LiViNG - Georgia Straight

RENOVATIONS>>
EXTREME
MAKE-OVER
STORY
AN ARTIST, A LIGHTING
DESIGNER, AND A FURNITURE
MAKER TRANSFORM A TOWNHOUSE
BY PATTY JONES
NEOPOLITAN BAMBOO CABINETS
SET OFF ULTRAMODERN
APPLIANCES, A WHITE CORIAN
COUNTER, AND EXPANSES OF
BAMBOO FLOORING THE
COLOUR OF DARK COFFEE.
| FALL 2008 | | GEORGIA STRAIGHT LIVING |
20
Last winter, before retreating to its current
corner in the dining room of artist Marianna
Gartner and lighting designer Gabor Csakany’s
newly renovated condominium, the
antique aluminum prosthetic leg with the wooden
foot was busy being a prop.
Gartner was using it for a painting, inspired
by a 1934 work by French artist Alfred Courmes,
that soon sold in Berlin. But the prosthetic,
scooped from a Vancouver antique shop, hasn’t
got a leg to stand on among all the other curios
in Gartner and Csakany’s Fairview Slopes
townhouse. Pistol-packing Hungarian wooden
rabbit? Check. Spanish gargoyle? Check. “A lot
of things are from our travels,” Gartner says in
an interview at their home.
These things reside in an airy 1,440-squarefoot,
three-storey abode that is one bathroom
short of completing its 11-month-long transformation.
There is a sunlit atrium with an 18-foot
ceiling, a kitchen where stripy Neopolitan bamboo
cabinetry flanks ultramodern appliances,
and expanses of bamboo flooring the colour of
dark coffee. But this is now. There was a “then”.
“I called it a wormhole,” says Gartner, describing
the 1983-built townhouse when they first
stepped inside last fall. “It was very dated, very
dingy. It had dirty wall-to-wall carpeting; dingy
paint; dated, dingy kitchen and bathrooms.”
“I liked the architectural details, but otherwise
I wouldn’t buy it,” Csakany says. “I knew Gabor
could fix anything,” says Gartner.
They soon had keys to “anything” and were
ripping out its carpets and gutting its kitchen of
pesky datedness.
They went four months kitchenless. Renovating
can make grown people weep, but if anyone
cried, they’re not saying. “You hear horror stories,”
says Gartner. “We’re not angels, but we get along
really well renovating.”
Csakany and their aged Saab made trips to
environmentally friendly GreenWorks Building
Supply. “He’s proud of the lugging that old
Saab can do,” Gartner says. The Saab lugged
coffee-coloured and Neopolitan bamboo. It
lugged PaperStone countertop. It lugged a
lean, brushed-metal fridge and a deep, chic
Quebec-made bathtub. Csakany and Gartner
lugged things up and down staircases.
“We were a team,” Gartner says, “but Gabor
does most of it.” “Most of it” meant laying bamboo
flooring almost entirely himself, including on
wraparound stairs. It meant setting Italian-ceramic
tile around a fireplace, in an entranceway, and in
a bathroom. He installed radiant heating under
floors. He put in a German stovetop, designing
and installing the hood and backsplash. He added
aluminum ledges and wood-chip beams that share
a warm, zebra sensibility with the kitchen cabinetry.
“There has to be a kind of flow,” says Csakany.
Csakany is a man who lights up a place. “We
hoped there would be enough light. We knew
there would be if we did this,” Gartner says.
“This” was removing a floor from the glassblocked
atrium’s top level. Light flooded into
what they envisioned would be the artist’s studio
below. Now, she is working, painting surreal, often
macabre twists on Victorian-style portraiture.
Gartner shows mainly at Berlin’s Galerie Michael
Haas and Galerie Haas & Fuchs. (The couple just
spent six months away while she painted in Berlin,
putting a halt to renovations.) In November,
she’ll show solo at New York’s Max Lang Gallery.
“I’m doing a few extra paintings, little heads on
wood panels,” she says.
Gartner chipped out tile and transformed
walls from hospital greens, burgundies, and
“bad” yellows to pale greys and off-whites. In
the kitchen, Csakany installed monopoints and
German-made halogens. He reconfigured an
aluminum dining-room chandelier into something
they now aptly call “the bird’s nest”.
He is a man to whom people give lights
that won’t work. In the living room upstairs, he
strung 1910-style light bulbs he calls “pigtails”
along a thin cable. Blue LED lights Csakany installed
down the staircase make it feel like an
ultracool airport runway.
“I put in my two cents,” Gartner says. At least one
of those cents went into the kitchen. They couldn’t