‘Fire Country’ Star Diane Farr Unveils Quirky Pacific Northwest Home That Brought Her Closer to Set—and Her Teenage Kids

When “Fire Country” actress Diane Farr landed her role on the hit CBS drama, she was reluctant to leave behind everything she holds near and dear while traveling to Canada to film the show.

So, she brought the most important elements from her life in California with her—purchasing a permanent home in the Pacific Northwest that is not only a short commute to the set of the popular drama, but is also a desirable destination for her teenage children to spend their summers.

For the first few years of filming “Fire Country” in Vancouver, British Columbia, and its surrounding villages, Farr, 56, initially rented furnished apartments in the area, while still counting her family’s home in La Cañada, CA, as her permanent residence.

But her family was no longer there to make the property really feel like home; when Farr began filming the series, her children headed off to boarding school in Switzerland—and she realized that she’d need something truly spectacular to lure them home to spend whole summers with her.

She explains in the latest installment of Celebrity Sanctuary that she found exactly that in Washington state, where she scoped out a property that was perfect for her kids and offered an array of outdoor activities that she knew would serve as the ideal draw for the three teens.

The former “Numb3rs” and “Rescue Me” star still maintains the Southern California property where she raised her three children, but with son with son Beckett, 19, now off at college, and 17-year-old twins, Sawyer and Coco, still at boarding school, she realized the time was right to spread her wings and find a new home base.

“My son is a freshman in college, and my daughters started boarding school when I started this job—they go to school in Switzerland—so this is really a way for me to lure them here for the whole summer,” she says, before noting who she derived the clever strategy to entice her growing children to return.

“I know Julia Louis-Dreyfus said, ‘What you need is really good sheets,’ but if your kids are still teenagers, the sheets weren’t enough,” Farr shares.

“You need something they’ve never had before so I bought two jet skis, two kayaks, and two stand up [paddleboards],” she adds. “They can carry them to the beach, and this has brought them and all their friends, so when they’re on school break, they come here to me.”

Between the fleet of personal watercraft she purchased and a five-month, customized makeover that upgraded the 2020-built abode from a three-bedroom, three-bathroom residence into a four-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot modern architectural masterpiece, Farr has fashioned a dream beach getaway where she can build a life outside of her role as Cal Fire Chief Sharon Leone while still technically on location.

Situated just “one house from the Pacific Ocean” and neighboring the Canadian border, Farr expands upon how she’s positioned her second home—and in particular, her primary bedroom—to be her first choice for an after-work retreat and her children’s first stop after school.

The home here was born out of filming “Fire Country” in Vancouver. For three years, I lived in furnished rental apartments. Renting in Vancouver is as expensive as London, which I think is more expensive than anywhere in L.A., and no matter how fancy the apartment was, I always felt like I lived in a dentist office because the walls are always white.

The furniture is nice, but you don’t really want to sleep on it. And it just really bred this feeling of work was supposed to provide everything. 

Finding something in this little beach town, even though I have a drive from Washington, was just a dream. Just getting a house when you’re on location was the most game-changing thing I’ve ever done on a job because it suddenly became that I live here and I go to work—as opposed to, I’m here for work and work must fulfill everything. 

I don’t know if this happens to everyone, but there’s always notes on my work as an actor. There’s a director that has notes. As a writer, if you manage to sell your piece, somebody’s buying it, and they have notes. I just finished directing. Everyone has notes for you, even when you’re the boss as the director.

Decorating is the only place where I get no notes. So this house, with the kids not even here all the time, this house was supposed to be my workhouse, the location house; but this house feels like my home because it’s just mine. It’s me. It’s my personality thrown up on the walls.

I didn’t need the biggest space when I was looking for a home that I could commute to Vancouver for from work, but what I needed was something that was warm and comforting and a bit of a retreat that would lure my children to come and stay with me in the summers. 

The town I’m in is mostly people’s beach cabins, and they’re passed down from generation to generation. It’s like everybody’s grandmother had a cabin here, so some of the cabins have been redone and some of them really just feel like a good time. 

My place was one of the only new builds. The house itself is really beautiful. I’ve never had such an architecturally beautiful house. Very modern, mostly glass. One wall of the house is all glass, floor to ceiling, and it has that pitched roof.

It has a double roof on the short side, and then the long side, there’s more construction going in. Beams go through the whole house, so every room has a double ceiling, and then the far side of the house has a triple. 

Everything in Vancouver is designed to catch light, so you really start to get the idea of how to beat the dark hours of the Pacific Northwest.

I was in love with the idea of the architecture because it [felt] like the masculine side. I mostly live here alone, so the homeowner who built the place took care of all the masculine, and then I was left to do all of the feminine. All of the color, all of the fabric, all of the texture, which is my dream. It was the easiest thing in the world when I saw the house. I was like, “That I can have a great time with.” 

I like to do everything full bore, so my renovations went the same way. Because it’s such a rural small town, it was really hard to find available people in the winter. I think most people here leave for the winter, and they come back because the summers are so gorgeous in the Pacific Northwest.

I ended up taking my contractor from L.A. and flying him up here, and flying his son, who’s 40 years old and owns a restaurant, but he thought it would be fun to do it with his dad. So, we all were, like, camping together in the house when it started. 

They worked seven days a week, and they would come for two weeks, but they’d get a month’s worth of work done. And then the other two weeks, I’d keep dreaming up the designs. The inside was white, gray, and beige, which are three colors I hate. I systematically moved most of the walls.

There are heated concrete floors throughout, which is a dream, but you can’t put new walls down. You have to secure the walls to other walls, so it became quite a game of Tetris, trying to figure out if I move this wall, what can I secure the new wall to?

They had the place made mostly for people with little kids. They had a big open space with two TV areas and rooms filled with bunk beds. Each room could sleep, like, eight people. They had tiny closets. Every cabinet [was] below my waist. They were so uncomfortable for brushing your teeth, and I’m the shortest person in my family. That was all going to have to be reversed immediately. 

My son is 6’2” my daughters are 5′ 11”, so every cabinet was going to be jacked up on something. The most important thing to me was to make sure each of my kids had their own bedroom, which is not something they’ve had for all the years I’ve been in Vancouver. They’ve all been sharing a room. 

I think the biggest build was over the kitchen because there is a double- and triple-high ceiling. As soon as I walked in, I realized I could put a bedroom over the kitchen, which would basically give my son his own apartment. You walk in, and there’s a spiral staircase up, and it’s the best view in the house because he’s high above everything else. He just sees the ocean.

This is about my sixth house that I built. I bought all of the houses alone. I generally didn’t buy them with a realtor. I would buy them from the realtor selling the house, who would become my realtor; and every time I would look for contractors, if it was in a new place, there was a lot of, “You can’t do it because.” 

My father was a general contractor. I work on sets. People can build anything overnight on a set. I mean, they have a lot of people there to do it, and they will tell you it’s not built to last; but last week, I saw them build a trolley car overnight. I was like, “I can definitely do it. It’s just whether or not you’re comfortable with me designing as we go.”

In fairness to the artisans, I always think they don’t want me to be disappointed. They don’t want to get it wrong, but if I’m saying to you, “If I make a mistake, I’m paying you by the hour or by the day or by the week. It’s on me, so you don’t have to worry,” we’re going to try my idea.

The primary bedroom, it kind of was missing a lot of things. It was the only room in the house that didn’t have a high ceiling because it had this loft, and you could only get to it from a hallway. I hate hallways. Every house I’ve ever been in, I’ve rearranged the walls to get rid of the hallways and sort of buy back the space. 

There was no walk-in closet space in that room. I realized if I moved two of the walls, I could build a long, L-shaped staircase inside my bedroom up to the loft [and], if I made the staircase 5.5 feet wide, I could build a closet along the staircase. 

My bedroom is my sanctuary because of my closet. As a Virgo and an oldest child and a highly organized A-type alpha personality, I like to see all the things. Everything is out.

The staircase and the closet has become the showpiece of the room because the clothes wrap all the way around. It’s all exposed. It’s sort of like, if you like the idea of an exposed kitchen in a restaurant, this is an exposed closet in my bedroom. It’s very interesting, and it came out really pretty. 

It’s very hard to get people out here to work, so we ended up building the steps ourselves, putting in electric. 

I like to wallpaper myself. I found some wallpaper from Sweden that was abstract, and it had muted plum, and light blue, and navy in it. It was really vibrant, so that’s the backing of the closets, and on top of it are gold piping, and white shelves on them. 

I wanted shelves underneath because the base of the steps are very wide. It became a place to put suitcases and extra blankets. 

For the hanging pieces, we went with old plumbing pipes, and we painted them gold. All the finishes in the bedroom were gold. 

It felt fun, and on top of all of those plumbing pipes are shelves for sweaters and T-shirts and eventually shoes as you climb to the very top, and then it turns into coats, scarves, hats. It looks a little bit like a fancy store.

I also bought a glass top table for all the jewelry and the belts. If it’s not on display, I want to give it away. It might as well go. 

We built the staircase to go up to a loft, which would be where my office is. It’s a great view. It’s a quiet space. There’s nothing else in there so I can’t get distracted by cleaning or organizing. It’s just a desk and a chair, but the way up to the loft on the steps—the steps are 5.5 feet wide for a 3-foot closet along the inside wall, and everything I own is displayed on it.

I started collecting baby shoes from around the world when my kids were born, so there are shadow boxes, in between my sweaters, of shoes from China and Istanbul and Uzbekistan. They’re sort of woven and in between the sweaters, just sort of breaking up the space. 

Underneath my hanging clothes, I’ve had this rule that started on my first TV show. It was called “Loveline,” and it was on MTV. It was the first time I had any money, and you could see my shoes every day, so the stylist would go out and buy clothes and shoes, and I would buy them from her if I really liked them.

At the time, the apartment I lived in was so small, I would line the walls with the shoes as almost, like, a decoration and then when I filled up the walls, if I wanted a new pair of shoes, I had to get rid of an old pair. I’ve never stopped this. I have a certain number of shoes I’m allowed, and I don’t buy anything unless I have something to give away—usually to my teenage daughters.

The stairs that I built, first, I was trying to carpet. Then I was trying to get wood with the hook on the end of the steps, the piece of the wood that hangs over on the steps. I couldn’t get anyone to deliver that, so eventually I was like, “We’re going to have to build our own stairs, and I’m going to do a wash on them.” 

There is a muted yellow, somewhere between yellow and brown, that’s in the wallpaper. I bought some yellow paint, and I did a 20-to-1 mix with water.

I have very fancy plywood, and I just washed the plywood with it; and then I found a beaded edging that I made my own lip on the stairs. They had to be nailed in by hand because they’re so soft. The wood is so small that I was afraid a nail gun would snap it. So, in between the steps, about every third step, I have a cut-out, and the plywood goes all the way back to give me shelves underneath the steps, and there are lights underneath. 

From the floor up, every inch is colored, detailed, and has a different fabric. The wood is very exposed on the steps. There’s detail on it. There are lights on it. I have this very colorful wallpaper, and then I have the gold bars running through; and then on the very bottom, underneath the clothing, is my rule about the shoes, so there are two pairs of shoes the whole way up.

That’s your first layer, and then the clothes are hung in sections based on how high it is on the steps. You start with gowns, jumpsuits, and long things, and it turns into shirts.

I think there’s always going to be tweaks. I keep looking for small rugs that can soften the experience as you go up the steps that would fit in the center. So far, everything I found looks like it belongs in a library. I don’t know why someone hasn’t made this fun and chic yet, but it doesn’t exist. 

I hung small chandeliers in the area. I’ve since rotated the chandeliers. It hasn’t quite worked for me yet, but it just feels very grand. It’s really fun because it’s the only room with a short ceiling, and it needed some kind of grandeur to feel like it was the primary bedroom. It’s incredibly feminine. It really is fun. It feels like that corner of my bedroom became a dressing room, which really feels precious.