failed, Mr. Butson recalls his grandmother going through quite the ordeal before finally settling on Ikea.

Mr. Butson regrets that he never asked his grandfather, who would go on to build Barrie’s Formosa Springs Brewery (later Molson) in the late-1960s, where he found inspiration for the home. The couple travelled to Vancouver and Arizona a fair bit, so it’s possible influences were drawn from those places. Or Toronto, of course, which was a pretty modern place by the late-fifties.

So, on the listing brochure – yes, the home is for sale and Mr. Butson and other family members are “pretty upset about it” – there is the predictable comparison to Frank Lloyd Wright. Certainly, Mr. Wright was the poster boy of “un-lazy,” but those in the know will see more of Cliff May, the “grandfather” of the ranch style, with, perhaps, a soupçon of flashy Miami Beach hotel designer Morris Lapidus.

And speaking of those in the know: Time for an energetic someone to step forward, chequebook in hand.

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For more information, contact Jenn Chalmers, jennchalmers.com, or Matthew Klonowski, matthewk.ca.