INSIDER PROFILE : Former Film Producer Finds Happiness as Home Builder

As a television and movie producer, Peter Perrin helped start the Canadian equivalent of the Academy Awards in 1968.

But as Hollywood’s biggest annual event approaches this year, Perrin, 49, doesn’t feel even a twinge of nostalgia.

“I’m having so much fun here in Southern California, I don’t miss it,” he said. “Anyway, the film business is not all that glamorous.”

The business he finds more exciting is home building, and he does plenty of it as president of Costa Mesa-based Bramalea California Inc., which two months ago, bought another California home builder, Marlborough Development Corp., for $250 million.

“The family who owned Marlborough had worked with another buyer, but it didn’t go through,” Perrin said. “I heard about that, and at the same time, our president in Toronto (Canada) heard about it. Timing was everything.”

Together, Bramalea and Marlborough would have ranked sixth in The Times’ 1987 survey of home sales among Southern California builders. Bramalea ranked 28th, Marlborough was 17th.

Perrin said he has no idea how his firm will rank this year “because I don’t play the numbers.” (According to calculations based on the 1988 survey, they would have been No. 4, if their combined sales volumes had been considered.)

Bramalea California’s parent company, Toronto-headquartered Bramalea Ltd., ranked as North America’s fifth largest real estate holding company in another survey.

With assets of $4.7 billion, Bramalea Ltd. is a developer of residential, commercial, retail and industrial properties in the United States and Canada.

“Though Bramalea’s prime business is producing shopping centers and office buildings,” he said, “it does land and housing development only in Toronto and Southern California. . . . Probably 10% of our projects in California are commercial.”

The mix of housing being built here ranges from $95,000-homes in Sun City, in Riverside County, to $550,000-houses in Mission Viejo, with some $1-million-plus houses planned on the Orange County coast.

When Perrin brought Bramalea to Southern California in 1979, he built very little housing, preferring to concentrate on the other types of development that Bramalea knew well.

“We put our toe in the water and learned to build houses here from Jim Peters and Bill Lyon,” he said. Perrin is working with the two veteran builders to develop 1,000 lots at Foothill Ranch, in the Saddleback Valley area of south-central Orange County, north of El Toro.

Bramalea’s first residential project in California contained only 50 houses. The company had to learn what Perrin terms “the cultural differences.”

“Canadians are much more conservative in their buying than Californians, who are probably the most adventuresome of anybody in all of North America,” he said.

Variety of Styles

Home buyers in Toronto generally look for houses with brick facades and a center hall, he explained, while those in California seek a variety of architectural styles and finishes, though many high-end buyers of Bramalea homes have preferred brick or stone exteriors.

Perrin learned the fundamentals of home building when he was growing up in Winnipeg.

“My first exposure to construction was when I was 12 years old,” he said, when he went to work during his summer vacation for one of his physician father’s patients who owned a home building company.

Every summer, Perrin worked on a construction crew until he went to college, where he studied engineering.

“I liked working with hammers and nails, but after four years at the university, I decided I didn’t want to build highways, sewers and water treatment plants,” he said.

He didn’t follow in the footsteps of his father, a thoracic surgeon, “because I never would have been as good a doctor.”

He followed, instead, a friend, who was a producer/director. “I started as a stage hand at $50 a week.”

Produced Game Shows

He was in film and television for eight years, producing game shows, including the Canadian version of “To Tell the Truth,” talk and variety shows, and musicals. He also produced some feature films.

A year before he quit the entertainment business, Perrin and his wife, Dorothea, bought their first house and had their first child.

At the same time, as chairman of the new Canadian Film Awards, he got directors, producers and actors guilds together for an annual event like the Academy Awards. Before that, awards were given for 20 years to film makers by the Assn. of Adult Education.

Then Perrin quit the industry. “The glamour had worn off,” he recalled. “So we put a boarder on the third floor to help pay our mortgage.”

And he went to work for what he describes as “a real muddy boots builder, the kind of guy who designs and builds homes from start to finish.”

He was hired as a marketing expert, since he had packaged TV shows and films. A few years later, he joined Bramalea.

“In Toronto, I worked seven days a week,” he said. “Here I have a much more balanced life.”

He skis, plays tennis, and just built a house in Newport Beach for himself, his wife and their two teen-aged sons. “I learned a lot about my own business building my own home,” he said.

And he’s learned that he likes California.

“Those poor corporate guys,” he said. “They’re freezing in Toronto, and here I am with my mallards.” Two ducks were swimming in a pond outside his office.

“It’s paradise out here.”