Distillery Homes · Services

Distillery Design

Interior design and an experienced painting crew — for renovations, remodels, and homes going to market. Walkerville, Windsor, Essex County, and the Greater Toronto Area.

Who we are

Distillery Design is led by Sharyn McCahon, who spent years restoring the four century-old heritage properties behind Distillery Homes in Windsor's Walkerville Distillery District — an 1890s house taken back to its original brick, an 1800s home with its formal rooms and ceiling heights intact, an 1884 property with two kitchens and a garden, and a preserved home on Argyle Road.

Guests kept asking who had done the work. This is the answer: the design practice and a dedicated painting crew, available to hire.

The full story of the approach is in our launch post.

Services

How we work

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

Four principles shape the work, drawn from restoring century homes rather than from a style guide.

Keep what can't be replaced

Original brick, plaster, millwork, ceiling heights, tile, and hardware are why a century home feels like one. None of it can be bought back once it's gone, and none of it can be faked convincingly. The instinct in most renovations is to modernise the bones. The better instinct is to modernise everything except the bones.

Spend the money where the house gets used

Living in a century home shouldn't mean putting up with a century-old kitchen. Kitchens and bathrooms are the rooms you use every day, and they're where new work is worth paying for. The trick is making them feel like they belong to the house rather than having been dropped into it — a question of proportion, material, and restraint rather than budget.

Design for how people actually use a room

Good design is largely the removal of small daily frictions. If you open three drawers to find a spoon, the room has failed at its job no matter how it photographs.

Treat outdoor space as rooms

Gardens, patios, decks, and fire pits are part of the house, not landscaping around it. In a city with real summers, they add more usable living area than most interior renovations.

Selling a property?

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

A buyer forms an impression in the first ninety seconds, and most of it comes from light, colour, and the absence of visual noise. Almost none of it comes from structural change. Paint, lighting, and removing whatever makes rooms feel smaller than they are reliably return more than they cost. The expensive changes people reach for first usually don't.

Tell us up front if a property is going to market — the brief is different, the budget goes elsewhere, and the timeline is set by your listing date. We also run a professional cleaning team for pre-listing and post-renovation cleans, and we work with agents at RE/MAX Preferred Realty.

Where we work

Windsor and Essex County. Walkerville and the Distillery District, Ford City, Olde Riverside, and the surrounding heritage neighbourhoods. This is the housing stock we know best.

The Greater Toronto Area. Condos, mid-century houses, new builds, and the Victorian and Edwardian homes in the older core — often with the same bones as Walkerville's, under decades of unsympathetic renovation.

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.

Do you take small projects?

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

How does pricing work?

Design 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. You get a figure before any work starts.

How far ahead do you book?

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