Church-Lady Lunches and PoHo Houses

My friend and I travelled to lovely little Port Hope this weekend for their annual house tour. We managed to hit several stunning properties, from sleekly modern to charmingly restored, though we didn't make it to the three out-of-town options. As often happens, my favourites weren't the ones I expected at all. In my opinion, Best of Show was 184 Walton, the restoration of a Victorian townhouse on the main drag. It wasn't just the bay and transom windows and lovingly refinished plank floors, it was the eye-popping tangerine, flame orange, and soft lime paint colours. And the amazing origami chandelier in the dining room that papered the walls with patterned shadows.

A close second was the gorgeous 20 King St., with a kitchen to impress even a culinary philistine like myself (love the punchy, graphic wall of antique clothes-iron footplates!); a walk-in closet lined with meticulously cut-out images of women's shoes; and the cutest and the most British garden shed (below) I've ever seen—and that's saying a lot in a veddy British town.

Thanks to Peter for this photo!

The house below, also on King St. was beautifully restored and renovated, and had a cool office-slash-lounge added in the attic, but the decor was pretty over-the-top frilly and not to our taste. The garden, however, was another story. It was huge, went on forever, and featured a pool area, manicured hedges, and GIANT cedar trees (there's one visible to the right in the following picture; we were all mystified at how they managed to keep them trimmed). And the yard had one more thing at the very back, tucked inside the weathered eight-foot back fence: a dilapidated old barn with an alarming sine-wave roofline but noble character.


Worth a mention, too, was the new property at 103 Augusta, remarkable not only for its four levels of floor-to-ceiling windows stacked on the lip of a ravine, but also for the galleryful of gorgeous art created by the homeowner.

But as it turned out, it wasn't the architecture OR the decor that was the highlight of my day, it was the lunch served at the P.H. United Church. I could not have asked for a more quintessentially small-town Ontario setting, cast of characters, or cuisine.

In the house tour program, the lunch was listed as follows: "Homemade Meat Pies, Coleslaw, Rolls, Dessert, Tea/Coffee." But it was so much more. The program included no mention of the tea-rose tablecloths, the church-basement chairs, the hotel plate silverware, the mix and match tea cups, fresh bouquets in vases, or cheerful church-lady servers. Nowhere did it hint that we would witness those servers dumping the dregs of their coffee and tea pots back into the commercial percolators stationed in the classic, fluorescent-lit church hall. I was in cliché heaven.




And "dessert" doesn't begin to describe the oh-so-WASP experience of the creamy vanilla pudding studded with juicy, canned crushed pineapple and topped with the extra-fancy embellishment of a canned tangerine segment or halved maraschino cherry. WITH an oatmeal cookie! Shades of wedding showers past!



We were delighted with our "refreshments," but will always wonder about the church-lady paths not taken. For example, also available were repasts offered without irony by the Catholics ("Italian Meatball Sandwich, Caesar Salad" [!]), the Presbyterians ("Chicken Pot Pie, Salad"), and perhaps most tellingly, the Anglicans ("Quiche, Salad"). Those crafty Anglicans, however, did go the extra mile by providing the only all-day refreshment station for weary tourists, at which were served "Muffins, Scones and Sweets." After all, it's a hilly town, and on top of that, those houses have a lot of stairs.

So thanks to PoHo for a lovely day: the rain held off, the meat pies were delicious, and, to accompany our end-of-day coffees, our beloved Zest restaurant served us fresh ginger cookies. Even a church lady couldn't have asked for more.