Favourite room: A bedroom filled with antique treasures | Canada Voices

Interior designer Sappho Griffin can trace her appreciation of antiques to her childhood. She was born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto but spent summers in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region. Her family had a series of neighbouring cottages where aunts, uncles and cousins gathered. “The oldest cottage, originally belonging to my great-grandparents, was filled with antiques from Ontario and Quebec,” she says. “My mother was a big collector.”

Griffin’s passion is evident in her current home – a 1940s bungalow in Bedford, a leafy suburb of Halifax. “All my things are personal and have been collected over time,” she says. “Antiques take time to find and care to maintain. But to me, that’s okay. I’m not interested in zero maintenance. The maintaining is what connects me to my home.”

Her bedroom is filled with these treasures, each with its own story. Her clothing bureau is an antique from the Prairies, something she found at an antique shop in Vancouver where she used to work. “It might have belonged to Mennonites,” she says, “and was once used for kitchen storage. I love that you can still see where mice dug into the cupboard to find food.”

An unsigned vintage painting hangs above the bureau. “It was one of the first paintings I bought after moving to Nova Scotia,” she says. “I found it at auction and was determined to win it despite some stiff competition from another bidder. It is a beautiful seascape of the Tatamagouche shoreline.”

Griffin’s schedule is packed. She’s an entrepreneur, the principal of the design studio Shingle and Stone. This month, she’s running a pop-up shop in Lunenburg to sell some of her favourite decor finds. She also has three children ranging from their late tweens to early 20s. The fainting couch by her bedroom window is where she steals a few quiet moments between demands, looking out at the backyard garden.

It also evokes childhood memories. “It belonged to my grandmother,” Griffin says. “She had great style, and had it covered in a Fortuny silk, but it had seen better days. So, I picked a very simple herringbone weave and reupholstered it.”

The neutral fabric originally complemented the room, which had a subdued colour palette after Griffin bought the house in 2017. The scheme was partly inspired by Toronto designer Emily Griffin, a cousin who also spent summers at the Kawarthas cottage. “Emmy and I share a love for design and often bounce ideas off each other,” says Griffin. “She suggested some neutral touches for my bedroom to create a calmer feel.”

It’s hard to picture the cream backdrop now, as Griffin has recently applied a swirling blue-and-chocolate wallpaper. Choosing the paper was a long and careful process.

“I hemmed and hawed and looked at different options,” she says. “But I had this one tacked up for many months. It looks like seed pods, which spoke to me. I love nature. When I’m feeling out of sorts, I go to nature.”

The catalyst for the decor change was a shift in her personal life. “I call it my divorce paper,” she says. “As soon as my husband and I separated, I took the opportunity to reclaim the space as my own. I wanted to express myself in an entirely new way.”

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