Hamilton’s historic Southam mansion up for sale for $1.6 million
It's a gem in a treasure chest of a neighbourhood, streets spilling over with beautiful stately buildings and sparkling with history.
The Southam house, at 51 Markland, in the heart of old Durand, features sprawling gardens over a 120-foot frontage, a mix of Italianate and Queen Anne accents (bargeboard gable atop a towering two-storey bay projection) and windows reaching almost from baseboard to the ceiling of 11-foot-high rooms.
Everything about the house, just listed for sale this week at $1.6 million, seems to reach up, like those windows. The turret top rising to a point, with decorative cornice bracketing and dentils underneath; the stacked double cupboards in the kitchen, once again, 11 feet high (you need a ladder to get to the higher cupboards but Sonja De Pauw simply climbs on to the countertop); and, yes, the two rocketing brick chimneys.
Of course the house would reach. It was a reflection of the ambitious character of its builder, publisher William Southam who had his modest shed put up either in 1883 or 1889. There is some dispute, says Sonja, current owner.
Modest? Hardly. It was meant to be, one imagines, a statement of his ascendancy. Not modest maybe, but tasteful. Shed? No, the place is exquisite, and so it's unfortunate we don't know the architect. But somehow practical.
By the time he got to building his mansion, Southam had become publisher of The Hamilton Spectator newspaper, had expanded it into what we would now recognize as a mass modern daily and had started acquiring other newspapers.
This city, through The Spectator under Southam ownership starting in the 1870s, became the Canadian cradle of a major development in media history - the newspaper chain. The Southam chain was the first in the country and by far the largest at its peak, when it owned newspapers from west to east. The Spectator was the beginning of that.
The house breathes with history. Not just the Southam connection, which is the most well-known and pronounced, William Southam having had it built as his star was rising.
Subsequent owners had their own stories. One of them, Trumbull Warren, had served as aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Montgomery in the Second World War, and Montgomery actually spent a night in the house as a guest of his old friend and adjutant.
Sonja tells the story of the field marshal leaving his boots outside the room he slept in when he went to bed, expecting the servants to polish them.
But the servant staffing at the house had long since been discontinued. So Warren polished them for the field marshal," Sonja says.
A residue of the era of service can be found if you know where to look.
This was the butler's pantry," Sonja tells me, walking me through a cosy, small wood-panelled room between the dining room and kitchen. Now there's a printer in it and shelves with Sonja's cookbooks.
In the dining room, with its enormous built-in metal-framed mirror (It must weigh tons," Sonja speculates), there is a brass plate built into the floor under the table. Original owners would press it to signal for service when they ate.
When I press it," Sonja jokes, nobody comes."
The dining room itself swallows you up invitingly in its cinnamon red, shoulder-high wainscotting and matching valances over angled corner windows, all set off against white.
If the history feels palpable it might be because Sonja and her family have created their own. Even as they've respected the past in the upkeep, they've put their stamp on the house, preserving its character not so much curatorially but as a vibrant living space in which her daughters grew into adulthood.
They are one of only three families who have lived in it for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the other two being the Robinsons and the Warrens before them.
As Sonja walks me through it, I'm struck by the copious gulps of light that the many large windows take in and lavish over the house, symphonically almost, the brightness shining off the hardwood floors, bringing up the colours that Sonja has so aptly chosen; the Devonshire blue of the mantlepiece with the Corinthian scrolls in the magnificent living room, for instance, and the unique pale terra cotta in the kitchen.
Everywhere are beautiful light fixtures, chandeliers and such, some original. Even up in the attic, with all its geometry of pitched ceilings, nooks and knee walls, light prevails. And there's the terrific tiled sun room, with a view of a pond.
One of the house's chief attractions is the staircase, with its voluptuously wrought wooden newel post. Over the first landing of it looms an enormous central window, 16 feet high, from sill to head. Sonja had to make curtains for it herself. The window, the stairs, the post, spindle rails - it makes for a glorious tableau, the thrust up to the next storey.
There's so much else. High baseboards, coiled radiators, fascinating wallpaper, washrooms with classic wide-lipped pedestal sinks and hexagonal tile.
It is called the Southam house but William Southam only lived in it for a short time. Southam didn't found The Hamilton Spectator - that was Robert Smiley, the founding publisher, but when Smiley sold the paper to Southam, in 1877, Southam built it up and used it as a springboard to national expansion.
I didn't know, people flipped (houses) even then," Sonja says.
It will be hard for Sonja to leave but the move will be made easier by her and her husband's new destination. The MacNab Terrace row house, built by legendary Hamilton architect James Balfour. From one historic icon of a building to another.
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com