Grimsby’s Painted Lady was something of a DIY project

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26 Auditorium Circle, Grimsby, Ont.

Asking price: $899,999

Taxes: $3,601 (2024)

Year built: 1894

Lot size: 80 by 35 feet

Listing agent: Jeff Smith, Royal LePage Burloak Real Estate Services

The backstory

Would you believe that one of the most Instagrammable places in Ontario is at least in part the product of a restless teenager with a taste for woodworking?

There are a dozen stories about the rise of the Painted Ladies of Grimsby Beach but most agree that the modern chapter began in the mid-1980s when roofing contractor Ed Giernat moved onto Auditorium Circle and decided to add some colour to the exterior of his 150-year-old cottage. The way William Taylor tells it, he was right there from the beginning assisting in the project to either bring back – or invent out of whole cloth – some of the gingerbread and bright colours that have become a signature of the type and a tourist attraction for the small town on the edge of Hamilton.

“All the houses were painted two out of three shades of baby diaper brown, like most of Grimbsy,” Mr. Taylor said of the houses on Auditorium Circle when his father moved him and his brother onto the street a year or so before Mr. Giernat arrived next door. “All the houses in the beach were sort of run down and covered over in siding. Eddie pulled off some stuff and exposed what was left behind from yesteryear.”

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Mr. Geirnat’s was the first home that was given a bright new paint job with lots of gingerbread woodworking, according to Mr. Taylor. It may look historic, but there weren’t many historical records to work from. So, for the most part, “we invented some patterns” and did what looked good, he said. Mr. Taylor was in high school and got a job working for Mr. Geirnat’s former roofing company, but was very proud of the wood working he did. He created the carved finials that drip from the roofline and thought they could serve as an advertisement for his skills.

Initially, this gingerbread was just painted white, with the house a muted peach colour. But over the years his father grew ever fonder of the decoration. Now, 26 Auditorium is a riot of carvings and colours, with bright green trim and a rich grape purple on the walls.

With the Taylor house and Geirnat’s standing out on the street more and more neighbours joined the Painted Lady party. “It was me and Eddy doing all the work,” said Mr. Taylor. There’s now a dozen houses on Auditorium Circle with bold colour schemes, unusual carvings or elaborate trim work, and more scattered around the Grimsby Beach area.

“I made a lot of enemies over the years doing that; they say I’m the reason their property taxes went up,” Mr. Taylor said. Of course, property values going up is why the taxes went up. “These aren’t really cottages any more, these are houses people live in all year round.”

The house today

Auditorium Circle is the showpiece street for the painted ladies, situated in a literal circle around the former site of a Methodist temple that anchored the campground where many of the cottages were built in the 19th century. No. 26 presents a handsomely painted face to the Circle with a wide porch and a separate gazebo, however the driveway and everyday entrance is on the other side of the house off the laneway of Fair Avenue.

This side is more “plain,” as per his father’s taste but still bright purple with white wooden shutters on all the windows. The entrance here is directly into the kitchen, which presents a different sort of vintage than the Candyland Victorian-exterior.

“In the late eighties we had a house-fire that gutted everything,” said Mr. Taylor. “It’s all brand new construction from basement to rafters, so we have a new house with the old outside. The outside was stucco, so it didn’t move.”

The kitchen is galley-style and takes up the back half of the main floor. A dining room connects off of it with views of the side yard and an opening to the rest of the living spaces. A stairwell to the upper and lower levels sits in the middle of this beyond which is living room and closed-in sunroom on the back half of the house. The floors are all hardwood – though in need of some refinishing – and the walls are all white with finished wood window-frames adding more warmth to the space.

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Upstairs under the gabled roof are three bedrooms, two with skylights, that are carpeted in a very eighties maroon. One bedroom has long narrow windows tucked up next to the eves of the house that perfectly frame the finials that look like a cross between a swallow and a fleur-de-lis that Mr. Taylor carved with nothing but a jigsaw and a template.

The four-piece bath (also with a skylight) has more of a nineties vibe with a grid of two-by-two square tiles in slate colours below wood-panelled walls. The claw-foot tub and separate tiled shower behind frosted glass door keep the time-travelling style going.

The basement and laundry room is unfinished, but has a tiny powder room and a ground-level walkout through French doors.

Some advice

It may be daunting to take up the care and management of a piece of Grimsby history and a tourist attraction, but it turns out keeping the paint fresh isn’t the trickiest bit: it’s those dang finials.

“The finials don’t last,” Mr. Taylor warns: weather, water and animals being the chief culprits for a break or a crack that ruins the look of a row of carved shapes along a roofline or fence. But they are easier to repair or make than you’d think, Mr. Taylor said – if you learn from his mistakes.

“When I was 14-18 I was doing it all the hard way: if you cut a 16-foot span with 20 finials, when one breaks off you’ve wrecked a 16-foot piece,” he said. “Now I make the finials individually – it’s easier to sand an individual piece and you can get it more perfect – and I screw, nail and glue em,” onto a fascia board.

Also, he doesn’t worry about downloading any historically accurate templates off the Internet: “Draw a pattern, any pattern you want, grab a fence board, cut it out, paint it white and stick it on your house. There’s nothing to it.”

Repeat this process for a dozen of your neighbours over 40 years and you can have a painted lady neighbourhood, too.