Gerald Potterton has two cardinal passions — architecture archetypal airplanes and authoritative movies, something that becomes accessible the minute you airing into his home in Lac-Brome. The abode is abounding with miniature planes and cine posters and the bath walls (of all absurd spots) are afraid with awards from Potterton’s continued filmmaking career.Trained as an animator, Potterton, an expat Brit, formed for the National Blur Board of Canada afore aperture his own flat in city Montreal. Best accepted for the 1965 cine The Railrodder (starring Buster Keaton), he aswell formed on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. In 1981, he directed Heavy Metal, an activated hard-rock fantasy accurate by luminaries like Al Waxman, John Candy and Eugene Levy.
Model planes are just a amusement but if he constructs them, he employs the aforementioned absorption to detail as he does if he animates his movies. He flies the mini aircraft as generally as he can, allegorical them forth a aerodrome in a acreage at the aback of his 88-hectare property.
Potterton’s home, a ancient dairy farm, dates aback to 1820, but it’s absolutely two houses in one. The foreground part, congenital by Loyalists, is archetypal of its era. Complete of brick, it has a pillared veranda, narrow, multi-paned windows, dormers and a abrupt roof. The aback allotment of the abode is “only” about a aeon old. Clad in clapboard, it was apparently acclimated for storage.
It was afterlife that brought Potterton to this website in the Eastern Townships.
“I was planning to accomplish a cine set in the Ardennes and I was on the anchor for a farmhouse and a barn,” recalled Potterton.
“The countryside about actuality reminded me of that breadth of Belgium. This abode would accept been ideal, but unfortunately, the allotment for the blur fell through.”
“After the blur was cancelled, the agriculturalist who had busy us his abode asked if I’d be absorbed in affairs it instead. At that point in my career I didn’t accept a lot of money, so I hesitated, but a brace of weeks later, I accustomed an abrupt ability cheque. That enabled me to put a down transaction on this abode and, in 1977, I confused in.”
The farmhouse was not in actual acceptable condition, abnormally the “new” part, a large, “open-to-the-elements” amplitude abounding with absurd concrete, with no insulation or avant-garde electrical wiring. There was, however, a bank and a aperture amid the aback of the architecture and the front, so for years Potterton added or beneath lived in the old Loyalist house.
He fabricated some renovations (“I advised myself a carpenter, which was antic because I wasn’t!”) such as accoutrement the admiral walls with Gyproc and architecture a bath with a window breadth there had been a “dark, horrible, space.” But in 2000, he absolutely redesigned his home, acutely transforming the autogenous and aperture up the two sections of the building. The centrepiece of the accumulated anatomy is an 1,800-square-foot open-plan living/dining/kitchen breadth on the arena floor, arch into the small, affectionate apartment of the Loyalist house.
PAGEBREAKThe added apartment in the two-in-one-house cover the aboriginal active room, two bathrooms, four bedrooms and an admiral amusement allowance breadth Potterton builds his archetypal airplanes.
The Loyalist abode has absorbing architectural appearance — low ceilings, absorbing nooks and crannies, windowpanes fabricated of wavy, handmade bottle and age-old board doors that adhere a little askew.
The new part, which has ache floors is bright, ablaze and open, with French doors arch to a patio at the kitchen end, a capital access with a mud allowance in the middle, an accessible access arch to the additional attic and a ample mirror on the far wall, encased in a huge, scallop-edged window frame. The mirror reflects the active space, authoritative it assume even larger.
Potterton didn’t apply an artist to redesign his abode but relied instead on his colour faculty and agog aesthetic eye. He did, however, accept the advice of the Albers, a father-and-son architecture aggregation whose ability was architecture barns.
“I adulation the barn artful of apparent areas with blubbery beams and top ceilings,” Potterton explained. “I aswell like lots of ablaze so if I drew up the plans, I congenital those appearance into my design.”
The architecture aggregation was able to cannibalize some of the absolute beams and move them about to actualize Potterton’s new active space. They were aswell able to antecedent some abstracts from a neighbour whose old barn had collapsed. One ample block of hemlock serves as the countertop in the kitchen.
The kitchen cupboards were custom-built by Peter Wisdom, a Knowlton-based artisan who aswell complete the floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the “Christmas room.” The kitchen adornment is ablaze and animated with agleam stainless animate appliances. The congenital units are colonial dejected with an aged accomplishment and the floors are covered with sienna-coloured bowl tiles.
“My alone affliction is that I didn’t install under-floor heating,” Potterton said. “The abode stays air-conditioned in the summer, but, unfortunately, it can aswell be a bit arctic in the winter.”
Potterton credibility out, however, that affairs were consistently an affair and installing heating would accept been an added cost. He paid $24,000 for the architecture aback in 1977, but he has angled out “many, abounding times that amount,” whipping the abode into shape. According to Potterton, it took him decades to pay off the mortgage, as able-bodied as the money he has spent on aliment and repairs.
The dining breadth is bedeviled by a anemic dejected amphitheater table, belted by Windsor chairs. It came from a abbey and seats up to a dozen people. As was the case with the table, Potterton best up a lot of of his appliance at barn sales and auctions about the Eastern Townships. Aboriginal artwork adorns the walls. Family photographs sit aloft the fireplace.
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