Taking his set design home
Film director shoots for convertible spaces and strong sightlines with his eye for 3D design
Framing scenes, filming on soundstages and juggling production schedules are among the many skills of award-winning Canadian producer/director David Acomba.
So Acomba, whose credits include movies “Slipstream” and “Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave,” and the sketch comedy TV series “Codco,” put those filmmaking skills to use in designing a home for himself and his wife, Sharon Keogh, a retired TV and radio writer and producer.
Seven House — it’s the seventh Acomba has designed and built — is a twostorey, contemporary cube tucked into an older neighbourhood a block from Lake Ontario in the town of Cobourg, an hour east of Toronto.
“It’s processional architecture,” Acomba said about designing the home’s floor plan to flow from entrance, to living room, to kitchen/dining room.
“It is about how you approach the house at the end of the day. You should park your car and walk into the main entrance of your castle,” Acomba said. “When you shoot a film, you have to know how to stage scenes in 3D. Film directors and architects both imagine things in 3D.”
They also work with convertible spaces, like the one Acomba created with their “car porch.” The room — panelled in cedar tongue-and-groove — serves as a carport in winter but is transformed in late spring through early autumn with sliding screen doors. A cedar floor floats a few inches above a gravel base. Floor-protecting plastic is rolled up, and wicker furniture and a dining table take the car’s place.
Inside their 1,728-square-foot home,
which sits on a 50-by-75-foot lot, each window or opening captures a scene — like the pier and beach view at the front door, or the living room’s woodburning fireplace glimpsed from the dining table 11 metres away.
The interior is painted a soft white, “as the design concept is that everything is background” to the views, Keogh said. “I really enjoy the light and airiness and the high ceilings. It’s a beautiful space to live in as well as being very functional.” Acomba and Keogh have an enduring love affair with the area, in Northumberland County. They first bought a country property, north of Cobourg, in the early 1980s. Actor Paul Gross owns one of their former homes.
They moved to the area permanently from Toronto in 1999 when they built a country house at Rice Lake Plains, on a historic property that was once the homestead of early Canadian author and botanist Catharine Parr Traill. Keogh initiated an extensive, award-winning ecological restoration there, reintroducing native plants from the mid-19th century when Parr Traill had lived at the property she named Mt. Ararat.
As the couple neared retirement, they wanted to be in town and purchased the infill Cobourg lot for $140,000 in 2014.
“I wanted a clean cube. Next door is a 1960s bungalow and I didn’t want to interfere with that house,” Acomba said of his modern design. So he created a box clad in green stucco and tucked it behind a mature jack pine tree. The driveway curves around other trees and shrubs.
He opted to forego a basement, since neighbours had water issues with theirs, and sat the house on a concrete pad with in-floor heating.
Extra insulation required for the floor and large kitchen windows that supply passive solar heat results in a $350 annual heating bill — about one-tenth of what it cost to heat their large country house.
“There’s nothing as efficient as a square box,” Acomba said. He designed the interior similar to asoundstage, where walls could be floated and moved into place at will. He used 24-by-36-inch ceiling trusses to eliminate the need for load-bearing walls and 10-foot ceilings to give a sense of space.
The house cost $420,000 to construct, including a large outdoor cedar-clad concrete storage bunker/garden shed and landscaping. It took just five months to build in 2015. “In the film industry, there is a lot of money involved when filming and it requires a lot of planning to keep things moving,” said Acomba, who served as project manager.
“I did the same with the house. If the tiler was coming, I had a second tiler lined up as backup, to keep it going ... I had my own (trades)people and I sought their input, just like you need the actors’ input for a film.” An acquaintance who watched the carefully orchestrated process told Acomba: “The next time I build a house, I’m going to get a filmmaker.”
No space is wasted in Seven House: The home’s combination boiler, providing in-floor radiant heating and hot water, and the air conditioner are tucked into a closet under the stairs. The comfortable living room, overlooking a large wooden deck and Keogh’s perennial garden, has a TV that can be rolled under the built-in bookcase. A corner fireplace with overhang and Italian tile facade is sliced into the wall, inspired by the work of modernist U.S. architect Richard Neutra. The sound system underlines Acomba’s passion for music; he founded the Port Hope All-Canadian Jazz Festival (2002-2017).
The kitchen has a bank of windows looking to the beach and street. Folding doors open to reveal a pantry on one side of the coffee station and tableware/cookware on the other. Three-foot cupboards above the kitchen cabinets offer clever, concealed additional storage.
Upstairs are the master bedroom and bathroom, plus Acomba’s and Keogh’s separate studies. A painted canvas backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, from an old CBC production, hangs on a curtain rod and hides the guest Murphy bed in his office.
“What I like most about the house is its comfortable modern usefulness,” Acomba added. “We live in and use every part of the house daily. For me it retains a cosiness all too absent from most modern homes.”