A3

SHOPPING FOR A PARK TO CALL HOME
From globeandmail.com
Friday, February 7, 2003

For house hunter and film director Tim Southam, en suites and kitchen layouts take a back seat to proximity to greenery
TRALEE PEARCE

Film director Tim Southam is shopping for a home in Toronto. But first, he's shopping for a park.

For him, location, location, location doesn't have to do with tony neighbourhoods or the best transit access; it has to do with the proximity of greenery.

While maintaining their home in Montreal, where they live near Mont Royal, Mr. Southam and his theatre director wife Eda Holmes (most recently, Little Mercy's First Murder at the Tarragon) need a home base in Toronto. While looking to duplicate the experience of living near green space, Mr. Southam's become a quick study in the charms of the city's parks.

"We'll live as close to a park as we can afford," says Mr. Southam, as he gives me a tour of his favourite park, Moore Park Ravine.

But on his unconventional shopping trip -- he doesn't even have a real estate agent yet

-- Mr. Southam has grown fond of his next hometown.

"One of the more interesting thing about the parks in Toronto is that the city came together out of smaller towns. Large parks are arrayed in neighbourhoods where you can actually afford to live."

It's no wonder that Mr. Southam is approaching the house hunt from this offbeat perspective, considering that the great outdoors is one of the stars of his latest film, an adaptation of David Adams Richards' The Bay of Love and Sorrows, set along New Brunswick's Miramichi River.

"Location and atmosphere were among the most important things for that film. It's the fourth rural film I've made in a row," he says.

Mr. Southam, who looks every bit the Montrealer in his black leather coat and black jeans, says the outside has always been more alluring than the inside.

"It all comes from the same place. When I was a kid, I'd go to the woods behind the house everyday and play out umpteen fantasies related to being a pioneer, a forest dweller of some kind.

"But I really like cities. So my first instinct is to find the nearest clump of trees and run off and play act. And so when we landed in Toronto, I started looking for the park with the most trees."

Lisa Dale, who practises real estate in Toronto (but is currently on a sabbatical), says she's shopped for houses this way for years.

"I've always wanted to be near parks, they make me feel comfortable and offer a way to get lost," says Ms. Dale, whose fondest memory of a park is living near Summerhill Gardens, where she eschewed curtains in a room that overlooked the park.

Dale says she fields requests like Mr. Southam's from two seemingly disparate demographics: parents for whom parks are as important as schools and creative types who need tranquility.

"They're often looking for peace and quiet, where they work."

Mr. Southam fits both bills. He needs the childlike outlet and the quiet for writing. And after a lengthy discussion of the democratic roots of parks -- we venture from the British history of commons, to the need for public places of protest and the French Revolution -- we get to the practical bits.

His criteria for the best park to live by? He likes scruffy, slightly wild parks that aren't too manicured. And he's all about ravines -- the perfect foil to the Montreal mountain park where he cross-country skies as a break from from winter writing.

"There you get to go up Mount Royal; here you go down into the ravines. Curious difference. It has to do with geography, but I wonder what it says about the cities. Torontonians hide their parks. Montrealers show off their parks."

Mr. Southam says what's great about the ravines is they've always been wild, because the farmers were more interested in cutting down the trees on more accessible, flatter land in order to put in crops. The ravines are where there's a river or a stream.

He's also fixated on the idea of a park that leads somewhere, as opposed to a rectangular park bordered by four streets.

As a runner, he's found one can run through the entire city via ravines.

"You start at one end, disappear into this deep crease in the city, then, like a gopher, you pop up from time to time and check out where you are. You can do this for miles and miles."

This is why we found ourselves in the superlative Moore Park Ravine on the coldest day of the winter a couple weeks ago. Sadly, Moore Park homes are in the $1-million dollar range, which is not in the budget.

"This is the best park, but I think we'll end up out on the Danforth because there are good parks out there. You can get up to the Rouge Valley easily and it's still reasonably possible financially. Failing that, I'd like to get near a ravine, so the St. Clair ravine borders some neighbourhoods that I might be able to afford.

Considering Toronto Life's February issue just profiled a house in Riverdale that sold for $725,500 (asking price: $599,000), Mr. Southam may just have to broaden the search.

Luckily, he's also keen on High Park and Trinity Bellwoods Park, where houses are reportedly selling in the $300,000-to-$600,000 range.

"So, unlike other cities where the downtown park is a preserve of the rich, in Toronto it's possible to get near a park without spending too much."