AT HOME with MIKE WEIR Photo by John Thomson
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
HH35.qxd 2/2/09 5:19 PM Page 13 At Home with Mike Weir INSIDE THE GOLF SUPERSTAR’S MAGNIFICENT UTAH HOME p48 AT HOME WITH MIKE WEIR Photo by John Thomson By Robert Thompson “While Bricia was showing the ladies the art and couches in our place, the guys all wanted to go and see the room: my gym and my In a picturesque area overlooking Salt Lake City in Utah, a group of families practice facility,” Weir says. is gathering for a housewarming. After a year of renovating, the new fami- Showing off the house, which the Weir family acquired in 2006 after a ly on the block is preparing to host a neighbourhood gathering, to intro- plan to build a home fell apart, brought to a close a year-long process of duce themselves to their new neighbours and to show off all the work designing, decorating and furnishing. It also represents a degree of per- they’ve done on their large home, that sits in the foothills, presenting a manence in the transient life of Weir, who was raised in Brights Grove, clear view of the city below and with the east mountains as a backdrop. near Sarnia, Ont., but who has chased a little white ball across golf However, the guests – the husbands mainly – recognize this isn’t just courses around the world since the early 1990s. any housewarming and this isn’t just any neighbour. Rarely does a neigh- bour win the Masters golf tournament. Rarely has a neighbour won On Top of His Game nearly US$24 million in prize money during a decade-long career on the Weir’s relationship with Utah is longstanding, starting with a recommen- PGA Tour. Surely the visitors have been aware for some time that the dation from Canadian PGA Tour winner Richard Zokol, who suggested Weir family, led the best professional golfer in Canadian history, have Weir consider attending Bringham Young University in Provo and playing taken up residence on their small street. And as the guests enter the on the school’s golf team, which was then regarded as among the best 14,000-square-foot home with its rustic Italian façade of brick and stuc- in the U.S. It was at university that Weir, who would become an All- co, the wives take in the decorating that Weir’s wife, Bricia, has under- American on the golf team, met Bricia, who was studying to become a taken. The men, on the other hand, have one thing in mind: seeing what social worker. He turned pro after leaving school in 1992, Bricia, who is Weir jokingly calls, “my little facility down there.” originally from Los Angeles, worked in Utah to support the couple while In truth it there’s nothing little about it at all. Formerly a garage for the Weir chased his dream. previous owner’s RV, Weir had turned it into his own indoor driving range, “Bricia had a job as a social worker right out of school, so she kept it replete with enough area to watch the ball travel in the air for 15 yards, going for us as I tried to establish myself,” he says. Bricia continued to and punctuated by a computer system he can use to analyze his swing. work while Weir travelled the world playing golf, including stints in HH35.qxd 2/2/09 5:20 PM Page 14 At Home with Mike Weir Australia where he literally ran out of money on a couple of occasions. management company, IMG Sports. Other times, he’d make the 11-hour drive to California to visit Mike As Weir’s star grew, the family, which now included daughters Elle and Wilson, his swing instructor at the time. It was a difficult period during Lili, became more attached to Utah, especially the outdoor activities and which the couple had little money and the golfer didn’t progress up the the privacy it offered. ranks as quickly as many expected. “It was a good base and soon enough all of our friends were here,” “Bricia traveled with me for three years in there,” he explains. “We’d Weir explains. “We grew to like it and loved the out-of-doors, the skiing, get an apartment and when I had to go on tour we’d just put everything the lifestyle. We liked it all. And I’m definitely more anonymous here than in storage.” if I lived in a golf town like Scottsdale or Orlando. Golf is big here, but no That changed in 1998 when Weir made it through the daunting quali- one is bugging me at the grocery store.” fying school: six rounds of difficult, pressure-filled golf, and finally found himself on the PGA Tour. His rookie year was far from a disaster, but he Making a Home didn’t earn playing privileges for 1999. Instead he went back to Q- On a mild day in December, Weir is enjoying a break from the rigors of school, won that tournament and would become the first Canadian to professional golf. He didn’t win in 2008, but he did make more than win an event in Canada in more than four decades when he captured US$3 million in a solid year. His year came to a close at the end of the Air Canada Championship in Vancouver. That set him up to become October, and since that point he’s spent more time at home in Utah at the best Canadian golfer in history, winning again in 2000 and 2001 one stretch than he can easily recall. before his breakthrough year of 2003, when he won three times and “I enjoy getting up, getting the girls breakfast and taking them to became the first Canadian to win one of golf’s four major championships school,” he says. “It is about being dad.” when he prevailed over Len Mattiace in a playoff at the Masters. Schooling for the girls was one of the big considerations to the loca- By then the days of stuffing the family’s belongings in storage while tion of their new home, which Bricia found during an Internet search. It Weir played golf was a distant memory. In Canada, Weir became a sports With its rustic brick-and-stucco façade, Mike Weir’s 14,000- superstar, instantly recognizable through a series of television commer- square-foot home almost looks as if it sprung from the cials and billboards in support of a Toronto-based mutual-fund company. mountains surrounding Salt Lake City, Utah. Mike’s wife He made nearly US$5-million on the course in 2003, and millions more Bricia worked closely with a designer for a year to create p33 off the course through endorsement and sponsorship deals set up by his a sense of scale and comfort that suited the family. Photo by John Thomson HH35.qxd 2/2/09 5:20 PM Page 15 At Home with Mike Weir had been the dream project of the previous owner, whose spouse died suddenly, leaving the house largely unfinished. “It was a beautiful home, but it was a question of what we could do with it,” Weir explains. The new house was 20 minutes closer to the school the girls were attending, and had a bigger lot for outdoor activities. Located about 25 minutes outside Salt Lake City (“the highways put in place for the 2002 Olympics make it really easy to get around,” Weir says), the house offers the privacy the family was striving for while also providing the natural beauty of the mountains with the city in the distance. But its vast size presented a challenge, especially since the family didn’t want it to seem too expansive. In order to take the house from the mas- sive shell to a homier, more comfortable setting, the Weirs employed a designer that worked with them for more than a year. Working closely with Bricia, who managed the process of redesigning the house, the goal was to make the main rooms feel less spacious. This was done by creat- ing what Weir calls “rooms within rooms,” essentially utilizing furniture to create intimate sitting areas within some of the more expansive areas of the house. In the great room, for example, which is one of the central areas of the house, Bricia and the designer acquired a number of antique Photo by John Thomson items that separated elements of the room, and utilized earth tones to p48 p33 Photo by John Thomson The great room is the focal point of the Weirs’ Utah home. To give this expansive space a more comfortable scale, they acquired several antique items to separate various areas, and used earth tones to add warmth. So that the big Pioneer Kuro plasma TV from dominating the area, there’s a movable abstract painting in front of the screen. It rolls up when the TV is turned on, then back down, hiding the screen, when the TV is turned off. HH35.qxd 2/2/09 5:20 PM Page 16 At Home with Mike Weir Photos by John Thomson The Pioneer Kuro plasma TV in the master bedroom is installed inside a large cabinet. When it’s not in use, the screen is hidden by sliding bookshelves, which can be pushed to the side when Mike and Bricia want to catch a late-night movie. bring a warm sense to the area. When someone turns on the TV, the painting scrolls up on a roller, “We wanted the house to have a cozy feel, because it was so big and uncovering the screen.