Indie producer RTR Media has started production on the cottage makeover series Summer Home for HGTV Canada.

The lifestyle series will see interior designer Karen Sealy, a former Designer Superstar Challenge winner on HGTV, renovate rural cottages using simple and inexpensive design principles and materials.

RTR Media president Kit Redmond told Playback Daily that shooting a design series in rustic, rural Ontario has its challenges, especially as a short Canadian summer season constrains production schedules.

But she insists Summer Home is tapping into the deepest yearnings Canadians have for a slice of the cottage life, with its down-home approach to life and living.

“It’s the simple life. That’s what we find so attractive,” Redmond explained.

Ironically for a TV show, cottages overhauled in Summer Home have no TV sets.

More than that, RTR Media isn’t looking to do up grand Muskoka cottages, but instead worn out and outdated second family homes that require a little TLC from an expert design team.

Here Summer Home follows a trend in TV property shows away from the fast-paced home flipping shows of better times to current series where people are looking to stay in their homes and do with less.

The series has a deliberately low-tech look and feel, and no computer effects to dazzle TV viewers.

Redmond and worldwide distributor Picture Box are talking to HGTV U.S. about a possible stateside sale.

At the same time, the potential for the Canadian series in the U.S. market is limited by a poor housing market across the border making many Americans more concerned about holding onto their main home, much less renovating a second one.

Elsewhere internationally, Summer Home has real potential as a travel series as TV viewers globally take in Canada’s bucolic and expansive natural landscape.

HGTV Canada plans a 2011 bow for Summer Home.