A Retro Kitchen on the River

Retro on theRiver
Unique Kitchen Built Over Water
Rudy and Anne Schmidt bought a new state-of-the-art retro fridge
and stove, which blended perfectly with their 1920s antique wood
cookstove.
STORY BY JIM CHLIBOYKO
Photos by Merlin Braun
F
or many cottage owners, the dock is both a
pragmatic and poetic place.
It’s the area beside your dusty boathouse,
where people tie up their boats or dump their canoe. It’s
maybe where your pump is, and it’s where you keep your
tools to fix said pump.
It’s also where the family congregates when the
weather’s warm, where you take in sunsets or sunrises,
and it’s where you place the buckets of sand when you set
off fireworks on long weekends.
If you want snacks, or need to start thinking about
making supper, the kitchen – in most cases – is “upstairs”
or uphill in the cottage.
But for one family on the Winnipeg River near
Kenora, Ont., their new kitchen is over the water.
Last summer, it was almost in the water.
Flooding in parts of cottage country had Rudy and
Anne Schmidt watching the rising water creep higher
and higher toward their retro appliances, furnishings
and electrical outlets.
“The water got scary, but we stayed safe and I shut
the power off…” Rudy says. “(But) all the wiring is
waterproof, we lucked out that way.”
After being built two years ago, the Schmidt family
has fully embraced their kitchen, high water or not.
The idea to build a full kitchen on the water came
about as a practical solution for their family, which also
Part of the Schmidts’ dock on the Winnipeg River was submerged
during last summer’s flooding, but luckily their unique kitchen
remained high and dry.
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Anne and Rudy Schmidt don’t have to miss a minute at the shore when they can cook
and dine in their retro kitchen.
includes daughter Rachel, two mentally challenged women Rachel takes
care of and three foster children.
The family spends most of their days down by the Dufresne Island
shore and realized they were using their cottage’s kitchen and constantly
bringing stuff down to the deck, which is attached to the dock.
“When it was time to expand the deck and put a roof over half of it, the
discussion went to why not be able to cook and can (food) and stay down
by the water where we want to be?” Rudy explains.
The kitchen does sit safely above the water – Rudy estimates six feet,
which is several feet higher than the lower portion of the dock where
the family parks their boats. Some of that portion was under water last
summer.
“We never eat upstairs, except for breakfast,” Rudy says, referring to
the cottage’s kitchen.
The Schmidt family has been coming down to this lot off Beryl Winder
Road since the late 1970s, initially from the family’s home in Winnipeg.
But a series of realizations (and, in particular, the decline of a friend’s
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health) made Rudy re-evaluate his quality of life.
“I had a midlife crisis in the city,” says the former contractor. “My lead
man had some health issues. I sold the place in Island Lakes and bought
a condo.”
The condo didn’t last long before it was sold off, too, and the cottage
became their year-round home in 2000.
One of the projects they wanted to do was expand the deck.
“We needed a more serious deck down here,” Rudy says. “It was a
quarter of its current size. And we needed part of it covered for when
it rains.”
The fully decked-out kitchen has a retro vibe that began with some
cupboards.
“Those metal cupboards, they’re from a post-war house in Calgary,”
he says of a find they pulled out of his sister’s house. “That’s what sparked
the whole (retro) thing.”
The kitchen is decorated with items, both old and new, hanging on the
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walls, and a roof of corrugated translucent plastic. There’s an L-shaped wall on two
sides of the kitchen, where appliances are placed against, but it’s otherwise open air.
In place of a breakfast nook, a couple of wicker hanging chairs are attached to
one of the overhead beams close to the water, and there are potted plants galore. The
feeling of being outdoors is underscored when a young beaver swims by and a heron
lands in a nearby tree across the water, silhouetted against the sunset.
Sleek, new appliances go perfectly with the antique wood cookstove (bottom right) Rudy found at a
Whiteshell cottage. Vintage items complete the look.
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The parts of the kitchen are admittedly a bit
mix and match.
Schmidt has picked up the ingredients for
his kitchen from a number of sources, some
of it found, some of it ordered. In pointing
out various features, he says things such as,
“That’s an interesting countertop; that’s kind
of fun.”
The robin’s egg blue fridge and stove are
from the Northstar line, produced by Elmira
Stove Works.
“That’s all they do, retro equipment, but it’s
all state of the art,” Rudy says.
The kitchen also has an actual antique
Guelph Stove Company wood cookstove he
believes is from the 1920s. He came across it
at a cottage at Brereton Lake in Manitoba’s
Whiteshell. It had been sitting in a dining
room alcove at the cottage, functioning as a
china hutch of sorts.
He says the dock is fully supported with
pipes underneath so none of the heavylooking appliances will crash, cartoon-like,
through the dock planks.
The frame holding the whole thing
together is perhaps easy to overlook amongst
all the fixtures, but it’s a sturdylooking red pine frame put together
by Oliver Marks of Highwind Lake
Log Homes.
Rudy says Marks milled the locally
sourced wood himself. The posts and
beams are red pine and the rafters
were from a large spruce that blew
down on the Schmidts’ property.
The frame is stained a warm colour
that looks as if the perpetually setting
sun is benevolently shining on it.
The cottage’s sunroom, kitchen and dining
room were recently renovated.
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“I told him what I wanted, but to look
funky,” Rudy recalls. “When you come into
the bay, you’re pleased with the colour.”
While every cottage needs a kitchen, and
while much of cottage life revolves around
food and drink, the Schmidts’ kitchen is a
place about which the family is particularly
serious. Rachel has celiac disease, while one
of her foster kids is autistic and a gluten-free
diet is preferred.
That attention to food means Rachel
spends a lot of time in the kitchen, usually
the one attached to the dock.
“We come down here at eight in the
morning and I go up at seven at night,”
Rachel says. “It’s nice for canning because
it’s so time consuming. You don’t get to
enjoy the river when you’re upstairs. But if
you have 20 minutes, you can jump in the
river or go for a kayak with the kids.”
Rachel also runs a small Montessori
school in the cottage during the school year.
While you might think food on the water
would attract bugs, Rudy says that’s not the
case because of the particular location of
their cottage.
“There are no bugs here. I think it’s because
of the river and there’s no grass.”
When temperatures cool, they merely put
on sweaters until it’s finally time to shut it
down for the year.
“We don’t close it up until (the weather
is) threatening, until there’s still one boat in
the water and we’re messing with the ice. We
never shut down till after Thanksgiving.”
When he does close up shop, he sheaths
the kitchen in plywood and weatherproofs it
until the next spring.
Since the kitchen was finally completed
with last summer’s arrival of the new retro
stove, there are other projects that now
occupy his time at the cottage up the hill.
What started off as a “shack” is now about
4,000 square feet of different sections.
The second storey, for instance, sprouts
non-adjoined bedrooms in two different
places. He’s kept the front of the cottage in
wood, but the side and back walls are all
done in very light brown stucco with wood
trim.
They heat the sprawling complex with a
combination of three different woodstoves,
including a ceramic Jotul and an Amish
nook stove. They recently renovated the
sunroom, kitchen and dining room.
“In ’08, we put on 1,600 more square feet,”
Rudy says. “On 800 of that, we started the
preschool. That took off for Rachel. In 2012,
we added another 400 square feet and gave
the preschool a separate entrance.”
As far as future plans, Rudy says 2015 is a
landscaping year – and he’s got at least one
more structure planned.
“A hip-roof barn,” he says from his
driveway as dusk settles on Dufresne
Island. C
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