A Designer Updates Her Victorian With A Cool, Eclectic Mix

Designer Denise Roy has a knack for making big decisions look easy.

Since 2021, she’s left a career in PR to launch Denise Roy Design, renovated her family’s vacation property in The Blue Mountains, Ont., and reworked the Victorian she shares with her husband, real-estate agent Rahim Jaffer, their daughter Juliette and her sister, Céline, who arrived earlier this year.

The three-bedroom, 1,755-square-foot house on Toronto’s west side was already in good shape when they bought it. “Everything was functioning just fine,” says Denise. The changes were less about fixing problems and more a matter of making the house feel personal and right for their family.

They began with a two-month-long reno that included the main bathroom, second-level flooring, kitchen and behind-the-wall upgrades, with trade work done by Terranova Developments. “It made sense to tackle some of the trade-heavy work early on, before we were actually living in the space, while we had the momentum and tolerance for disruption,” says Denise.

Denise’s decision to move from PR into design full time didn’t happen with a bang. “It was a quiet realization that kept getting louder,” she says. “I was trying to picture myself returning to my work in PR, and I just didn’t feel aligned anymore.” By contrast, long days knee-deep in renovations, whether for her own home or her clients’, leave her feeling nothing but energized.

In the kitchen, she recouped some costs by keeping the existing cabinets and painting them black. She also swapped the original black counters for white quartz. “Technically, the palette remained the same, but we inverted it,” says Denise. “By doing that, the entire mood shifted.” She also updated the flooring: natural white oak engineered hardwood was laid over the original circa-1890 boards that had become too worn to keep.

Denise’s design style is layered and deeply personal. In her own home, she’s taken the traditional Victorian elements and mixed them with mid-century and collector pieces, creating a calm environment with surprising twists. Unexpected moments appear in the breakfast nook with Sandberg Wallpaper’s Pine pattern and CW Stockwell’s Martinique in the powder room.

At the heart of the home is the dining room, where a vintage stone table is paired with six comfortable vintage chairs that Denise found on Facebook Marketplace. “I wanted it to be a table that you can spend a long time around. It’s a point of pride for me that we can host a dinner party and people linger at the table for hours,” she says with a smile.

Smaller spaces are the perfect place to take risks: on the second-floor stair landing, a vintage bust sits next to a playful contemporary table lamp and, in the front entry, an asymmetrical mirror complements a Kashan runner. Here, old and new work in tandem, creating expressive spaces throughout.

The house also reflects the realities of family life. In the loft playroom, neutral anchor pieces combine with accessories and toys in brighter colours. “Children’s spaces don’t need to be loud to be joyful,” says Denise. A checkered Moroccan stair runner, installed with help from a neighbour when the designer was eight months pregnant, has become one of her favourite features. “The runner makes me smile, even when I’m schlepping the umpteenth load of laundry up the stairs,” she says.

The bathroom was the first room they renovated, for practical and emotional reasons. “It’s a space we use constantly and, for me, it’s a sanctuary,” she says. The room was gutted, with only the tub remaining, and new terrazzo slabs on both the walls and floor became the defining feature, creating a graphic, immersive effect. The bathroom also delivered the biggest budget shock. Mid-renovation, Denise discovered that she needed an additional slab of terrazzo. “A little miscalculation turned into a big surprise,” she says.