It’s all in the family for HGTV’s ‘Property Brothers’
Working with family can be a blessing or a curse. For Jonathan and Drew Scott of HGTV’s Wednesday home improvement series “Property Brothers,” it’s mostly the former.
But that is not to say there aren’t disagreements.
“If you’re watching ... any of the shows, if we disagree on something, we still voice it,” Drew Scott admitted to a recent gathering of journalists in Beverly Hills, Calif., “We call it our no-BS policy. Just if we have different opinions or someone’s in a mood, we just get it out. We deal with it and we move on. We know that both of us have good ideas and ... there’s no one way to design a space. There are multiple ways you could. So we’ll bring our ideas.
“We always think function for a family,” he continues. “Pretty is important, but so is function. And at the end of the day, we usually come up with an idea together that’s better.”
Since 2011, the 40-year-old identical twins and Vancouver natives have been two of HGTV’s cornerstone stars, helping families find and renovate homes – Drew on the finding and negotiating side and Jonathan with the design and construction work. So successful has been the series that it’s become its own franchise, branching out into the spinoffs “Property Brothers: Buying and Selling” (2012), “Brother vs. Brother” (2013) and “At Home” (2014).
Starring in those series, plus running a production company and a real estate business might seem like a lot to have on one’s plate, but neither brother admits to being stressed. The fact is, they enjoy what they do, helping families get into homes, and that comes through on camera.
They also like meeting fans, hearing what they have to say and even listening to suggestions. In fact one show, says Jonathan, came as a result of fan encounters.
“When we created the show ‘Brother vs. Brother,’ ” he recalls, “it came out of the fact that Drew would get so pissed off when ... fans would walk up and be like, ‘Oh, you’re the one who does no work’ to Drew all the time. Like, ‘Jonathan does all the work!’ He got so annoyed at that that we created the show so that he got to get into his own design, his own construction.”