Image 1 of 2
Image 1 of 2
Neigbours
Network TV shows have discovered the Vancouver condo phenomenon. So have the people who star in them.
By Ian Caddell
Photographs by Gregory Crow
Styling by Luisa Rino, Lizbell Agency
"Robson Arm's" is a case in which life imitates art. Most of the young writers, directors and crew members on the show live in neither Shaugnessy mansions nor Port moody bungalows but rather centrally located apartments and condos. The same is true of the actors, Gabrielle Miller, who plays Bobbi Briggs, a character she describes as "emotional and insecure," had grown up in Vancouver and seen every neighborhood up close when she decided to take an apartment near downtown Vancouver. That real-life accommodation helped simplify a complicated on-screen life. Miller, a co-star of the Saskatchewan-set "Corner Gas", now plays two totally different characters who reside in two separate cities. Her "Robson Arms" character married young and moved from Regina to Vancouver where she makes ends meet by teaching exercise classes. Her "Corner Gas" character Lacey Burrows, is "a much more serious woman" who moved from Toronto to small-town Saskatchewan to run her late aunt's restaurant, Miller also recently landed the lead in "Love and Other Dilemma's". a film currently shooting in Vancouver.
Not surprisingly, some of the pieces that help forge her own identity came from the places her characters have taken her. "When friends come over, they say, 'It's another Gabe apartment,'" she says. "It was built in 1928 and has a lot of character. I love old apartments. I am pretty different from Bobbi, but the Robson Arms is really a lot like the apartment building I live in. I love the style of that era. I could live in this building if it was real, but I would have to redecorate. I've moved a lot, but I tend to take the artwork with me. I have these wonderful charcoal drawings and paintings by [Canadian artist] M. Stark that I bought here and I found some great new stuff in Saskatchewan. I have two pieces from an artist [from Yorkton] named Jolene Erhardt and two mirrors salvaged from a church that I bought on South Granville."
Miller decided to make a clean break form the Prairies during her hiatus form the first two seasons of "Corner Gas". She moved first to Los Angeles and then back to Vancouver when she was hired by "Robson Arms." She has no regrets about returning to the town she left behind.
"I don't think there is a neighborhood that I haven't lived in here," she says. "When I was a child, I lived on the east side, Kerrisdale and Kitlsilano. When I moved to Los Angeles, I was excited to try something new and I loved the landscape and lifestyle I had there. Since I moved back, I have rediscovered the things I like about Vancouver. Now I spend a lot of time walking along Jericho Beach and running through the Endowment Lands. I love the combination of forests and ocean."
Rediscovering her own home town now has Miller wondering if she shouldn't own a piece of it. "I think that this year I will buy a place here. The irony is that throughout my life my bigger dream has been to settle down in one place, now I have a career that has facilitated the opposite of that."