10/01/2025
Good evening everyone, We recently restored a beautiful turn-of-the century desk for one of our long-time clients.
Here are a few before-and-after photos along with a little bit about this special piece from its owner, Joanne Rider:
‘The Work Desk’
Growing up, there was an old dusty, work-worn desk in the back basement corner of the dingy furnace room in my family’s house. Neglected but not to be discarded. A work desk, as opposed to a fine piece of furniture.
The oil-based, off-white paint was chipped, cracked, and embedded in the wood grain that was mostly oak with other species mixed in here and there.
At one point, I decided to strip the paint and refinish the desk but the paint became gooey gel that was impossible to remove.
Decades later, I took it in a half-stripped state from my mother’s house when she moved into a retirement home.
Over the last few years, conversations with my daughters about our ancestors found new energy for fixing the desk.
This piece was the office desk of my great, great aunt, Isabella Smith Wood, born in 1875.
Auntie Isa, as she was known within the family, was the third of four and had three brothers; her parents having emigrated from Scotland in the mid-1800s. Isa became a schoolteacher but soon answered a different call. She saved enough money to apply to and enter medical school at the University of Toronto. She likely faced seemingly unsurmountable challenges in an overtly patriarchal time, one being that the University would allow women to partake in medical school, but Toronto hospitals would not accept them to complete medical school requirements through residency positions which were the domain of men. So, Isa travelled to the Boston Hospital for Women (now part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital) to complete the residency requirements and graduated in 1902.
Though it is unknown when it was acquired, my half-stripped desk was used in her home office at 252 College St., in Toronto, where she treated patients for years.
During that time, Auntie Isa banded with a small group of other women doctors in Toronto to found Women’s College Hospital in a house on Seaton Street as a place for women to complete their medical studies, to specialize in women’s medicine, and to care for the city’s marginalized.
She delivered the first baby born at Women’s College Hospital on a blustery Christmas Day in 1911, leaving the family dinner table and making the trek to the hospital by horse-drawn carriage.
The only time the desk likely sat idle was in 1916 when Isa sailed to the England with other physicians to treat the injured in the WWI effort.
A clean-out of my own office this year compelled me to finally focus on repairing and refinishing the desk.
Peter Rowe has undertaken many home renovation projects for our extended family over the years and I knew his love of wood working and attention to detail would do this project justice.
He meticulously fixed the separating planks and loose detail, sourced period-appropriate drawer k***s, and restored the original pre-paint stain colour.
The significance of the desk meant something to him, which makes the job he did even more beautiful to me.
With that, the century-old piece has now re-gained its status as a working desk once more.
Thank you, again, for doing such a beautiful job in restoring it. I work at it every day…
