This couple turned a Dundas West Victorian into a dark and sultry Hollywood Regency palace

In September of 2010, decorator and stylist Lysa Fina and her husband, graphic artist Lou Peluso, came across a real estate listing for a three-floor Victorian near trendy Dundas West for $560,000—an average price for the area but a steal for a fully detached house with a garage and a massive backyard.

Built in the 1890s, the three-bedroom home had 1,700 square feet of space. The hitch? You had to shimmy past garbage bags to enter the crammed and neglected abode. The former rooming house was so packed with garbage that some of the rooms were inaccessible.

“It was Hoarders minus the dirt,” says Fina, whose interior business is called Grateful Home—a play on Grateful Head, the Dundas West hair salon she ran before the pandemic.

The Victorian had been owned by the same family for 56 years and was disintegrating from lack of maintenance. Fina was on the fence, but Peluso was sold, so they made an offer, shaving the selling price down to $470,000.

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Along with the rubble, there were other cosmetic icks: ugly purple walls, sketchy carpeting and a kitchen with sticky, mismatched cabinets.

They added in a clause that the house would be emptied before closing. Upon possession, the couple were amazed seeing the space bare. “I was like, ‘Wow, we have beautiful baseboards,’” says Fina.

The couple made a pact not to demolish a single wall, worrying that renovations might unleash a Pandora’s box of nightmarish surprises. Instead, they would decorate only within the house’s existing footprint. To start, they neutralized the walls with white paint. Then they painted the windowsills a glossy yellow and renovated the kitchen, adding a clean white subway tile backsplash for a look that leaned French farmhouse. They also replaced the ancient clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom with a shower.

They lived in the whitewashed home for seven years, until Fina decided she was ready for a big aesthetic change. “I got the seven-year itch,” she says. “I couldn’t live in a white interior anymore—I hated it.” Thus began her full-tilt boogie into dramatic, glitzy darkness.

“I’m very into maximalism, pattern-mixing and textile play,” she says. When it came to the design, Fina leaned into her love of antique chinoiserie, Hollywood Regency, art deco and a bit of what she calls “’70s slut glam, like Yves Saint Laurent or Halston.”

Visiting the couple’s home is a head-turning experience. “I want people to feel like they are immersed in a completely different environment, like they’re in a 1920s jazz club,” Fina says.

Across the house are a total of ten different wallpapers in a dizzying array of colours and patterns. The entranceway is lined in a theatrical black palm print that stretches toward the dining room. The kitchen is done in vintage tattoo-themed wallpaper, and one of the bathrooms is lined in a punk graffiti Marie Antoinette pattern. Move toward the lounge area and geometric gold swoops provide a sultry backdrop to the Regency hoopla: the tiger textiles, faux-bamboo étagères, burled-wood coffee table and gilded furnishings.

Garden gates salvaged from Châtelet Home for $90 aesthetically divide the living and dining rooms. In the latter hang two gigantic chandeliers dripping in Lucite and crystals. The light fixtures cost $450 each at an estate sale in Mississauga. “I want it to feel like an Old Hollywood actress retired and then went thrifting,” she says. Her other favourite places to score vintage finds include A Room In Paris, Of Things Past, Era Antiques, Avenue Daughter, Weston Vintage, Mrs. Huizenga and Mission Thrift.

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The basement is stacked with furniture that Fina rotates on a regular basis. She’s switched out the dining table eight times—one month, mahogany; the next, marble. Not all the furniture belongs to her: “A lot of my friends like to store their furniture here for some reason,” she says. “I guess because I already have a basement full of chairs.”

Peluso is serene about his wife’s habit of constantly rearranging. “I’m proud to live in such a place,” he says. When asked whether he loves the decor mania or merely tolerates it, he answers, “A bit of both.”

In winter, Fina might remove the dining table altogether, transforming the room into a reading zone with comfy chairs by the fireplace. Recently, she replaced the doors on her bathroom with a pair of carved peekaboo wooden numbers. (Previously, they hung as art pieces in a yoga studio.) The window bench at the front of the house has been revived with lime-coloured panther fabric and now serves as a squirrel-monitoring perch for the couple’s cats, Mingus, Luna and Fabrizio.

Fina gets to show it all off at the monthly dinners she hosts for her girlfriends, where everyone gets dressed up. “We turn off our phones and laugh and talk,” she says. She and Peluso also recently hosted a champagne and charcuterie night for four other couples. “I want to share this with people,” says Fina, sweeping out her arms. “We didn’t do all this to sit around in the house alone.”

The couple aren’t sure they’ll stay in the house long-term—steep steps, wonky floors and drafty winters from lack of insulation don’t lend themselves to aging in place. But, as long as they can still get up and down the stairs, they’re happy to inhabit the wacky, palatial space they’ve built together. Although Fina wouldn’t say no to switching up the wallpaper every few years: “With decorating the way I do, you’re never really done.”