Visiting This Summer’s Best Event Venue
🌕 Lune 1860 is the dreamiest escape.
Lune 1860 in Goderich, Ont. is a magical place. Based on an Italian revival style villa design and dating back to 1860, it is clearly the event space to book right now.
It’s also the home of Lisa Mok and her husband Ezra Silverton, who moved there full-time in 2020 but maintain a pied-à-terre in downtown Toronto so Lisa can be close to her new job as creative director of Sephora Canada. The dream!
I’ve been lucky to have been invited up to Lune twice this summer, first in May for a lunch with Pandora, which is when I took these photos, and again in June for a driving experience with Audi. Both visits were super chill and relaxing and felt like a true escape, even though I wasn’t all that far from home.
I caught up with Lisa to get the lowdown on their vision for Lune, find out why they love sharing their home and to ask what we all really want to know: Is the house haunted? Read our condensed and edited conversation below.
Tell us about your journey of coming into this home.
We were looking for a cottage by a lake and we couldn’t find any we liked and the ones that we did like were so expensive. And then we went to England for a couple of weeks and spent a week in the Cotswolds, which gave us some new perspective.
Perhaps it wasn’t water that we needed to be by. Maybe we just buy some farmland and a small farm house where I can do my creative things and Ezra can grow some trees and just have a place to go on the weekend.
And then this property came up out of nowhere. When I finally saw it in person, all I could see was us hosting things.
The more we spent time there, we decided that we should just completely redo it so that people can come and just use space for whatever reason that they want to. Then it became what it is after that conversation.
Why did you want to open your home up to hosting events?
Like most of us, we love hosting our friends and family and we did that a lot in Toronto. There’s always this point in the evening where, I don’t know, maybe because you’ve had a few drinks and you’ve forgotten that the person you’re sitting beside you actually didn’t know two hours ago and you’re really fully immersed in the conversation. Everyone’s having their own little private talk. Everybody’s full, whether they’re drunk or not, it doesn’t matter.
It’s just a really beautiful time and it doesn’t last very long because someone always gets up and goes who wants more wine or whatever and you kind of break that amazing space. I said to Ezra, “If I could just bottle this up, that would be so amazing.”
And how did you land on the concept of the moon to inform the space?
When we did host, people just felt really calm. All this shit that happened during the day, at work or wherever, people kind of forget about it, right? Because it’s time to just hang out and hope that the next day is a better day.
So that drove the whole idea of nighttime and the moon. We’re not spiritual by any means but we do love that the moon can change bodies of water, it can change people’s moods. It really lends itself to a beautiful story and it is an amazing concept for the interior designers and us to work with versus just jumping into Pinterest.
This really helped ground the design of the space and the story of how we want the space to lay out to the degree of keeping it really small. It’s more about those intimate conversations that you have with someone close to you.
Then we went even more conceptual, painting one side of the house very bright and the other side is the dark side of the moon. It also helped us define the textures that we would use within the house. I want everything to feel like it was like the terrain of the moon, down to the backsplash in the kitchen. Even the brass detailing within the space, it all patinas within time. So every second of the day, especially the island, it patinas. And it absorbs everybody’s fingerprint on it as well, kind of like a living guestbook.
This led to a sense that life as a whole is not perfect. Everybody leaves a mark but I think that’s what makes life so beautiful, that there are physical things you leave behind or emotionally following that intimate conversation with somebody, if you can leave behind something beautiful with something you’ve said or something you can relate to.
And if people can have those conversations at Lune, it brings the story to life of why this venue exists and why we decided to do what we are doing.
What types of events have you been hosting?
We do a lot of photoshoots. We host a few corporate events during the day. We started offering a culinary experience called Piena, which means full in Italian. So of course the idea of the full moon and being full and having full conversations and relationships. I just really love that word.
It’s an opportunity for guests to come and immerse themselves with a chef’s culinary practice. We invite chefs from all over all to kind of do their own thing. They don’t actually show the menu to the guests until the day they arrive, so it’s really special.
Is the house haunted?
That’s a great question. I did not want to sign the deed until we did our research. I went on ghosts.com [laughs] and nothing came up.
You know what? I do believe in ghosts but not in this way where I feel like they’re going to attack me. I do feel a presence when I’m here. The house has been around for so many years. There’ve been so many people who have lived in it.
But no, I’ve never seen anything move or a shadow from the corner of my eye or anything. For sure there’s definitely really good energy.
What’s been the most rewarding thing about living here?
Hosting any wedding is really special. We’re not part of it, obviously, but when you think about the trust that someone has given you to be a canvas for such a momentous time in their life that hopefully only happens once, that level of trust that they instil in you is such an honour. It’s really special and I can’t put it in any other way. We feel very, very privileged.
Thank you Lisa for taking the time to chat with me about your beautiful space! And to the crew at Jane Gill for throwing such a gorgeous party for Pandora.
I’m off to Los Angeles next week to do some on-the-ground spa research (yes!) and continue my favourite side gig as petsitter to the stars.
Anything you think I should check out while I’m there? Hit me up!
Until next time, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
This place is stunning. Can’t wait for your LA dispatches!