The Sets
Four immensely talented Production Designers, Perry Gorarra. Marian Wihak, Nancy Pankiw and James Oswald each added their ingenuity and personal stamp to over 100 individual sets built over the course of seven years in both studio and back-lot. The challenges were often enormous. From a traveling circus to Dickensian back alleys. From a completely snowbound schoolhouse that had to be shot both interior and exterior in winter blizzards, to cricket fields, castles, caves full of bats and ships at sea!
Over the course of many, many episodes my team of writers and I had opted to set scripts in other locations as well as Avonlea. The production team was challenged to create a permanent maritime seaport out of the cobblestone streets of a 19th century Toronto distillery. The fashionable private girls academy attended by Felicity was staged at Penryn Park an estate in nearby Port Hope. The locations became more lavish, fanciful and more complex as the series grew in size, character and scope. Meanwhile all of the original interior sets for King Farm, Rose Cottage, the Dales, the Pettibones, and the General Store were maintained across four sound stages in Sullivan Studios. Even these became crowded with the mammoth completion of two floors, offices and dining room and kitchen of the Edwardian seaside resort - White Sands. Though Road to Avonlea grew in scale and imagination, it never lost its heart. Thanks to the talented team of designers and set decorators, the show’s unique brand of humor and human drama was allowed to evolve as far as the writers’ imaginations could dream.
