Christopher and Craig.
Craig and Christopher.
Both combos will be catchy if Christopher Gillis and Craig Dauphinee should someday launch their very own home design television show.
But for now, both members of this designing duo are contently contributing to their popular blog, theottomanempire — style in unexpected places, in which this Charlottetown couple puts their ongoing renovation and redesign of their newly purchased home on Fitzroy Street out there for all the world to see.
“It’s just sort of taken on a life of its own,” laughs Gillis of what has become a truly enjoyable and addictive hobby/side business for them.
Their previous project, which was, in fact, their very first home of their own, was the impetus to their unbridled passion for home décor.
They had spent the better part of a year putting their special stylized touches on that Stewart Street house, furnishing it with an exquisite mix of antique, vintage and modern pieces with loads of eclectic accents, only to sell it furnished right down to the placing of picture hooks.
“On the stairs up to our third floor we had an art wall and we said those were all personal (pieces) and they said, ‘That’s fine but leave all the hooks where they are. So they even wanted to replicate the montage, the way that we had it,” Gillis says of their previous house, which was featured in a 2011 issue of East Coast Living Magazine.
Of course, this meant they were starting from scratch all over again.
But they eagerly rose to the challenge in their new home on the corner of Edward and Fitzroy Streets.
One big difference was the amount of work they had to do to the structure itself, especially the exterior, which needed some major TLC.
“We knew there were wood shingles underneath the vinyl siding, so we wanted to restore it but we underestimated the amount of time and money that it would take to do that,” Gillis says.
“. . . We didn’t realize that because it had vinyl siding on it of course that was nailed on so there were literally hundreds if not thousands of nails that had to be removed.”
One unexpected but totally welcome surprise was the discovery of various characteristics and features of the home that had been hidden for years under the vinyl façade, including an original Edward Street sign, which is now a decorative feature in their living room.
“There was some graffiti where kids had (decades ago) carved their initials in the shingles and also a lot of architectural features like the headers over the windows and eve brackets and the side brackets,” Dauphinee says.
“We could see very clearly when we took the siding off that there had been details there, but it had all been removed so we had a local person make custom brackets based on a P.E.I. design.”
They began their blog as a way to document their work and to share the process with people they knew.
“It became a real coping strategy for us as well because when you’re in the middle of renovations it can be very stressful and very distracting, but this is a very nice sort of sideline way of focusing some of that stress, too; that we were able to turn filling thousands of nail holes into something else. It brought a little more levity to the situation. And people were more interactive, so you felt this huge support,” Gillis says.
“It was (also) a platform for us to showcase our work and from that we’ve been hired for other design projects, which is great.”
The big blog reveals were a hit with their audience.
“Everyone loves a reveal. Everyone loves a before and after,” Dauphinee says.
“And I think that we also found, being wrapped up in the process, when we started doing the reveals and started pulling out those pictures from August (2011) that we had almost forgotten it because we’d seen it along the way and through those stages, especially the outside . . . . We had kind of forgotten how bad it was.”
The other aspects of the blog evolved through time, such as Today’s Treasure column, which showcases some things they’ve found along the way.
“During that time this summer we were also doing quite a bit of shopping because we’d sold (almost) all of our contents in the other house,” Dauphinee says.
“We had a bit of money, so we went on a bit of a shopping spree and were finding all these wonderful treasures around. And people were asking ‘Where on P.E.I. did you find that!?’”They also added a DIY Doris section so that people could send in their questions and photos of their decorating dilemma, such as what colour to paint a front door, and then get some helpful advice from “Doris,” who in reality is a design-savvy female friend of theirs.
Reader numbers spiked when Dauphinee and Gillis did their big reveal of their house exterior.
On Dec. 4 Lynn wrote: “Great job, you two! I remember driving by this summer, and thought, “Oh dear, someone missed by a whole lot. Then a week or so later drove by and realized it was the primer! Super classic finish! . . . .”
On the same day Kristin wrote: “I keep scrolling back and forth between the before and after photos — it doesn’t even look like the same house! You guys did an amazing job!”
With this house on Fitzroy Street pretty much sewn up, the decorating duo has already set their sights on a new project — an old church they recently purchased in Annapolis Valley, N.S., that they will be starting to do the interior design work for very soon.
And so their designing eye is once again on overtime to acquire the pieces that will blend beautifully together with typical Craig and Christopher/Christopher and Craig style.
“A lot of times when we’re out shopping and people are asking us, ‘What are you looking for?’ our stock answer is ‘We don’t know.’ We don’t know what we’re looking for, but we’ll know it when we see it,” Dauphinee says.
“And when we see something we’re like, ‘Well that’s perfect. Why wouldn’t that work?’ ”
