Lisa Mok’s Celestial Space, Lune, Is a Vision Realized

A few years ago, Toronto-based creative director Lisa Mok became enamoured with a particular moment at the end of a dinner party.

It’s that time toward the end of very good evening—scraped-clean dessert plates still on the table, candles burned so low there are pools of wax on the table cloth, heels kicked off beneath chairs. What Mok calls “the newness” has worn off, everyone is relaxed in each other’s company, and you have that one last glass of wine (or espresso, even though you know you won’t be able to sleep after), just to make the night last a little longer.

“I wish I could bottle it up,” she remembers telling her husband, a digital marketer. “Or somehow scale it, so there was more of it.” He was nonplussed. “You want to host bigger dinners?” he responded in a typically practical way. “Maybe?” she answered. “I just really feel like it’s such a beautiful moment everyone should experience if they can, and it often doesn’t last, and you often miss it.”

A little more than two years later, in the fall of 2018, the pair found Lune. They had been looking to buy a lakeside cottage, but realizing they were priced out, shifted their search to an agricultural property of some kind, inspired by a trip to England’s pastoral Cotswolds region. When Mok’s husband came across a 160-year-old estate near the shores of Lake Huron, complete with stained glass windows, a Chatsworth-worthy fountain and nine bedrooms, he showed her the listing as a joke.

She wasn’t laughing. “All I could envision was people at the house, friends and family coming for parties,” she says. “This wouldn’t just be for us.” Shortly thereafter, her husband viewed the house in person, sending video clips to Mok, who was in Iqaluit, on set for a photo shoot. “I saw the potential this place could have. If we did want to start some kind of lifestyle venue, this would be the right place.” Almost overnight, a new business—and a new vision for their life—was born.

If anything, Lune is the story of a dream that sneaks up on you. “I didn’t see myself doing this when I was younger,” says Mok, who grew up poring over magazines in a tiny Saskatchewan hamlet and went on to work for top advertising agencies and lead creative teams at apparel, beauty and lifestyle brands, most recently as global creative director for Canada Goose. “Everything manifested in this, even though at the time I didn’t know it was what I wanted,” says Mok. “Bit by bit, everything came together in the house. Maybe I didn’t need that life in Toronto, and I could start a new chapter here.”

The house itself didn’t immediately scream “Lisa Mok,” whose personal aesthetic leans toward The Row and Jil Sander, and whose terrifyingly good taste is only made less intimidating by her low-key warmth and frequent laugh. But she was drawn to it because she’s moved by beauty in all forms (even when it’s not in her signature palette of cream, off-white and beige). “When people see me, they have this impression that I’m a minimalist, or I only like straight lines,” she says. “But really, I’m drawn to anything that’s pleasing to the eye.”

It would feel like a smile from the universe when, a few months after they moved in, someone dropped an envelope filled with photographs in their mailbox: Kodak snaps of elegant dinner parties and casual gatherings held at the home in the ’80s and ’90s. The house, it turned out, had always liked to show people a good time.

Getting Lune up and running would not be a simple matter of renting a few tables and getting the cards of some local caterers. Mok had a vision for it that would require an almost total gut of the 1860 property, which had been renovated by previous owners to the point that the only original features left were some hand-carved marble fireplaces. “I wanted to keep the original design intention,” says Mok, who found that the home’s builder had modelled it on Queen Victoria’s holiday house on the Isle of Wight, itself an homage to Renaissance Italian palazzos. The house was actually abandoned for a period, and the exterior was restored by the family who lived there before Mok bought it. “When we re-designed it, I made sure some of the details paid homage to the original building, but we didn’t replicate it.”

In every other respect, the home is a truly original creation. Every design decision harks back to a (literal) guiding light: the moon, a.k.a. la lune en français. (Neither Mok nor her husband are French, but she liked how it rolled off the tongue. It’s not always that deep.) “I love nighttime, when those gatherings happen, that time of day when you relax and rejuvenate,” says Mok. “I also love that in almost every culture the moon is a woman.”

In practice, this means that each of the house’s public spaces pays homage to one of the moon’s eight phases. The creamy lime-frescoed, vaulted entry hall represents “the light side” of the moon, while an intimate salon painted charcoal beckons you to “the dark side.” Details like domed ceilings, curved walls and heavily veined ivory onyx stone in the kitchen call to mind the form and texture of the celestial body. Even the lighting, all custom designed, was chosen to mimic the luminous glow of moonlight. (Interestingly, Mok found the hallway’s show-stopping paper “moon” pendant light by Italian designer Davide Groppi in a hotel in Portugal long before Lune existed.)

While translating concepts into tangible objects is Mok’s bread-and-butter as a creative director, she worked with Toronto-based architects Studio Author to bring her vision to life. “I sent them mood board after mood board, and I talked their ears off,” she says, noting that her inspiration was less about the space and more the mood it evoked. “But it was a true exchange of ideas, because they would then show me things I would never have thought of.”

For instance, she wanted everyone who visits to be able to leave their mark, in a way that transcends the typical guestbook. “I had wanted a brass kitchen island, and they said, ‘Well, let’s do it in an aged brass, which means that every stain, every oil from a fingerprint is left on the surface and becomes part of the island as it slowly patinas.’” What arrived the colour of a 1980s Versace chain has now aged to a numinous bronze with the footprint of a friend’s toddler imprinted on the side, a moment captured forever.

That’s not to say it was a smooth process. Like most renovations, it cost more than they’d budgeted, took longer than they’d planned, and had its share of minor disasters, like pipes that burst. It was also an unusual project located two-and-a-half-hours’ drive from Toronto, where the couple was still based and working full-time. “The design was so ambitious, and so over-the-top for most contractors,” says Mok, who regrets not being able to watch it happen step by step. “It was very challenging to find people who understood the aesthetic and could execute it, because everything was so unconventional.”

There was also the small matter of a wedding they’d agreed to host for their best friends, which gave them just eight months to get the whole thing done. (They almost pulled it off, although Mok says the fact that it wasn’t quite perfect “haunts me to this day.”) Through the stress of it all, their vision remained singular. Her husband once joked, “We’re in the business of love,” which Mok says, “made my tears dry pretty quickly.”

“Not once have I ever said, ‘What have we done?’” says Mok, even though the pandemic struck soon after Lune’s soft launch in late 2019, meaning the house sat silent and empty for months, just the two of them rattling around in this space they’d envisioned filled with people. But in fact, their focus on hosting small-scale events was prescient for a time of social-distancing, and now their booking calendar is busy with intimate weddings, photo shoots and a dinner series called Piena, where renowned chefs cook for small groups. “I don’t sleep the night before an event,” says Mok. “Every wedding, I can’t believe that people trust us with this moment.” Her role is to host, ensuring that the venue itself is as perfect as it can be. One of her favourite parts of the job is that time when the party is in full swing, and, from her quarters upstairs, she can hear the music and laughter filtering up from below.

The couple has since sold their city home and live at Lune full-time, where Mok dedicates herself to the business (bar a side project or two, watch this space). She hopes to keep building on what they’ve created—there are plans to host creative retreats and foster collaborations between artists of all kinds.

Whatever form Lune takes, one constant will be the feeling that started it all. “It’s emotional to think that we create a canvas for the most beautiful time in people’s lives,” says Mok. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”