New at Distillery Homes · 9 min read · September 9, 2026

Introducing Distillery Design

Interior design and a dedicated painting crew, for renovations, remodels, and homes going to market — in Windsor's Walkerville Distillery District and across the Greater Toronto Area.

Twenty years of practice, now available to hire

Sharyn McCahon has spent years restoring century-old homes in Walkerville, one at a time, without a client and without a deadline other than the one she set herself. The four heritage properties behind Distillery Homes are the result — an 1890s house with its brick exposed back to the original, an 1800s home with its formal rooms and ceiling heights kept intact, an 1884 property with two kitchens and a garden, and a preserved home on Argyle Road.

Guests have been asking the same question for years: who did this, and will they do mine?

Distillery Design is the answer. It brings the design work and an experienced painting crew together as a service, for people renovating, remodelling, or preparing a property to sell.

Sharyn's approach

The house already knows what it wants to be. The job is mostly listening to it, and then not getting in the way.

Working almost exclusively on heritage properties produces a particular point of view. Four things define it.

Keep what can't be replaced

Original brick, plaster, millwork, ceiling heights, tile, and hardware are the reason a century home feels like one. None of it can be bought back once it's gone, and none of it can be convincingly faked. In the Distillery District homes that meant exposing brick rather than covering it, keeping the formal living and dining rooms rather than opening everything into one space, and leaving the tall ceilings alone.

The instinct in most renovations is to modernise the bones. The better instinct is to modernise everything except the bones.

Modernise where it's used daily

Living in a century home shouldn't mean putting up with a century-old kitchen. Kitchens and bathrooms are the rooms you use every single day, and they're where new work is worth the money: quartz counters, stainless appliances, a soaker tub, a rainfall shower, a walk-in shower with room to move.

The trick is making those rooms feel like they belong to the house rather than having been dropped into it — which is a question of proportion, material, and restraint rather than budget.

Design for how people actually use a room

The Argyle House kitchen has a dedicated coffee station, a glassware cupboard, organised cutlery and utensil drawers, and real pantry storage. None of that is decorative. It comes from watching hundreds of guests use a kitchen and noticing where they hesitate.

Good design is largely the removal of small daily frictions. If you have to open three drawers to find a spoon, the room has failed at its job regardless of how it photographs.

Treat outdoor space as rooms

Gardens, patios, decks, BBQ areas, and fire pits are part of the house, not landscaping around it. Every Distillery Homes property has private outdoor space designed as somewhere you'd actually sit — which, in a city with real summers, adds more usable living area than most interior renovations.

What we do

Designing a home to sell is a different job

Designing a home to live in and preparing one to sell are different objectives, and confusing them costs money.

A buyer forms an impression in the first ninety seconds, and most of that impression comes from light, colour, smell, and the absence of visual noise. Almost none of it comes from structural change. The improvements that reliably return more than they cost are paint, lighting, and removing whatever is making rooms feel smaller than they are. The ones that rarely do are the expensive ones people reach for first.

If a property is going to market, tell us that up front. The brief is different, the budget goes to different places, and the timeline is set by your listing date rather than your patience.

Selling in Windsor? We also run a professional cleaning team for pre-listing and post-renovation cleans, and we work with agents at RE/MAX Preferred Realty.

Walkerville and the Greater Toronto Area

We work in two places, and they ask for different things.

Walkerville and the Distillery District is a heritage neighbourhood built around Hiram Walker's distillery in the 1850s — one of Canada's earliest planned communities, and one where the architecture largely survived. Work here is restoration-minded almost by definition. If you own a century home in Walkerville, Ford City, or Olde Riverside, this is the housing stock we know best. The history of the neighbourhood is worth reading if you're considering buying into it.

The Greater Toronto Area brings a different mix: condos, mid-century houses, new builds, and Victorian and Edwardian homes in the older core that have the same bones as Walkerville's, often under decades of unsympathetic renovation. The principles travel. Keep what can't be replaced, modernise where the house is used, and design for the way people actually move through a room.

Common questions

Can I hire the painting crew on its own?

Yes. The crew works independently of the design service, interior and exterior, and is experienced with heritage properties where surface preparation matters more than the paint itself.

Do you take small projects?

Yes. A single room, a colour consultation, or a house you've nearly finished and can't resolve. Ask.

How does pricing work?

Design work is quoted per project, based on scope. Painting is quoted after we've seen the space, because the honest number depends on surface condition rather than square footage. We give you a figure before any work begins.

How far ahead do you book?

It varies with the season, and pre-sale work is often scheduled around a listing date. Email us with your timeline and we'll tell you plainly whether it's achievable.

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