Inside an east-end funhouse overflowing with kooky souvenirs

Plenty of Donald Trump–averse Americans joke about packing everything up and moving to Canada, but Laura Federico, a sex therapist and author, and Ariel Rubin, head of creative at a tech start-up, actually did. In 2023, the couple were living in Iowa, where Ariel had a job as the head of creative at a chain of convenience stores, and they watched with concern as their state slid further and further to the right, rolling back access to abortion and loosening gun control.

Seeking a better future for their two young daughters, they made the choice to head north—which was facilitated by Ariel’s having been born in Kingston. After a quick solo winter trip to Toronto to survey the landscape, Laura fell in love with the city’s exceptional food scene (her favourites: the Pacific Mall food court, Pho Anh Vu and Ding Tai Fung in Scarborough, SumiLicious for smoked meat sandwiches, and Sumaq and Alforat for Iraqi food) and plentiful green space. The entire process from making the decision to arriving, bags in hand, took six months. “We’re doers,” says Laura.

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They arrived in September of 2023, moving into a three-bedroom, two-bathroom Upper Beaches home they had purchased sight unseen a month earlier. They found the house filled with antique charm, like mismatched crown moulding that added a sense of fun.

Less fun were the sloping floors—so uneven that furniture refused to remain in the same place throughout the day. The couple quickly got to work transforming their new home into a boho paradise, filling it with whimsical treasures sourced from world travels, flea markets, international bazaars and online auction sites.

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With its imposing black granite kitchen countertop, dark-brown faux-marble floor tiles and lack of overhead lighting, the interior of the home felt sombre and heavy. Lacking the budget for any major renovations—Laura says they spent “every last cent” on the house itself—she leaned in to its womb-like aspect, eschewing the bright and airy to create a cozy, intimate space filled with all manner of patterns and textures.

She lightened up the floors by painting them a white-and-grey checkerboard pattern and freehand-painted wobbly vertical stripes on the wall to mimic the effect of expensive wallpaper. Elsewhere, she added strategic pops of colour, like bookshelves painted Pepto-Bismol pink and butter yellow. “Laura comes from a long line of Italian craftsmen. Her grandfather is a woodworker, and her father is a carpenter,” says Ariel. “I’m the opposite—I come from a family of Jews who can’t do anything.”

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The home is filled with treasures from the couple’s years of borderline-nomadic travel. Since they met, in 2012, they have lived together in Brooklyn, Istanbul, Geneva and Des Moines, following Ariel’s work with the UN and the Red Cross. “Ariel is a hoarder,” says Laura. In the living/dining room, a clear acrylic case holds a collection of vintage cigarette boxes Ariel found in Myanmar and India.

On the kitchen wall hangs a Masonic temple star from the 1920s, found at an antique market in Iowa, that emits an eerie energy. “Sometimes people say it’s creepy when they see it, but I feel like there’s history to it,” says Laura. The antique-store owner who sold it to them said it belonged to a group of Masons who would hold meetings in the basement of a downtown hotel. They would light up the star and place it on a stand outside the hotel to let everyone know there was a meeting going on.

In the basement are a Persian rug Laura found at a mall in Istanbul, vintage Yves Saint Laurent hand towels from a Geneva flea market and star tiles from their old Iowa home. On a wall hang several religious figures, including one with a voice box Ariel found at a flea market in India—it used to talk but now emits what Laura calls a “terrifying warble.”

Their eclectic decor is the result of Ariel “hoarding a bunch of crap,” as he puts it, and Laura finding creative ways to display it. There’s the poster depicting proper hand-washing technique that Ariel found in India for $1, the warped portrait of the couple done by an Islamabad street artist and the South African barbershop poster from an antique store in Iowa. “Iowa has atrocious politics but some of the best vintage shopping in the world,” says Ariel.

Laura helps to temper Ariel’s collecting impulse. “Ariel is drawn to vintage neon lights, which I always say no to, because it would look like a dive bar in our house,” she says. When the couple got married, Ariel’s mother sent them 35 boxes of items she’d been holding on to on his behalf.

“I just like groovy stuff,” Ariel explains. The basement hosts an impressive collection of Pez dispensers and California Raisins merch. A dyed-in-the-wool Bernie bro, he has a cab sign that reads, “In poll after poll…Bernie beats Trump.” Lately, he’s been collecting 1970s cookbooks, like Simca’s Cuisine by Simone Beck and La Vera Cucina Italiana by Donaldo Soviero, which he cooks out of for fun. Laura’s vote for worst vintage recipe is the “weird milk pork.”

Of all the strange tchotchkes he’s acquired over the years, Ariel’s favourite remains a piece of papier mâché. It’s a shadow box artwork depicting shoppers at a Lord and Taylor store from the 1980s, which he found at a vintage store in Chicago. The bulbous figures are reminiscent of the 1980s children’s TV show Today’s Special, in which department store mannequins come to life. “I think it’s the coolest thing we own,” he says. “It’s so weird.”

There are also works of art created by the couple’s friends. They have several paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Michael Gac Levin and some “psychedelic, anatomically correct” drawings of hands by Miles Yoshida. Maxine McCrann, who painted the cover of Laura’s recently published book, made a special painting for Laura’s 40th birthday, depicting a table spread of all her favourite foods: sardines, lemons, tomatoes, bread and wine.

Many items in the home are homages to the couple’s cultural backgrounds—Laura is Catholic and Ariel is Jewish—like Laura’s family’ Ellis Island papers from the 1930s and framed replies to letters Ariel wrote to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as a child. There’s even a framed Jimi Hendrix poster Ariel received for his bar mitzvah and has been holding on to ever since.

The warm, cozy home is ideal for hosting. Always ready for a celebration, Laura installed permanent decoration hooks on the living/dining room wall. “Even when someone is just coming over for dinner, we’ll put up some sort of banner,” she says. In the living room, paper decorations remain from one of their daughter’s birthday parties several months ago. “I have a really hard time taking them down,” she says. “It feels fun to be festive.”

Despite their itinerant lifestyle—Ariel has moved every two years for the past two decades—Toronto feels like a place where the couple can envision themselves putting down roots. “It’s a city that’s really underrated,” says Ariel. “This feels like a place we could spend the next 10 years in.”