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The Spadina Museum Gets a Historically Accurate Revamp
Museum staff couldn’t find, for purchase, the exact wallpaper that had hung in the Spadina House’s living room from 1905 to 1940 or so, but there was still a tiny scrap of it that had been peeled off a wall years ago and preserved. Using the scrap as a reference, they located an unused roll of the stuff at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, which enabled them to determine the paper’s precise makeup. They took the additional step of sending a sample of the original scrap to a lab, where its pigments and colour saturation were analyzed. With all this information, they were able to find a Montreal manufacturer willing to make replica paper from scratch. The new paper—a thick material with an almost fabric-like texture—was sent to New York for staining, and its pattern was printed with woodblocks.
This level of attention to detail was not atypical during the course of the Spadina Museum’s recently completed $600,000 restoration. The City-operated museum has been carefully returned to approximately the same state it was in during the 1920s and 1930s, when it was still a lavish private home, inhabited by members of the Austin family, whose descendants owned the property until 1978, when it and most of its contents were transferred to the public trust.
Work on the museum began last Fall, and continued for almost a year. It reopened last Sunday, October 24.
Prior to the restoration, the house’s decor had been representative of four generations’ worth of Austin inhabitation (the last Austin descendant moved out in 1982). Museum staff decided to change the interior to reflect the house as it existed during the ’20s and ’30s in order to make it into a more focused historical experience for visitors. Doing so required them to make significant changes to the house, but that, they say, is just part of the job.
“These [rooms] are exhibits, and exhibits in museums change for different reasons,” said Neil Brochu, a collections specialist with the City’s department of Museums and Heritage Services, who handled much of the detailed research required to execute the revamp project. During the planning phases, he and his colleagues relied on a number of documents that had been entrusted to the City along with the house. “It’s a huge collection,” said Brochu. “And that’s family photographs, that’s sheets, that’s pillowcases. Everything. Nothing was disposed of.”
“We’ve got Noxzema bottles. We’ve got medication bottles from the sixties and seventies.”
The front of the house.
Particularly useful were photographs of the house’s rooms as they were situated in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as insurance inventories, receipts, grocery bills, and personal letters. (It’s all stored in a City-run warehouse in the west end.)
Painstaking accuracy of this kind requires a kind of aesthetic self-abnegation. The Spadina House’s restoration has turned it into less a museum of objects than a museum of taste. And tastes have changed.
In the house’s receiving room, where the main decorations are intricate pieces of French and German porcelain and tall mirrors in gilt frames, Nancy Reynolds, a museum site coordinator with the City, pointed out some cushions on a couch that were covered with a baroque floral-patterned fabric. The cushions had been carefully reproduced to match the appearance of long-departed originals.
“Even if they’re really ugly,” said Reynolds of the cushions, “it’s only because that’s what they actually had at the time.”
“Not that we think they’re ugly, or that it matters,” added Brochu.
The cushions were only noticeable on close examination, but some fashion crimes are self-evident. For instance, in the 1920s, the Austin family had a fondness for taxidermy. The major ornaments in the foyer by the house’s main entrance are a pair of snarling wolves. They’re reproductions, purchased specifically for the restoration from a taxidermist in British Columbia, who balked at Brochu’s request that they be made to look exactly like the originals. “He was quite reluctant to make them look this way,” said Brochu. “Apparently if they’re going to attack, their eyes are not wide open like that. Their eyes squint.”
But that wasn’t the type of fidelity Spadina Museum’s caretakers were going for. The Austins didn’t have squinty wolves.
This approach to accuracy extends even to the name of the building. Staff use the original Algonquin pronunciation, Spah-dee-nah. The present-day pronunciation, Spah-die-nah, is technically incorrect. Is it irritating hearing so many people blithely trample that historically accurate syllable, we asked?
“Well…” said Brochu. “We let it go.”
Photos by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.