You’ve seen Melissa Stubbs before. You’ve seen her in a red nightgown over black bra and panties, crash through a window and plunge out of a 23-storey building. Or cringed as she flipped and rolled a speeding SUV into a crumpled mess. And that was probably her jumping a motorcycle while firing a machine pistol.
If you watch TV or movies, you’ve seen Ms. Stubbs or her work. One of North America’s top stunt women and stunt co-ordinators, she’s the action girl on more than 90 movies and over a hundred TV episodes. She’s doubled for Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Milla Jovovich and more than sixty other Hollywood starlets and worked in such movies as Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Scooby Doo 2, Batman & Robin and Blade 3. After getting “hit by a car at four in the morning,” and pulling the notoriously long hours of the film business, her home is her refuge. This stuntwoman’s home is her castle. Literally.
Five years ago, Ms. Stubbs, 36, coordinated one of her biggest jobs yet, the conversion of her West Vancouver family home into a 4,800 square-foot castle, complete with turret and drawbridge. The project, expected to cost $500,000, went way over budget, adding up to $800,000 by the time it was over. Still, you’re not likely to have seen a castle like this one.
Apart from the fortress design, the home’s most unusual feature is the system of indoor slides that extend from a trap door in Ms. Stubbs’s master bedroom through to the main floor, then from the main floor to the basement bar and motorcycle gallery.