Seaside style, N.S. flavour in hot home design

BY WENDY ELLIOTT

Kings County Register

When Kentville native Jan Sweet and her husband, Karsten Riedel, wanted to put their Toronto home up for sale, the real estate agents took immediate notice.

Jan is a professional interior designer and her husband a contractor, so their house was worthy of note in the hot Toronto market. A special flyer turned into a feature article in the May issue of Style at Home.

The house replaced a waterfront cottage-style home. It could be only 17 feet wide and had to blend into the neighborhood. Blend it does and, Sweet says, it even offers a seaside, Nova Scotia feel.

Being so close to adjacent homes, Sweet and Riedel emphasized light. They used an open concept and no less than 100 pot lights.

Sweet believes the real estate market will always be in areas like the Beaches, which is on the water.

“People naturally gravitate to the water - as I do, coming from a province surrounded by ocean. Our house sold for $1.2 million, which was a crazy price for our neighborhood,” she said.

Left the Valley in 1980

Sweet left the Valley to study at Ryerson in 1980 and took an interior design degree.

“I didn't study art as I was afraid of being a starving artist - although I would've loved to. So I chose a career in interior design.”

Sweet says she decided to stay away from residential decorating projects because they were likely to be too personal (ie. cause husband/ wife disagreements). She worked freelance in the commercial sector for 15 years, designing primarily financial institution interiors.

Marriage and a family meant Sweet stopped working in the traditional sense.

“I'm a busy stay-at-home mom now who designed this house off the corner of my sticky kitchen counter at 9 p.m. after the kids were in bed,” she chuckles.

The in-fill house in the popular Beaches area was one she and her husband built from the ground up.

“It was my first residential project. Because of my design background and my husband's knowledge of construction, we were able to design the house without an architect, which we were proud of. Of course we used a structural engineer to review and stamp our drawings.”

Rather be an artist

Sweet would really rather be an artist.

“I'm mostly self-taught, with the exception of a few classes here and there.”

Her very first art teacher was Doreen Roberts in Kentville when she was 12.

“She was lovely. My mother always encouraged me to paint. For years, I would paint one painting a year until I finally enrolled myself into an art class at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This forces me out of the house one night a week to paint and now I can produce one painting a month.”

Sweet has had one student exhibition with her art class.

“I'm hoping to have an exibition this summer if I can only get busy and start painting. I'd love to do a Nova Scotia series. I'm currently working on an image of Blomidon at low tide.”

Her painting of Cape Split, which appears in the May issue, was recently purchased by the Old Orchard Inn in Greenwich.

Sweet admits she misses Nova Scotia in many ways.

“Mostly, I miss the natural beauty, which I took for granted when I lived there. Now, when I come home each summer, I revel in the beauty and try to steal away with my camera to take photos to bring back to Toronto

“All I want to do is paint,” she said. “It seems I like to paint landscapes the most because I miss being near the woods and beaches of my native province, so I paint them. One day, I'll come home.”