‘I’m still in the works’: Pamela Anderson on restoring her BC home and herself | CBC News

Model, actress and environmental activist Pamela Anderson is on a mission of rehabilitation.

Back at her home in Ladysmith, BC, she says the goal is to renovate the two-acre Vancouver Island estate where she spent her early years and now hopes to become a multi-generational sanctuary for herself, her to establish parents and their sons .

It’s the focus of her new reality show HGTV Canada, Pamela’s Garden of Edenwhich premiered on Thursday.

At the same time, the Hollywood star says she’s been hit with a burst of introspection: while on the property, she wrote a memoir to be published in late January and she’s preparing to release a Netflix documentary about her life.

As much as the major home renovation is a work in progress, “I’m in the works,” Anderson says.

“Coming back here was really triggering. It’s very emotional for me,” Anderson says of going back to basics from a childhood she described as difficult.

“When I came home, I don’t think I was as happy as I used to be. I came home to really face some things. There are certain things in your life that you just brush aside and it was just so healing for me to come home and it took me a while to realize what I was going through.”

Home from Hollywood

More details about her early life and colorful celebrity career will be revealed in the forthcoming memoir and streaming project, she assures, admitting that the recent return to small-town life is worlds away from the tabloids of her ’90s heyday.

“I had never been on a plane when I left this island. You know, I left the island and went to Vancouver, and then I moved to LA, and then I traveled around the world and to the south of France for a year before I moved home,” says Anderson, the first became famous as a Playboy pin-up Baywatch TV star.

“I was restless when I was here. And I had to learn to be comfortable, to just relax and enjoy and put all my creative juices into this project, make it an art project and listen to other people’s ideas.”

Anderson says she bought the property from her grandmother about 30 years ago because she believed she “just needed some Canadian roots” and that she would move there one day.

It would take longer than expected, she suggests in a first episode, which briefly alludes to years of “overwhelmed” life in Los Angeles, a busy career and several high-profile marriages.

She says it was initially “heartbreaking” to return to the sprawling waterfront property, which includes three buildings known as the roadhouse, boathouse and cabin.

“I felt like this place was like a broken heart that I really needed to turn around.”

Live this island life

These days, Anderson says she enjoys the new creative endeavors that take up her time — including painting, repainting, pottery, and canning vegetables — as she discovers her personal design style.

Acknowledging a lot of trial and error — and possibly conflict — in design decisions, she chuckles at the folly of inviting cameras in to see how it “melts down which doorknob to put on your door.”

“I am not perfect. Some ideas are really bad and some ideas don’t work and some things I’ve reworked and fixed and I’m wasting a lot of money trying to fix those problems,” says the 55-year-old, who runs the $750,000-budget company started.

The crew is also a collection of “outsiders,” she adds.

“I wanted boys [for whom] this is their second or third chance in life. I wanted to bring people here who aren’t perfect people. I wanted everyone to have a fun project as a healing place of sorts.”

She introduces one of them as her husband in the first episode and reveals little about their courtship other than that he’s “a regular guy, which is nice”.

Anderson declined to say more over the phone, and a spokesman for HGTV Canada later said the couple filed for separation in January 2022.

A family affair

The show gives us a glimpse of Anderson’s goofy side as she jokes with the crew and their well-founded love of the outdoors, while chatting about local wildlife and walking barefoot on the beach in loose, flowing dresses.

It’s a far cry from the big coiffed bombshell version of Anderson that made her a beauty icon, and she agrees. But it’s real, she adds, and is partly an overture to her two grown sons, who urged her to do the show because they saw a disconnect between her public persona and the women they know.

“My sons were like, ‘Mom, people don’t understand who you are,'” she says of Brandon Lee, a producer on the series, and Dylan Lee.

“It doesn’t really bother me – I’m me. But it bothers her.”

Anderson is happy to say her sons are spending “more and more” time at the property as the renovations progress, and she boasts of personal triumphs, including a 5,000-square-foot garden filled with produce.

The “heart and soul of the property” is a rose garden featuring Anderson’s favorite pink variety.

“I’ve had them in all my flower arrangements around the world. Wherever I went, whoever I was with, I always knew this was my rose,” says Anderson.

Pamela’s Garden of Eden airs Thursdays on HGTV Canada and streams Fridays on StackTV.