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ROBERT NOAKES, the crown prince of Rosedale interior design, sits back on his early-eighteenth-century French couch, beneath his huge gilded seventeenth-century Italian mirror and between a pair of wooden painted angels long since separated from the churches they once adorned. "This is dated," he says of his environment. "It's okay, but I just want a fresh trip.
None of my clients have anything like this. They have the money to do it, but they're more a French and modern mix. I don't think any of my clients have ever been in here--well, maybe a couple. I think it might frighten them."
Here is the double penthouse atop a high-rise south of St. Clair. Noakes knocked two units together to create one vast, seventeen-foot ceilinged space that looks down across the city to the lake. Not that he would allow the metaphor: "I don't look down on the city. I was born here. But I travel a lot and you can't expect Toronto to be those other cities. It's a small city."
It was smaller still in the fifties and sixties when Noakes was growing up in a WASP household in North Toronto, but he rejects any suggestion that his is a strange background for a designer. "Most great designers don't come from the background that you'd think. My father had his own business and became a supplier of construction equipment. A wonderful man. We didn't see eye to eye--he was very sports-minded--but he gave me the freedom to find my own world."
That world started out a great deal less far away than the Han and T'ang horses that also dot his drawing room. "What I liked most when I was young was the cottage and my friends. I still have those friends. I was influenced by the life. My father was on his way to making money, but at the cottage in Thunder Beach my friends had chauffeurs and maids and beautiful things. I saw that. I wanted that. I wanted most things."
Lest this sound too Gatsbyish for words, it is worth remembering that, far from being an outsider trashed by an uncaring plutocracy, Noakes has been, with Robert Dirstein, one of the key figures in evolving the style of the city's Daisy...
