ottawa french farmhouse
Ottawa Luxury Homebuilder Or Bailek, of Neoteric Developments, took a departure from form with this project. While most other projects are distinctly modern new builds, this renovation needed a different direction. When I asked Or how he arrived on this French country inspired aesthetic, he said simply “It’s what felt right for the house”.
Or brought me in to photograph the project with the intention of submitting into several categories of the Greater Ottawa Home Building Awards (GOHBA), including the Kitchen, Garage, Laundry Room, and Exterior.
Shooting a home of this style was new territory for me, so I picked up copies of Country Living and Milleu for inspiration. This lead to us staging the home with lots of flowers and botanicals, and gave me the idea of staging the laundry sink area as a florist’s prep station.
For the kitchen stating, we said what could be more stereotypically French than cheese, baguettes, and wine? And because I like for a kitchen to look like it’s in use, we set up the little baking-in-situ scene for the left counter detail. I had planned to cook some soup in a Dutch oven for a scene involving the stove, but the image got too busy, and we ran out of time, so that shot unfortunately got scrapped.
In the bathroom, we filled it with lanterns, candles, and a plush blanket to add a soft cuddliness to the scene. We even added a bit of bubble bath and color to the tub, but it didn’t stand out as much as we’d hoped in the final shot, and hte final angle didn’t show that the tub is actually full of beautiful water - but it does make for an inviting and alluring scene.
The garage is among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, with the creamy board and batton, topped out with chandeliers. Every the system of heated fluid that keeps the driveway from freezing in the cold Canada winters had beautifully laid out copper pipes that brought beauty to the space.
In advance of shooting the exteriors, my client got on a ladder and trimmed several of the lower branches from the huge beautiful tree in the front courtyard. As a lover of trees, I didn’t want him to go too far in trimming it, so I unfortunately had him under-do it a bit, and I ended up giving myself a nightmare of a retouching job when I had to remove a branch that occluded one of the dormer windows, which was a crucial element to show off. The amount of time I spent in photoshop reconstructing that window and dormer form bits and pieces of nearby pixels is the stuff of nightmares, and it a mistake I will never make again. But, that said, it just caused me a bit of frustration, but the tree got to keep a branch that took decades to grow, so maybe it was still for the best in the end.
This was an excellent project for how it challenged me to stage and shoot a different kind of space than I’d encountered before, and it was a joy to work so closely with my client all through the shoot to bring the space to life for the images.
Client: Neoteric Developments
Location: Galbar Park, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada