Georgia 
From the street, the Wood Residence reads exactly as it always has: warm golden brick, a stone-trimmed arched entry, a mature maple anchoring the front lawn, and that oval window set into the facade like a quiet punctuation mark. Nothing about the exterior announces a renovation. That restraint, it turns out, is the whole point.
Completed in 2025, this is a project about knowing what not to change — and then being precise about everything else. The result is 2,800 square feet that feel neither frozen in time nor aggressively modernized, but genuinely resolved.
The Project
The Wood Residence is a renovation by Montreal interior design firm Vives St-Laurent, founded in 2018 by Laurence Ouimet-Vives and Lysanne St-Laurent. Architecture was led by Philip Hazan, with construction by contractor Modulor and cabinetry by Loeven Morcel. The project sits in Westmount — a neighborhood known for its early-twentieth-century rowhouses, each carrying the same general layout: staircase at center, formal rooms at front, kitchen pushed to the rear.
The brief was renovation for resale, which is a specific kind of constraint. It asks for materials and decisions that read as neutral and appealing to a range of buyers, without tipping into the blandly generic. Vives St-Laurent answered that by leaning into the home’s existing character — preserving the staircase position, the room sequence, the molding profiles — and selectively replacing what was worn or misaligned with the overall vision. The original flooring came out; pale-toned white oak went in. The banister was redesigned. A powder room was hidden beneath the stairs. The kitchen received a marble countertop and an island. Each intervention was calculated to feel like it had always been there.
SaveThe Spaces
The Entry Hall
The first thing you see when you cross the threshold is the floor. A checkerboard of Alpi Verde and Bianco Carrara marble sets a tone that is neither country-house traditional nor cold and contemporary — it lands somewhere more interesting than either. The oval window visible on the facade reappears here on the interior wall, its arched form now surrounded by a thick plaster reveal that gives it a sculptural, almost monolithic quality. Beneath it, a low built-in bench with a single drawer drawer provides a place to sit and remove shoes. Beside it, a tall flush-panel storage unit rises nearly to the ceiling, its face smooth and handle-free save for a single small black pull. The furniture was designed in direct response to the window — its proportions and placement chosen to highlight rather than compete with that original architectural feature.
SaveThe Staircase — Wide View
From the hallway, the staircase is visible through a doorway opening, its painted steel railing rising diagonally against a warm white wall. The newel post at the base is a turned oak drum, low and rounded, grounding the vertical lines of the balusters. The stair wall carries a composition of applied moldings — panels and rails redesigned to integrate seamlessly with the existing trim language of the house. Cove lighting at the upper landing washes the ceiling with a soft glow, making the stairwell feel taller than it is. The whole composition, seen from this angle, reads as a single resolved object rather than a collection of parts.
SaveThe Staircase — Detail
Up close, the decisions become more legible. The treads are pale white oak, matching the floor below. The risers are painted white. The steel balusters are slender, vertical, and evenly spaced — simple enough to read as contemporary, but not so minimal that they clash with the period moldings running along the adjacent wall. The handrail itself is recessed into the stringer, a detail that required close coordination between the architect, contractor, and cabinetmaker. It is the kind of thing most people will never consciously notice, which is exactly what makes it work.
SaveThe Living Room — Fireplace View
The living room fireplace has a natural stone mantel in veined white marble — preserved from the original house. Flanking it on one side is a built-in bookshelf and cabinet unit, painted the same warm white as the walls so it reads as architecture rather than furniture. The shelves hold a small black ceramic mushroom lamp, a stack of books, and a matte black sculptural object — restrained styling that leaves room for the materials to speak. In front of the fireplace, two low camel leather lounge chairs face a dark walnut coffee table with cylindrical black legs. A cream shag rug grounds the seating area. The overall effect is of a room that has been carefully edited rather than fully furnished.
SaveThe Living Room — Bay Window View
From the other side of the room, the bay window dominates. Three tall sash windows look directly onto the mature tree in the front yard, its canopy filling the frame with green. The window surround is minimal — no curtains, no treatment — because none is needed. The furniture arrangement here is sparse by design: the same pair of leather chairs and coffee table, a low upholstered bench tucked against the bay, and the marble fireplace visible to the left. Through the doorway at right, the checkerboard marble entry floor reappears, linking the two spaces visually. The pale oak floor runs continuously, uninterrupted, from one room to the next.
SaveThe Dining Room — Establishing View
The dining room sits between the living room and kitchen, anchored by a solid oak trestle table and surrounded by dark-stained wood chairs upholstered in a ribbed brown-olive fabric. The chairs have a raw, almost elemental quality — their joinery exposed, their forms chunky and architectural. Overhead, a large off-white paper lantern pendant hangs low over the table, its organic oval shape providing softness against the room’s straight moldings and hard floor. A small black articulating desk lamp sits on the table. To the left, the tall multi-pane windows let afternoon light fall across the pale oak floor in long rectangles. On the windowsill, a blue ceramic vase and a small amber glass object add the only note of color in the room.
SaveThe Dining Room — Window Angle
Shot from a position closer to the window wall, this angle reveals how the dining room connects to the kitchen beyond. Through a wide opening to the left, a kitchen counter and stool are just visible — the lighter, brighter rear of the house glimpsed through the warmer dining space. The paper lantern reads here almost as a moon, its ribbed surface picking up the ambient light from the large rear window. Blue and amber glass vessels on the sill catch the direct sun. The chairs, seen at closer range, show their construction clearly: trestle bases, slatted backs, and upholstered seats that have absorbed decades of design thinking into something that feels contemporary without being trendy.
SaveThe Dining Room — Doorway Glimpse
A tighter crop through the doorway opening emphasizes the framing quality of the architecture. The thick cream molding of the door surround creates a picture frame around the dining room scene: lantern, table end, the large rear window with its blue vase, tree foliage beyond the glass. The pale oak floor glows with reflected light. This is one of the quieter photographs in the set, but it captures the essential quality of the project — that every room, seen from every angle, looks considered.
SaveThe Dining Room — Close Detail
Pulled back to center on the table and pendant, this view clarifies the scale relationship between the furniture and the room. The lantern is large — probably 60 centimeters across — and hung low enough to feel intimate over the table without blocking sightlines. The chairs are taller than they look from a distance, their backs rising to mid-shoulder height. A small black bench at the table end offers flexible seating. The room’s molding runs at chair-rail height around the perimeter, a detail redesigned as part of the renovation to maintain the neighborhood character Vives St-Laurent was careful to preserve throughout.
SaveWhat you might carry home
The Wood Residence is a renovation-for-resale, which means every decision had to work for someone the designers had never met. That constraint produced a set of moves that are genuinely transferable — not because they are generic, but because they are so carefully reasoned.
The most useful lesson is probably the one about existing features: before you replace something, ask whether it just needs to be framed. The marble fireplace mantel was already there. The built-in bookshelves flanking it are new — but their function is primarily to make the mantel feel intentional rather than orphaned. If you have an architectural feature in your home that feels awkward, the answer is often to give it company rather than to remove it.
The oval window moment is worth sitting with. Rather than treating the window as a constraint — an oddly shaped opening that made furniture placement difficult — the team made it the reason the entry furniture exists at all. The bench and the tall storage unit were designed around the window’s character. That is a useful reframe: your home’s quirks are not problems to solve around; they are the brief.
The material palette here is neutral, but it is not flat. Pale white oak floors, warm white walls, Carrara marble, Alpi Verde marble, painted steel, natural stone — each material has texture and a slightly different temperature. None of them are loud. Together they create a room that reads as calm but does not feel empty. If you are trying to build a quiet interior that still has depth, the answer is usually to vary texture and finish within a narrow color range, rather than adding more colors.
Finally, the hidden powder room under the stairs: the door was designed to align with the existing molding profiles so that it disappears into the wall when closed. You do not need a renovation budget to apply the principle. When something functional has to go somewhere imperfect, design it to belong there rather than apologize for being there. That is true of built-ins, of awkward alcoves, of radiators — almost anything.
SaveThe Wood Residence, completed in 2025 and photographed by Alex Lesage, is a 2,800-square-foot argument for renovation as an act of listening. Westmount gave the house its bones. Vives St-Laurent gave it its clarity.
