By Cecilia Nasmith

On the list of nominees up for the 2023 Architectural Conservancy of Ontario awards, count six local residents – including a Port Hope lady who had her 100th birthday this summer in the garden of her heritage home.

Whether Rod Stewart will win the James D. Strachan Award for Craft – and whether the team of Bill and Marnie Bickle, Ruth Redelmeier, and Aaron Peacock and Adrian Kennedy of Two Blue Shirts Productions will take the Stephen A. Otto Award for Research and Documentation – will be announced Thursday at a Toronto ceremony.

Ian MacKay of the Port Hope ACO chapter is delighted with what he considers the well-deserved nominations.

Stewart has been working in heritage preservation for almost a half-century. The list of buildings preserved as a result would be quite lengthy, with perhaps the Capitol Theatre being the best-known. It is now nationally designated and is a central component of the region's cultural life.

“Rod was certainly a leading light in making the Capitol happen, and also a huge local hero in terms of heritage conservation, in terms of a number of buildings in town,” MacKay said.
He has been actively involved in Heritage Port Hope, the town's heritage committee, for many years, he added.

This award specifically recognizes his pioneering work in heritage plaster conservation techniques that have been used all over the country in significant buildings.

“Rod is a master of many crafts, as you say,” McKay stated.

“He's a great connector of people as well. He's got the technical know-how, and he digs into that, but he also is a great big-picture thinker who has helped connect people and buildings and possibilities in a lot of places.”

At the time of the interview, Stewart was the only nominee in his category.

The second nomination acknowledges one of the success stories that began as a way to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic – a group effort that made a virtual house tour in some ways an improvement on the real thing.

The real thing was the annual Port Hope ACO House Tour that ran for 55 consecutive years.

“It's a significant fundraiser for historic preservation in the Port Hope area, and the money raised from the house tour has been an important contributor to the Port Hope ACO branch being able to give grants to businesses and owners of historic buildings around town, and support the Opera House project and continue advocacy efforts,” MacKay said.

COVID intervened, forcing committee chairs Bill and Marnie Bickle to – as they said in those days – pivot.

“They adapted to a changing world and moved the house tour to be an on-line tour,” MacKay said.

The first on-line tour was a great success and, in the second year they went even further - “an on-line tour that would still raise funds for heritage, but also be a great opportunity to document some of the heritage work that was happening in places around town, in particular singling out for a longer-form version something that could not have been done in a physical house tour,” he said.

That was the Bluestone, which he called “one of the most important houses in the province,” with owner Ruth Redelmeier in the spotlight. MacKay recalled how she bought it at the age of 90 and estimated that the restoration process would take 10 years.

“It's already more than 10 years, She just celebrated her 100th birthday in the garden there last summer,” he said.

“But Ruth loved the house and set about hiring the best craftspeople and best local tradespeople to do a museum-quality restoration inside and outside the house – but to also make sure it was very much a living house.

“Not many people would take that on at age 60, let alone 90. But Ruth is a formidable and extraordinary person,” he declared.

“The story of the house and then the story of this person who describes herself as the chatelaine or custodian of the house, not necessarily the owner – she helped it blossom and be ready for generations to come.”

The production company also deserves the nod, he added, with the quality of their filming and technical work capturing the stories – including drone footage doing a remarkable job on the exteriors and grounds – in a product that is now archived and captured for anyone in the world to access,

“Two extremely talented, extremely creative local guys,” he said.

“The great thing coming out of this is, it enabled us to continue fundraisers during COVID, but it also documented stuff that really needed documenting. The Bluestone was a house that probably never would have been on the physical house tour, because it would have been too complicated to have that number of people – and that's true of two or three other houses in Port Hope, to get on the on-line house tour and document that, when probably the owners would not have agreed to be on the house tour.

“One of the nice things about the virtual house tour is that people bought tickets from around the world – imagine people watching the Blue Stone documentary from Australia and all over.”

Redelmeier will be travelling to Toronto to be in the audience and see how they fare against the other two nominees in her category when the announcement is made on Friday, MacKay added.