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I ask Maurice Roy how he knows how to restore a heritage house and here’s what he says: “You just listen to the house and it tells you what to do. The rest is just gut work.” It sounds a little farfetched until he invites me into his current project—a house on Upper Prince Street in Charlottetown, built in the early to mid 1800s. The house is bit of a shambles. Roy and his partner, Linda MacLeod, are living there while they carry out extensive restoration work. But it’s clear what he’s talking about. Amid the clutter, it’s easy to see the bones of a graceful old home, built almost a century and a half ago.
Roy is in the process of removing (with great care and expert advice) the asbestos shingles that hide the house’s grace and beauty. It was, when it was constricted, one of very few houses in the area. It was built for H. R. (George) Goodman, an Island MLA, and uses a vast array of architectural styles. Roy speculates that the builder, perhaps at Goodman’s behest, chose features from a variety of buildings in early Charlottetown. One of the primary influences was something called the picturesque style, which emphasized the pictorial values of architecture and landscape in combination with each other. Hence, the large windows and the French doors which brought the outside in.
Roy also learns about his houses by looking at other houses. Ardgowan, another significant house (located off what is now Mt. Edward Road) is also in the picturesque style. As he mucks around the Goodman house, he finds little echoes of other buildings—a little neo classical here, a little Fanningbank there.
But mostly, he lets the house give him his clues. He is able to date his house and the two additions at the back from the nails and the hand split laths. In fact, the differences in the carpentry were his first clue that the two rooms at the back had been added later.
Roy pulls away a bit of crumbling plaster to reveal the telltale laths. He is as excited by them as most of us would be by a lottery win.
Roy was able to discover that one of the rooms at the back served as Goodman’s library. It has its own entrance and it is not hard, even now, to picture men of state trudging out of town and across the wide verandah to conduct business.
This is not the first house he has listened to. That was in Pleasant Grove—a tiny little place that became a lab and a classroom for Roy’s new found interest in restoration. He tackled a very old house on Hillsborough Street in Charlottetown, work which netted him heritage awards from both the city and the Heritage Foundation. He has completed a house in Rustico and is working on an old stone house in Hazel Grove.
By now, he’s comfortable with what he’s doing—attuned to what the old houses are trying to tell him. In the case of the Goodman house he’s lucky. The house has has very few owners and, with the exception of some insulation and cosmetic work, very few changes. Another bonus: windows and pillars that were removed during renovations were carefully stored in the barn.
By day Roy works for Park Canada. All the work that he does on his houses is in the evening or on weekends. He bought this house in mid-April with the intention of having the outside work done by winter. Many evenings, as dusk come down, the only sound in the neighborhood is the steady clink of Roy’s hammer. Then there’s a pause. It’s easy to imagine that he’s listening to the house. It’s also to imagine, as its original beauty is slowly revealed, that it’s thanking him.