TLC renovates ‘Trading Spaces’
From 2001 to 2008, TLC’s “Trading Spaces” introduced America to design, showing how a budget of $1,000, two days’ worth of work and a lot of outside-the-box thinking can transform a single drab room into a showplace. And now the granddaddy of the genre is back.
Premiering Saturday at 8 p.m. with the first of eight hourlong episodes, the new iteration brings back many of the original cast, including host Paige Davis and designers Ty Pennington, Doug Wilson, Carter Oosterhouse, Frank Bielec, Genevieve Gorder, Hildi Santo-Tomas, Laurie Smith and Vern Yip, joined by newcomers Brett Tutor, Joanie Dodd, John Gidding, Kahi Lee and Sabrina Soto.
The premise is essentially the same: The designers help neighbors redecorate a single room in each other’s homes within a time frame of 48 hours. But in a concession to the times, the budget has been increased from $1,000 to $2,000 — which, according to Pennington, still isn’t a whole lot to work with.
“In the original, they would usually leave like 40 bucks for to us build five pieces of furniture and now we have 80,” he explained to a recent gathering of journalists in Pasadena, Calif. “But that’s what’s great about the show, is it really is — it’s a tight budget. And considering, like, the way design has really, it’s certainly more visually out there, people have more ideas. So I think the stakes are higher, so you want to do more, you want to go bigger.
“But I think the $2,000 still really isn’t that much,” he said, “considering the room that you can create from that much money. I mean, it’s a challenge, but it’s nice that we’ve got a bump.”
As in any creative process, there will always be questions of taste (“I don’t want to hear shiplap ever again,” quipped Wilson), but Davis maintained that’s part and parcel of making design accessible to everyone.
“I think that originally the show has always been about being resourceful, creativity, doing the most for the least amount of money, using what you already have,” she said. “And even though we’re in a landscape where design is so accessible to everyone, those rules and those ideas still apply to us as a show. We still go out and I see these designers create rooms that are just mindblowing with incredible resourceability and creativity and ingenuity.”