How Heated Rivalry's cottage rejects the sameness of contemporary architecture

A cottage in Muskoka, Canada, has become the unexpected breakout star of buzzy gay ice hockey romance Heated Rivalry. Here, the show's creators reveal why they struggled to find the pivotal set and what makes it so special.

Heated Rivalry, a surprise international success from small-time Canadian streamer Crave, follows two closeted young ice hockey players as they strike up a secret romance despite playing for arch-rival teams in the National Hockey League.

Over the course of six episodes, the drama chronicles eight years of yearning glances, stolen touches and hotel-room hookups, as Montreal's Shane Hollander and Boston's Ilya Rozanov are inexorably drawn together while trying to hide their growing affection from each other and the world.

The season finale, titled simply The Cottage, delivers a rare happily-ever-after for two on-screen queer characters and effectively turns Shane's peaceful Canadian lake house, where the two finally confess their feelings, into an architectural allegory for this hard-won ending.

"It's become a metaphor for the safest place in the world – a place where you can love and be loved openly," said director and writer Jacob Tierney, who created the show based on a popular book series by author Rachel Reid.

Since the episode aired, the phrase "I'm coming to the cottage" has taken on a life of its own, endlessly memed and repeated by fans, including fashion designer Donatella Versace and Muskoka's own tourism board, which is using the tagline on billboards across Toronto.

Meanwhile, the architecture studio behind the building itself, Toronto-based Trevor McIvor Architect, is fielding requests from fans who want to replicate the home in real life.

"We have a lot of interest from new clients wanting The Cottage of their own," revealed senior associate Alisha Bishop.

But despite playing such a crucial part in the story, Tierney said the cottage was actually one of the last locations to be secured, just two weeks before the team started shooting on site.

"It definitely loomed in my mind," he told Dezeen. "Because we filmed it at the end, and we did not have it for a long time."

"We had a hard time finding that spot," added production designer Aidan Leroux. "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," he remembered. "But we knew it was important, and Jacob was willing to just keep looking and not settle."

In the show, the cottage is described as a "fortress of solitude" that Shane, played by Hudson Williams, had built for himself as a private escape from life under constant public scrutiny.

After five episodes spent mostly in anonymous hotels, this meant the set offered Tierney a rare opportunity give viewers an insight into the inner life of this character, who spends most of his time masking not just his sexuality but also his autism.

"The idea was that it was supposed to be a bit of a reveal of his heart," the director explained. "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."

The issue, it turned out, was that most of the newly built cottages around Toronto, where the show was filmed, looked almost exactly the same.

"One of the things we found was the sameness of contemporary [homes]," Tierney said. "At a certain stature of wealth, they really are all glass boxes with chrome finishes."

"A lot of new cottages just don't have that comforting feel," Leroux agreed. "And then a lot of them were just really, really ugly, even if they were new and they were designed by an architect."

At the same time, Shane's cottage also couldn't be too idiosyncratic or overly "design-y", Leroux explained, since he is ultimately the kind of person who sees a home as an investment, rather than a reflection of his character.

"We wanted it to have a nice architectural element to it without it being too self-consciously designed," said the production designer, himself a trained architect who previously worked in Daniel Libeskind's Architecture Intermundium institute.

"We wanted a style that's really interesting, but has a kind of humble element to it, leaning towards Scandinavian, mid-century modern."

The Goldilocks location the team finally settled on, Trevor McIvor Architect's Barlochan Cottage, was smaller than they had originally envisioned, but delivered heavily on the requirement for warmth and comfort thanks to its exposed Douglas fir structure.

Although the home's all-encompassing floor-to-ceiling glazing was not originally part of Tierney's brief for the cottage, it ended up serving as a subtle architectural parallel for Shane embracing his sexuality and his feelings for Ilya, played by Connor Storrie.

"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," the director explained.

This buttery golden sunlight creates a stark contrast with the show's earlier episodes, which unfold mainly through a series of fluorescent-bulbed stadiums and dimly lit hotels.

To make these anonymous spaces feel worthy of the big, beautiful love story that Tierney felt the queer community deserved, the production team used different light sources like lamps, fires and dramatic window views to underscore important moments throughout the show.

"With the hotel rooms, we analysed the crap out of how light enters the room and the views out of there," Leroux remembered.

The most obvious manifestation of this comes at the end of episode two, in a glitzy penthouse where Shane and Ilya reconnect after months without contact.

It was built from scratch on a sound stage so that the team could use a giant LED video screen to show glittering views of the Las Vegas skyline through the hotel's windows and reflected in its glossy surfaces.

"We built it because we weren't really going to find something that looked like that in Toronto," Leroux said.

"It's too important a moment," Tierney agreed. "We needed the Vegas skyline."

For another emotionally loaded set – a restaurant where Shane meets and later comes out to actress Rose Landry, played by Sophie Nélisse – 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," Leroux remembered. "I've never worked with a DOP that did something like that."

The entire series was shot in just over a month on a budget of CAD $30 million (USD $21.7 million) – equivalent to less than a single episode from the latest series of Netflix's Stranger Things, which debuted around the same time.

"Each department was sort of understaffed," Leroux remembered. "We didn't have the time, budget or resources to make it look as good as it does."

"In the end, the look of the show is really a reflection of the positive attitude of all the departments," he added. "It's better than the sum of its parts."

Other recent set designs featured on Dezeen include the painstakingly recreated Shaker interiors from The Testament of Ann Lee and The Studio's fake Frank Lloyd Wright studio building.

All photos are by Adrian Ozimek for Trevor McIvor Architect unless otherwise stated.

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