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Canadians Abroad: Southern Lights

Toller Cranston, San Miguel de Allende

At 6,500 feet above sea level, San Miguel de Allende is the little jewel of mountainous Guanajuato state. Its sapphire skies, fresh climate, magical light and relatively low cost of living have attracted about 2,000 Canadian painters, photographers, sculptors and potters since the 1940s. Art and music have flourished here since the 18th century, when two art schools, the Instituto Allende and the Centro Cultural el Nigromante, were established. Both continue to draw students from around the world. At about three hours drive from Mexico City, San Miguel is somewhat off the beaten track, but its Spanish colonial architecture, superb artistry in wood, metal, ceramics and leather, and wealth of charming art galleries and restaurants make it a popular refuge for Canadians.

One Canadian who couldn't resist settling here is Toller Cranston, the Olympic medalist and six-time Canadian men's figure skating champion. "My first impression of San Miguel was at the hotel Villa Santa Monica, which is next to a lovely 450-year-old park," says Toller. "I tell everyone that Cortez watered his horses there. I began renting but started looking at properties here in 1990. I must have seen about 60 houses by 1992. Then through a friend I heard about a house that was not officially on the market. I vividly remember standing on the cobblestone street looking down into this winding tunnel or greenery. It really was El Paradiso [the property's original name].

Strolling around the 2-1/2 acre property, which was totally derelict, with not one but four houses on it, I had an instant sense of belonging. And it turned out that the bottom of the property bordered the incredible park I had seen six years earlier! I knew I had found my heart's desire."

He is candid about the intense financial commitment he made to secure the property, saying simply, "I sold everything I owned to buy this place in San Miguel." (Readers may remember Toller Cranston's Cabbagetown home in Toronto, filled with so many unusual objets d'art that when a sale of the contents was held, Waddingtons called it the sale of the century.

Like its flamboyant owner, the property has undergone a metamorphosis in both philosophy and style. It was once a 16th-century tannery and later a private school for the children of wealthy families, before becoming a privately owned estate. For a long time even most of the locals didn't realize that the property had two different entrances on different streets.

Above: "Think of the film The Name of the Rose and you will understand the look I have tried to accomplish here," says Toller of his "monastic" departure from the look of his previous home in Toronto. Simply furnished, his guest rooms reflect an elegant rusticity in which pieces of Mexican folk art, exquisitely carved furniture and his own colourful paintings are the only decoration. Shown, Hung Jury.

Left: A four-sided fireplace in the loggia is often used in the evenings, after the heat of the day subsides.

Below Right: In the living room, Toller's symbolist paintings bring the lushness and colour of the tropical outdoors inside. (At left is Swedish Bride, at right, Witches from the Garden.) The wooden spindle windows seen here and in Toller's kitchen share their unusual sun's-rays design with windows in the ancient Bellas Artes institute in San Miguel.

Right: The covered, open-air living spaces can be enjoyed day or night in almost any weather. 

Left: Jacaranda trees in full bloom create a periwinkle-blue backdrop for Toller's property, which borders a 450-year-old public garden. Snow-white egrets with wingspans of over six feet migrate from North Africa to nest in the trees.

Toller's estate marks a change for him, too. "The decor is not over the top," he explains. "Certain things that impressed me at one time no longer do." He points out that the style of the main house "is the complete antithesis of what I once had, which was like a bordello or a museum. I wanted to live like the Mexicans - in nature, something I'd never done until now. I wanted a comfortable, monastic way of life without altering the rusticity of the garden or the interior design."

Painted a pristine white throughout, the main house is a study in restraint. The only opulence on display is natural: a profusion of sunlight streams in from the antique spindle windows. The living room is a serene, painterly still life, where Toller's own vivid symbolist paintings seem an extension of the tropical outdoors. On the exterior of the house, elegant wrought-iron staircases spiral up to second-floor guest rooms furnished with intricately carved armoires and Toller's pieces of Mexican folk art.

The painter's private studio is in one of the other small buildings on the property. He works surrounded by white walls and - although hundreds of artists are attracted to San Miguel because of its magical light - keeps the curtains closed. "Being bombarded with colour from the garden is a huge distraction while painting," Toller says.

He enjoys a simple routine at his tropical retreat. "Sometimes I'll just fly in for the weekend to relax. I get up at around 5 a.m. to paint, eat breakfast at 9 a.m. and then go back to work," he says. "I have lunch with friends or go for a swim about 2 p.m. and then work again until 7 p.m. When the sun goes down here it's quite spectacular, and walking, especially in the park, is de rigueur. It's quite normal for me to be in bed by 9 p.m."

Still, Toller most often appears to be living in perpetual motion, maintaining a 4,500-square-foot studio in Toronto while working on various projects simultaneously: creating paintings for exhibitions at the Chicago Planetarium and the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, and working on his as-yet untitled memoirs with writer Martha Kimball. (The book will be published by McClelland & Stewart in October 1997.)

"Sometimes I just can't believe how lucky I am to have this place in San Miguel," Toller says. "I'll always look back on it as the golden period in my life."

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