Curbed - House Calls
Words by Samantha Weiss Hills - Photos by Joann Pai
Dec 3, 2018
“EVERY MORNING,
I WAKE UP AND I NOTICE SOMETHING NEW ABOUT IT.”
Writer, creative director, and pastry chef Jackie Kai Ellis makes a home in the City of Light
When creative director, writer, and pastry chef Jackie Kai Ellis decided to buy a place in Paris last winter, she was hoping for a sign.
Ellis felt she needed to be pointed in the right direction: Paris hadn’t exactly been the place she saw herself putting long-term roots down, but the winds of chance had other plans for her.
Buildings along the Canal St. Martin on a November day.
It wasn’t that she was a stranger to Paris’s delights; Ellis, who now splits her time between Vancouver and the City of Light, originally arrived in Paris to study pastry several years ago, returning to her home town in 2012 to open Beaucoup Bakery & Cafe and, in 2017, passing ownership to two team members—and then finding herself back in France. (In March, Ellis published The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris.)
And then, Ellis got her sign, in the strange and serendipitous manner in which signs tend to arrive. “I see feathers everywhere,” Ellis begins, explaining how she chanced upon her apartment, just off the Canal St. Martin. And by chance, her apartment’s former owner was an older woman with a proclivity to collect rather than purge who “had been collecting beautiful feathers and put them beside the [front] door,” Ellis says.
“I was like, ‘I’m obviously not going to buy this apartment based off of a container of feathers,’” Ellis says, laughing.
After all, though the feather connection seemed auspicious, the apartment had real problems: It contained mountainous stacks of curios, hadn’t been renovated since the 1940s, and its layout was a bit of a puzzle; there was no refrigerator and a hallway had been fashioned into a bathroom. “You’d have to walk through this bathroom to get to the second bedroom,” Ellis says. “[The previous owner] had the shower floor on hinges so that she could lift it up.”