An Antique Stone House Revived, from John and Juli Baker of Mjolk in Toronto

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John and Juli Baker, the couple behind Mjolk in Toronto, have a refined, specific take on design, centered on a mix of Scandinavian and Japanese aesthetics. The two of them curate what we consider to be one of the best design shops anywhere (proof: it’s where Julianne Moore found her flatware a few years back).

When we launched Remodelista in the aughts, we communed with John and Juli online, and when I was in Toronto a few years ago, I stopped by to take a tour of their apartment above their shop (see A Scandinavian-Inspired Kitchen with Hints of Japan). So when John emailed me a while back to tell me the couple had impulsively bought a decrepit stone house in the countryside north of Lake Ontario, we were curious.

“We shouldn’t have even been looking,” John says. “At the time, we had a weekend cottage on the shores of Lake Huron (see O Canada: Mjölk’s Renovated Scandi-Style Cabin on a Lake), which we’ve since sold, but we were longing for a rural Little House on the Prairie kind of experience for our children. Juli and I both grew up with a strong connection to nature and rural life, literally washing laundry in the stream with a washboard.”

Join us for a tour:

Photography by Juli Baker.

mjolk stone house 31 — Above: The house was built in the mid-1800s by a Scottish farming family and had fallen into disrepair when John and Juli first toured it. “Juli said, ‘This is terrifying, this is a disaster,'” according to John. “The parlor still had a bit of its former glory, that was enough for our imaginations to spring into action. We put an offer in the same day for an almost scarily low price. It felt like the last great deal in real estate.”

mjolk stone house 13 — Above: John and Juli and their two children, Howell, five, and Elodie, seven.

mjolk stone house 33 — Above: John and Juli are longtime admirers of Swedish tiled stoves (*kakelugn),* so when they set out to renovate the house it was a first priority; their reconstructed kakelugn anchors the living room and provides warmth in the colder months.

“We sourced the salvaged fireplace surround tiles from Lindholm Kakelugn, a Swedish reclamation company, and we worked with our builder to install a new masonry firebox and a flue channel. There’s no industry around this type of project, you have to engineer it yourself. Once the interior was completed, we reassembled the tile according to a template that Lindholm provided us with and added a brass hearth.” (For a full account of the process, from start to finish, read Juli’s account on Mjolk).