SEEN IN THE PRESS

Weird Homes

Vancouver Echo newspaper

By Lisa Smedman, [email protected]
Contributing writer
 
Filmmaker Sharon McGowan loves eccentric people and the homes they live in. In her own Commercial Drive neighbourhood, she'd often walk past the "polka dot house" - a white bungalow painted with huge red dots - and wonder who lived there and why they chose such an unusual paint scheme.
 
When she was asked to co-produce the TV show Weird Homes and was looking for a Vancouver location in which to film host Arthur Black, the polka dot house immediately came to mind. But when the show's researchers went to the home, located at at Lakewood Drive and East 3rd Avenue, they found a sign posted near the front door that read: "Kill your television."
 
Despite the sign, the polka dot house became one of several East Vancouver residences featured in Weird Homes. Now halfway through its second season, the Gemini-winning half-hour show has also featured the former Montreal bakery (now an artists' residence) on Keefer Street, a home at Lily and Napier streets whose exterior walls are studded with broken bits of pottery, and a Strathcona house whose dining room has been turned into a tiki lounge. The show has also featured the hockey-stick furniture of Paul Chevreau and the live-work studio of graffiti artist Eric Whittaker.
 
McGowan, a documentary and feature film producer, was asked to work on Weird Homes by Mike Collier.
 
"He's always admired creative things that are outside the norm," said McGowan. "This has been a passion of his for a long time."
 
Airing on the Life Network, Weird Homes had 13 episodes in its first season and is halfway through its 26-episode second season. The show celebrates eccentricity and strives to present sometimes obsessive visions in a respectful way. Each show features three homes and focuses on a particular theme - everything from living underground to living up in the air, from homes where collections spill across walls, tables, ceilings and floors to crazy-quilt yards.
 
McGowan's personal favourites (from an episode that has yet to air) include a Swiss man who lives with his goats in a trailer parked on top of a former motel surrounded by his chainsaw-hewn sculptures, and a man who lives in a home built from scavenged barns who believes that, should another Biblical flood come, his home will serve as an ark.
 
Other favourites include a couple who live with more than 600 cats (the exact number changes, depending upon who you ask) and a man who has covered every inch of his home with collections of records, key chains, ball caps, pens and pencils, and buttons. One woman from Armstrong, B.C., a taxidermist whose home is filled with stuffed animals, provided a wealth of local history as she played her accordion.
 
"Everybody watches Weird Homes," said McGowan. "It's a real conversation starter at dinner parties."
 
Weird Homes has already lined up more than 130 homes from across North America that could potentially be featured in the show's third season. Researchers find the homes via the Internet, or by phoning around to libraries, hobby shops, art galleries, local newspapers and coffee shops.
 
Sometimes the leads don't pan out. One rumor of a blind woman living in a cave on Prince Edward Island turned out to be a woman whose husband was blind, and who lived in a house with a sod roof.
 
"Finding the homes is the most fun part of the job," said McGowan.
 
Although McGowan doesn't see the houses until the two-person film crews come back with footage, she's always on the lookout for Vancouver locations to use as opening shots. The hardest to find was an opening shot for an episode on underground homes, which featured the "earthship homes" of New Mexico, a missile home in Kansas, and the cave home of "Caveman Bill" of Dawson.
 
"The crew wanted to dig a big hole under my house and interview me in it," she joked.
 
McGowan, who teaches film at the University of B.C., was recently named Woman of the Year by Women in Film. She produced the feature films The Lotus Eaters and Better Than Chocolate. She is currently working with writer Peggy Thompson on two other feature films: a comedy; and a feature based on the life of Emily Carr. Yaletown Productions, which produces Weird Homes, is also developing a pilot TV show on "art cars" - automobiles whose unusual decorations and paint schemes rival those of the houses in Weird Homes.
 
McGowan encourages anyone who knows of a "weird home" to call Yaletown Productions at 604-669-3543 (or fill in this form). "We're always looking for suggestions."