I’ve been sitting in Lori Dixon’s chair since 2008.

She was cutting hair at Influence Salon on 17th Ave, relatively new in her career, and I was a columnist at the Calgary Sun. Eighteen years later, my highlights expertly applied the day prior, I found myself staring up at the gorgeous Bankview home I’d heard so much about.

Lori owns her own highly successful hair studio now called Color Theory, tucked inside the Citizen Salon building in Mission. Her daughter Adeline, age 23, runs her own brow business and shares the space. This detail delights me to no end, as Adeline was a toddler when we first met. Now building something of her own, and sure to be as sought-after as her mom.

And that’s the thing about Lori Dixon. She has a way of building things that last.

As I temper my enthusiasm and wander through the door, Lori tells me how she walked by the house every morning on her way to work.

A yellow two-story home on a corner lot in Bankview, with a veranda that wrapped around the front and a swing hanging from the tree. She doesn’t remember exactly when she started noticing it, only that she did, for months, including the day she saw the sign go up on the lawn.

That same afternoon, her husband called.

“We’re going to look at a house tonight in Bankview,” he said.

“Is it yellow?” she asked.

It sure was.

A word about the husband: his name is Billy. When their son, also Billy, was born in 2014, the household required a solution.

New Billy became Billy Boy, and old Billy became Billy Senior, and then just Senior, which has apparently stuck. I have been hearing about Billy Senior for 18 years and have yet to meet him in real life, which at this point makes him somewhat of a myth.

What I do know: he worked for Parks Canada. As I’m sure you’ll agree, this conjures a man in a felt hat and snappy green shirt. Lori has repeatedly assured me this was not the case, and that Senior now holds a director-level role with the feds that involves a desk and real pants. He is also one-fourth of the legendary Calgary-born band Chixdiggit, one of my 1990-something Republik / Night Gallery / Black Lounge faves, and has what Lori considers ‘exquisite’ taste in interior design.

That last part I had also heard a great deal about, and it is quickly confirmed once I’m inside.

Lori and Senior have now lived in this lovely house for 15 years. They bought it for $525,000 at a moment when the market briefly softened.

Lucky timing, though Lori calls it something closer to fate. They’d been renting in Altadore, working downtown, and growing tired of commuting through a corner of the city they wanted to call home. “We were not rich,” she tells me, with a token bluntness I know well by now. “We were coming from Saskatoon.”

What they found was a rare corner lot with two driveways, a front and backyard, and a showstopping veranda with sun on all sides, in the heart of Bankview just up from 17th Ave.

The house is not huge, and Lori will say this plainly. But standing in the main floor on a bright spring afternoon, it’s hard to see what’s missing.

The kitchen is a recently redeveloped horseshoe with cabinetry on all sides, a Samsung range, and stunning tile that Lori, a self-described ‘functional’ person, claims as her favourite thing in the room. A round Saarinen Tulip table, a Knoll 1957 original, anchors the space, found secondhand for $1,500 and worth five times more. Around it sit a collection of original Knoll chairs, each one a deliberate find and equally valuable.

In fact, everything in the house was found, chosen, or meticulously researched by Billy Senior, the rockstar non-Ranger. He found the lights. He discovered the blue couch. He selected the Buster + Punch cabinet hardware and spent hours tracking down the table that Lori can’t get enough of.

“My contribution is the plants and the frilly stuff,” she adds – an obvious understatement. The plants are everywhere and nowhere, each one tasteful, trimmed, and potted just right. Her design philosophy is ‘Scandinavian-Japandi,’ meaning minimalist, warm, and neutral, she informs me. Lots of wood. No clutter. Not even from her three kids or their millions of kid things. Lori is the definition of meticulous organization and household flow.

“I’m the opposite of a hoarder,” she says. “And my kids’ backpacks have to go upstairs on the weekend.”

The family’s recently-completed main floor and exterior renovation took a charming but dated home with burgundy walls, textured cupboards, popcorn ceilings, and a glass block wall that broke all flow, and made it into something entirely beautiful.

A designer friend came in for a consult, told them the wall had to go, and to stay as simple and uniform as possible – no jutting islands, no statement floors in random rooms. And boy did they listen.

“I’m so happy he told us to knock down that wall,” she says. “He was like, you have this big round centrepiece table. Focus the flow around that.”

The kitchen itself was built at a Vancouver factory called SWEDE, with cabinets arriving pre-built and the disruption compressed into a manageable process. They lived upstairs during the work – makeshift kitchen in the hallway, construction dust settling over everything they owned. The contractor, Ryan Heagy from Hygge Built in Calgary, was so good they’ve already booked him back for the basement and second floor.

But before gutting and rebuilding the inside of their beloved Bankview home, Lori and Senior tackled the entire exterior last year: new Hardie board siding, a rebuilt composite veranda so they’d never again need to paint, gemstone lights, new sod and concrete, a full irrigation system wired to Senior’s phone, and a pear tree to boot.

The renovation total, inside and out, was somewhere north of $190,000, and worth every penny and years of patient planning. Guests repeatedly comment on the front porch upon arrival, and Lori lines the entire span with flowers and plants in the summer.

I arrive in gravelly grey late winter, and despite the dirt and snow, the newly blued house is as eye-catching as ever.

Now, Bankview is not a neighbourhood that announces itself grandly. It doesn’t boast the highbrows of Scarborough nearby or the pomp of Mount Royal next door.

It is a genuine mixed bag, with century homes beside infills, and apartment blocks next to condo towers perched in a bungalow’s backyard.

Its narrow, hilly streets aren’t newly adjusting to rezoning rules and densification development – it’s been baked into Bankview’s DNA since its century-ago beginning. And among its many charms is its walkability in all directions. Lori’s kids walk to school. The family walks to 17th Ave on warm summer nights – the same route, past the same parks, to the same popular ice cream shop just a few blocks away.

“Bankview is one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in Calgary,” Lori confirms. “You have these beautiful multi-million dollar homes, and across the street there’s... very original apartments.”

She laughs, I laugh, and we send them a nostalgic, appreciative nod.

The closest the family came to leaving their little yellow gem was when Lori found out she was pregnant with Betty, their youngest, now seven, who bubbled them into a family of five. Suddenly, the math (and main floor bath) proved tighter, and a bigger house seemed smart.

They looked around, but most were only slightly bigger and double the price, with interiors that felt no nicer than their own.

Lori and Senior had always dreamed of a renovation and of making their home perfectly their own. They could also see further down the road, where Adeline would one day move out, followed by Billy Boy and Betty. The house that felt crowded now would breathe in time, and thus, they decided to stay, renovate, and fall in love with it anew.

“Once we do the basement and upstairs, this is our forever home,” Lori says. “We’ll just stay active enough that the stairs don’t beat us.”

At the end of our visit, I tell her the house feels like family member number six.

Lori thinks about it.

“I feel like it appreciates us,” she quietly adds with her signature grin. “Because of what we did to it.”

Catchers, restorers, and creators of memories and magic in the happy house that was once yellow, now brimming in blue.

Photographs by Kelly Doody. Published with Lori’s permission.

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