Harbour Town Photography
The listing: 8482 Highway 337, Georgeville, N.S.
Asking price: $2.5-million
Taxes: $8,076.95 (2025)
Lot size: 30 acres
Agents: Valerie Chugg, Royal LePage Highland Properties
The backstory
Nova Scotia is famous for its kitchen parties, but if you build a house with a large enough open space you can take it to the next level: a house concert.
“It was my cousin who knew somebody involved in Festival Antigonish [a summer theatre festival], she started telling me about these house concerts,” said Gail Rieschi, who has hosted several in her great room. “I was initially appalled: ‘You want me to charge people to come to my house?’ But it’s very normal in Nova Scotia and a lot of local musicians are very interested in supplementing their income by doing house concerts.”
She’s had musicians from as close as Cape Breton and as far as Australia grace her great room while friends and neighbours – as many as a 100 have crammed in – pay $10 to $20 for a private concert.
These concerts were an unexpected bonus for Ms. Rieschi when she finally achieved the goal of moving to the province full-time. Though born and raised in Toronto, her mother was from Glace Bay in Cape Breton. She’d never had a chance to visit until a business trip in the early 2000s. She fell in love with the water, the views and the people and was determined to find her way back there.
It took a few years to convince her husband, Gary Zemlak.
“He was very reluctant, but I got him to come down spent four or five days driving around the coast,” she said. That’s when something flipped for him. “He’s from rural Northern Ontario and he liked the bush, the terrain. My vision was a very small quaint house on the water on two or three acres, Gary wanted to be a land baron.”
When local realtor Valerie Chugg found a 60-acre undeveloped lot for sale on the north coast of the province – near the tip of the spit of land that separates the Northumberland Straight from St. George’s Bay – Mr. Zemlak was over the moon. “I told him if our offer gets accepted, let’s sell off some of the land. He said ‘I’m not selling an acre – I love it all,’” Ms. Rieschi said.
In a way both of them got their wish: in 2003 the couple built a smaller two-bedroom cabin next to the cliff that became their getaway for holidays and summer visits (it’s still there, only now it’s the guest house).
One of Mr. Zemlak’s great joys was building roads into the property (including a small parcel of land they sold to a cousin who built her own house); he even had his own bulldozer. In 2010, he was diagnosed with a degenerative disorder that meant he would soon require the use of a wheelchair. The planning for the new house shifted to an accessible one-level design to make sure “age and infirmity wasn’t going to get in the way,” said Ms. Rieschi.
The couple actually met because both of them worked with the disabled community: Mr. Zemlak’s former company Tykris Inc. built early smart-home technology to make independent living easier and Ms. Rieschi founded VPI Inc., an employment agency that got its start helping people injured on the job obtain the training they needed to re-enter the work force.
“What I liked about it, it wasn’t charity it was getting people who had skills and abilities and working with them to rebuild their lives,” said Ms. Rieschi.
Planning for resilience was a skill they’d honed by the time they were finalizing the site for the house. There were options to be closer to the water which they both loved – Gary with his canoe and Gail walking the beaches and sandbars – but they landed on a high point, 260-feet above the shore. “Eventually it’s going to be harder for us to get down there, but we will always enjoy the view and the sunsets, watching the whales and eagles from up high,” Ms. Rieschi said.
Mr. Zemlak died in 2020, and COVID-19 lockdowns put a pause on the house concerts, and now Ms. Rieschi is ready to find new waters to enjoy.
The house today
The home is essentially a big square behind a wide apron of tarmac, with the three-car at an angle off the right corner and a walkway to an outdoor kitchen on the left. Everything is at grade, with no steps or transitions (a patio wraps around to the rear, ocean-side of the home). The guest house is further to the right past the garage, built into a steep ridge with a basement walkout to the slope below.
Through the front door you enter directly into the centre of the main room, a 30- by 40-foot space that’s almost like a church nave with the ceiling rising 18 feet to a point above a huge stone chimney flanked by nearly floor-to-ceiling windows offering an ocean view. Sets of windowed patio doors flank the window wall, and the kitchen occupies the right third of the room with dark walnut-stained millwork that reaches the ceiling.
A dining space sits next to an opening to a smaller living/TV room, with another fireplace flanked by small windows looking to the outdoor kitchen, and a large oceanview window.
The second bedroom is on the corner of the structure facing the road in, along with an office and some storage. The bedroom has an accessible shower in its ensuite bath.
A door next to the kitchen leads to the primary suite that features a large accessible closet (with a bench for changing) that connects to the laundry and mud room spaces. The bedroom has an oceanview glass patio door and another fireplace; the large ensuite has a stand-alone tub with its own ocean view, which offers a little privacy from the back patio provided by the angle of the house, along with a large shower with bench.
The garage also has its own full bathroom (complete with urinal) for easy cleanup after a hard day of bushwhacking.
The sea
The outdoor kitchen was originally designed to be open to the sea and the sky, but a metal roof was added to help deal with the elements.Harbour Town Photography
The outdoor kitchen was originally designed to be open to the sea and the sky, but as Ms. Rieschi discovered, the sun shines mighty hard in the high summer and the near-constant breeze down the straight will carry away any shade that’s not bolted down. The permanent structure with its metal roof was a retrofit, and Mr. Zemlak used to enjoy coming down to listen to rain patter on it.
The couple installed a set of aluminum stairs that crawl down the bluff to the sea shore.
“I’d spend all kinds of time down there, what you don’t see is that it’s rocky to get into the water, but about 30 feet out there’s a huge sandbar: it goes on forever, you can stand in water up to your waist and walk and swim,” she said.
This connection to the briny deep is part of what attracts so many to the area. Ms. Chugg has been fielding inquiries from as far away as Tennessee, Michigan, California and even Austria. The “from away” thing is real though, according to Ms. Rieschi who has been living here on and off for 20 years but knows enough not to call herself a local.
“My doctor has been here 40 years and I asked ‘Are you considered local?’ ‘Not really,’ he said.”