TRADING SPACES

‘My Lottery Dream Home’ finds comfy digs for big prize winners

“My Lottery Dream Home” 9 p.m. Friday on HGTV

By MICHAEL STARR

YOU’VE just won the lottery — literally — and want to upgrade your living situation with the help of an expert.

Enter “My Lottery Dream Home.”

The HGTV series, in its fourth season, features host (and noted designer) David Bromstad walking newly minted millionaire lottery winners through their paces as they search for a new living space.

“There are a whole lot of factors that play into it,” says Bromstad, 44. “It’s overwhelming. A lot of winners get financial advisors and think it through before they call me. They know I’m going to give them great deals and show them exactly what they want to see.” The people featured on the show, whose lottery winnings vary (it’s usually around $1 million), apply to appear on-air through 7Beyond Productions, which produces the series. (Bromstad is not affiliated with the production company.) “It’s always nice to have someone who’s not really part of their lives, an outside source, to come in without any great emotions while listening to what they’re looking for in a home,” Bromstad says, adding that lottery winners aren’t always looking to go crazy and lavish their millions on unbelievably opulent abodes. “It all depends on how much money they’ve just won,” he says. “Some people are living paycheck to paycheck and they’re pretty smart, like, ‘Wow, I’m 35 years old and I’ve just won a million dollars — it’s going to change my life for the moment but I’ve got to be smart about it.’

“But the money does make some people act strangely,” he says. “It’s just one of those things — they’re set for life, and this makes them a little more comfortable. One couple on the show [Rick & Lorie in the series premiere] won $180 million in the California lottery and ended up buying a mountain, but they weren’t going overboard,” he says. “It’s hopefully the last big purchase they’re going to make and they were getting advice from people that knew how to deal with this amount of money.

“They purchased a beautiful, gigantic house — the most extravagant house I’ve seen so far — and started to research and found the property around the area was fairly inexpensive and that they were on the low end of a mountain. It happened to come with a bison farm and now they’re breeding buffalo and making money. “It’s all very relatable — and, at the same time, it’s not.”

“My Lottery Dream Home” participants come from all parts of the country. “They’re younger, they’re older,” Bromstad says of his TV clients. “We had a gentleman who won $4 million who was in his late-20s and wanted to be a landlord. Older couples are frequently looking for a retirement home for the rest of their days. It really runs the gamut.”

And, Bromstad says, people featured on the show have come to rely on his opinions. “I’m definitely a counselor for some of them,” he says. “I do renovations and flip homes and I’m an interior designer and I have ideas of how to make a house a home by tearing down walls.”