An Heiress’s Gatsby-Esque Getaway
Henrietta Southam vividly recalls the Edwardian-style fanfare that signalled summers at the family cottage on Ontario’s Big Rideau Lake in the ’70s. Her father was Hamilton Southam of the Southam newspaper empire, and every day at the lake was a party worthy of Downton Abbey. At the beginning of each summer, they loaded a boat with long dresses and smoking jackets and even had an old-fashioned squishing apparatus to wring out laundry on the island. Upon arrival at the cottage, they devoured cakes and capons. They wore straw boaters and formal gowns and played tennis and croquet. Marlene Dietrich was a guest one time, and a virtuoso opera singer gave private concerts for years. “It was a genteel paradise,” says Southam, now the owner and designer of Henrietta Southam Design in Ottawa. “It was a life of privilege. It seems to be all a dream,” she says.
The original cottage burned down in 1979, but Southam wanted to continue a more casual version of her family’s tradition. In April of 2013, she spotted a rare listing on Big Rideau Lake: a one-acre island with a cottage on it. She didn’t wait for her agent to set up a visit. “I’m heading there! I’ve got a boat on the lake!” she told her. The island was covered in pines, cedar and ironwood trees—and, as a bonus, it was mostly mosquito-free, due to its high, windy setting. Southam paid $495,000 for the island oasis. She’s spent each summer there ever since.
The one-storey cottage was assembled in the 1970s from a Sears prefab kit. “It’s made of cedar, so it smells great,” she says. There are four snug bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen and a long living-dining area—more than enough room for Southam and her teenage daughter. Her two grown sons live in Los Angeles and occasionally drop by with their California buddies. It’s always fun and chaotic, just the way Southam likes it. “On one visit, there were nine boys and my daughter sleeping all over the place,” she says. “And there’s no dishwasher.”
The rooms at her Ottawa house are sober and neutral, but eclecticism reigns at the cottage, thanks to the antiques and modern pieces she’s collected over time. “This lake is who I am,” says Southam. “It’s like when you look inside a fridge or a handbag and you know who somebody is. All of the colour in my life is here.” A motley of cool pieces gives the cottage character: she MacGyvered a console on her own by attaching scalloped Victorian trim to a butcher block. In her bedroom, there’s a red chinoiserie cabinet, as well as a pagoda-style lantern over the bed. “Those are from Alanis Morissette’s old apartment in Ottawa,” says Southam. The singer had sold the place to one of Southam’s friends with the caveat that everything she left behind would be gifted.
In the living room, chunky teak stools from Miami double as sculptures. They’re an idiosyncratic contrast to the wiry Blu-Dot coffee table. The clusters of still-lifes by the fireplace are by Southam’s late Norwegian mother, Gro Mortensen, who painted as a hobby. (Mortensen once lived at Amedeo Modigliani’s old address in Paris.) Her mom kept her paintings unframed in boxes. “She never thought she was any good,” says Southam. “Her paintings have a freshness in their naïveté. They bring me joy.”
When Southam isn’t filling her cottage with treasures, she’s cleaning and doing home repairs. In the past decade, she has replaced the roof, redone the kitchen and bathroom and installed a new water tank. Annual catastrophes are the norm, usually brought on by nearby critters. One year, beavers chomped down some of the property’s century-old ironwood trees; another time, geese left droppings everywhere, like grenade shrapnel. Ants and caterpillars have also done damage.
Southam spends her days cooking (she never gets the time in Ottawa), as well as reading and writing (she’s working on a memoir). Each year, in July, she hosts more than 50 guests for her birthday. “We dress up in colourful kaftans and muumuus as an ode to how my dad lived on the lake,” she says. People bring lobster and champagne, and guests use big floaties to travel from one dock to another. “The cottage is rustic, but I like to go all out on that day,” she says. It’s a mid-century time capsule, interrupted only by friends who frantically need to make a phone call, just to discover there’s no service at the cottage. “I’ve taken some very interesting phone calls on my pontoon in the middle of the lake,” Southam says.
