HOME Again
Trading Spaces is back with more highdrama decorating and designer hijinks.
Atented, red-and-gold circus-striped room with wheelbarrows full of sand poured onto the floor. A den with furniture secured upside down on the ceiling. A wall painted blood red with a coffin-shaped spice rack cut into it. Wallpaper made of straw! If that’s what you remember from eight seasons of Trading Spaces, you’re not alone. The home renovation series was wild and crazy—and revolutionary. Unlike any other home show before, it had neighbors swap house keys, then gave them $1,000 and 48 hours to renovate one room in each other’s residence. And now it’s back.
It’s been 10 years since the show last aired (it ran from 2000 to 2008), but on April 7 Trading Spaces will return to TLC for a long-awaited reunion—and season nine. Same bubbly host, Paige Davis, and often-shirtless “stud” carpenter, Ty Pennington. Same what-will-they-think-of-next designers, including Vern Yip, Laurie Smith, Doug Wilson, Genevieve Gorder and Hildi Santo-Tomas. Plus, the show is adding some new cast members to the mix—including designer Joanie Sprague, who picked up carpentry after being named first runner-up on America’s Next Top Model, and John Gidding, former host of HGTV’s Curb Appeal. And they’re doubling the design budget for each homeowner/ participant to $2,000.
Why was the show so popular then—and will it still be now? “We were the first show to empower the DIY abilities of its audience. We put the tools in the hands of the homeowners,” says Pennington, 53, who lives the bachelor life in Florida and Venice, Calif., and hosted ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition after his stint on Trading Spaces.
“People literally saw [the homeowners] doing the work and said, ‘Oh, my God, we can do this too—and in a weekend!’ ” says Pennington, who remembers trying to build five pieces of furniture for around $40. “There weren’t many shows out there that had the low budget we had!”
Low-Budget Smash
That limited budget was key, says designer Yip, 49, who later hosted HGTV shows including Design Star and today runs his own design firm while living in Florida, Atlanta and New York with his husband, Craig Koch, and their two kids, daughter Vera, 7, and son Gavin, 8. “Design really was only something the top rung on the socioeconomic ladder could afford—those who could afford an interior designer,” he says. “We were dramatically redoing spaces for money that people could wrap their minds around.”
It was also a window into what you could do with what you had, says designer Smith,
46, who now lives in Memphis, raising her two kids, son Gibson, 15, and daughter India, 11. At the time, she says, décor wasn’t as available and affordable as it is now. “When we came on the scene, you couldn’t go buy a lamp at Target. We could take ribbon and put it around a lampshade, and America was like, ‘Wow!’”
But the real secret to Trading Spaces’ success was the entertainment factor, says host Davis, 48, who points to the nail-biting moment at the end of the show when the homeowners were shuffled into their rooms, hands over their eyes, for the big reveal. Davis, who later moved on to host home shows on the Hallmark Channel and OWN and jumped back into musical theater, is now living in New York with her husband of 16 years, Patrick Page, and her Maltese dog, Georgie. “The vast majority of our reveals were happy,” she says, but there were many couples who didn’t like their new rooms.
Of course, that mixed bag of reactions was all part of the fun. A YouTube search pulls up plenty of homeowners’ painful reactions— including a woman who had begged designer Doug Wilson not to touch the brick fireplace in their family room. When she sees it, completely covered with a contemporary white build-out (photo above), she asks with a warbling voice to leave the room, following by the mic pickup of her crying off-camera.
But Davis is quick to put those shocking
makeovers in perspective. “Our more crazy, out-of-the-box designs were meant to expand your brain and inspire,” she says. Plus, “not one time did we have homeowners who were dissatisfied with their reveal who weren’t still thrilled that they’d had the experience.”
How Things Have Stayed the Same
In the new series, as in the original, designers have to rely on homeowners to get all their “homework” done overnight. Sometimes a couple will be asked to complete painting the walls or sewing curtains after the designer has left. Not only does it need to get done (because, says Davis, “like, the paint needs to dry!”) but it also needs to be done right—not, say, hanging the wallpaper upside down (which happened to Yip on another design show).
“The designer comes up with the design,” says Smith, “but the execution of the room really is in your neighbors’ hands. Some of my most awful memories are walking in, and being just like, ‘Whaaaaa?’”
Sometimes the surprise comes right out of the gate, with the design requests from the homeowners. Yip remembers the makeover of a newly married couple’s tiny bedroom in Minnesota. They wanted a king-size bed and a very romantic design—and they also required two other things. “She said, ‘You have to incorporate my collection of snow globes and you have to incorporate his collection of bobbleheads.’ He had hundreds of them!” Yip’s solution? “A lot of storage,” he says. But he really appreciated how the couple wanted to make that room their own. “It’s OK that you like bobbleheads and snow globes—it’s you.”
How Times Have Changed
One change the cast has already noticed while filming the revival episodes: Homeowners seem more open than ever to the idea of making their spaces feel unique. “When we were first doing the show, you would get the same answers from homeowners over and over again,” says Yip. “They would say, ‘Oh, I love Pottery Barn.’ Ten years later, people now are comfortable with the idea that they’re not aiming to look like their neighbors, or look like they’re replicating a catalog or a store. They feel more secure in their voice for being able to say, ‘This is really who I am.’”
Of course, putting the formula into the hands of more modern-minded families also brings new challenges. “I find coming back a bit intimidating, because where we used to go in and educate, we now have an educated audience,” Smith says. “Ten years later, America has Pinterest, Etsy, Instagram.” One couple she worked with this season understood design principles and terminology so well, she says, “I was going, ‘Whoa! OK.’ They knew what was up.”
Also different a decade later: House plans have changed. Back then, “it was the era of the McMansion,” says Smith. Now homeowners aren’t as stuck on bigger-is-alwaysbetter, and are more likely to make the most of every space. Instead of formal living rooms and dining rooms, they’re seeing more families seeking customized, utilitarian rooms. Now, it’s “How do we take this dining room that we no longer use and convert it into something [like] an office so that we can make money from home? Or a kids’ playroom?” says Pennington. “It’s about converting what you have and turning it into what you’ve always wanted.”
As viewers tune in to Trading Spaces this month for another season of surprising and potentially shocking reveals, the cast hopes audiences will also seek inspiration to update rooms in their own homes: “So everything in your home is meaningful and a reflection of you, and tells your story,” says Yip.
And to answer one final burning question about this new season: Should we expect to see a shirtless Pennington baring those abs again? “Abs-olutely,” he says with a grin.