Do you love queer hockey players, behind the scenes details, AND architecture? Then you’re in luck!
Heated Rivalry production designer Aidan Leroux said: “We had a hard time finding that spot. It would be a daily thing like: have you found the cottage yet? And we’d be like: nope. Glenn Carter, the location guy, would show us stuff, and it was just not quite right. But we knew it was important, and Jacob was willing to just keep looking and not settle.”
HR creator/director Jacob Tierney said the cottage was actually one of the last locations to be secured, just two weeks before the team started shooting on site. He said one of the main problems was that most of the new cottages in Toronto look the same. “The idea was that it was supposed to be a bit of a reveal of his heart so we didn’t just want it to look like it could belong to every other person who has three or four million dollars to spend on a big house by a lake. One of the things we found was the sameness of contemporary [homes]. At a certain stature of wealth, they really are all glass boxes with chrome finishes.”
Aidan Leroux, who is a trained architect, added: “A lot of new cottages just don’t have that comforting feel. And then a lot of them were just really, really ugly, even if they were new and they were designed by an architect.” Shane’s cottage also couldn’t be too idiosyncratic or overly “design-y” since he is ultimately the kind of person who sees a home as an investment, rather than a reflection of his character.
Leroux explained: “We wanted it to have a nice architectural element to it without it being too self-consciously designed. We wanted a style that’s really interesting, but has a kind of humble element to it, leaning towards Scandinavian, mid-century modern.”
The location they finally settled on was designed by Toronto architect Trevor McIver. His firm said that fans and new clients have been contacting them to have the cottage replicated for them. The house was smaller than the Heated Rivalry team originally intended the cottage to be. The floor to ceiling windows were also not something that they had envisioned but Jacob Tierney said that it seemed apropos: “There was something that, ultimately, I found really appealing about the idea of being that exposed, with that entire window wall, and how nice an idea that is for Shane, that he could feel like he’s allowed a bit of daylight to seep into his life in that way.”
Jacob and Aidan also talk about lighting the cottage differently than the other scenes in the previous episodes at the source. Aidan said that Heated Rivalry’s director of photography (DOP) Jackson Parrell wanted such specific lighting that he actually made all of the lampshades himself the night before the shoot: “On the shoot day, he turned up with a box full of small shades, and when I asked where he got them, he said that he 3D-printed them last night. I’ve never worked with a DOP that did something like that.”
