A winking combination
It’s all in the eyes for the newest Designer Guys
It’s
the wink that’s got the town
talking.
Last week, when a bunch of new guys with glue guns hit the tube — an all-fresh batch of Designer Guys on House and Garden Television — a certain eyedance made it clear exactly which team we were watching.
There was Matt Davis, one of the fluffing hipsters chosen to inherit the hosting job on the popular franchise show, showing a certain lovely her new bathroom shower in the very first episode. There she was, wowing about the design, going ga-ga over the size of it, and wondering out loud, “How many people here?”
It was then that Matt winked to one of his fellow fluffers, Allen Chan, about her implied invitation. Inadvertently — or not — Matt also winked to everybody in TV- land.
At the launch party held last Tuesday on the night of the show’s premiere — designed, indeed, by the new
Designer Guys — the wink certainly tested well. It even got some cheers. The wink was so good, I’m surprised it doesn’t have its own agent and three-movie production deal by now.
Presuming any knee-jerk assumptions you may have made that these three well- dressed boys who just happen to have a certain flair for design are Friends of Elton John, that wink sure blasted away that idea. And since that night, the “I’m just metro, not gay” wink has become not only the stuff of conversation, but analyzed like a semiotics assignment.
The other night at a party, I happened to run into the three of them ( travelling together the way they often do — sort of like a male answer to Cameron, Lucy and Drew). “What’s with the wink?” I asked them, teasing them a bit.
“I don’t think there are any more winks for the rest of the season,” replied Anwar Mukhayesh, the alpha- Designer Guy.
“It wasn’t planned,” Matt told me, sheepishly. can fit in
The sun, I recall, was winking rather madly on the day some months back when I set out with these guys for a get-to-know road trip. ( Well, maybe driving to the Old Mill in Etobicoke, Ont., doesn’t really count as a road trip, but it’s not exactly in the vicinity of any of the downtown spots where these urban groovers typically hang.) Anwar, Allen and Matt — who have “day jobs” working at their rather busy firm, Precipice Studios — have been on the social scene for a while, but it was obvious that things were about to change dramatically.
In Toronto’s game of social snakes-and-ladders, they’re moving up. They have buzz. They’re on “the lists.” And, indeed, they have the cars to show it. Confident about their ability to make the show go big, after choosing them from out of several hundred candidates from across Canada, HGTV arranged for them to get new BMWs. ( Which, of course, get plenty of play on the show.)
“It’s a nice perk,” Allen admitted, when I proposed that they pose for pictures around one of the cars.
“Lay across the windshield,” Anwar suggested to Matt at one point. ( He may have winked when he said this, but I can’t remember.) Matt clearly wasn’t biting.
Arcade Fire, the cool-kids’ fave Canadian band, was playing as we took the shots — a little detail that perhaps sums up the younger, edgier vibe that these Designer Guys
are going for. (The old Designer Guys, who abandoned the show — along with their name — for another network, would probably be playing Donna Summer right about now.)
“ We have good juxtapositions on the show,” Anwar, the scarfwearing, super- chic Designer Guy whose family owns the Toronto restaurant Kensington Kitchen, told me me later over lunch. “Everything from the penthouse of the new Cosmopolitan Hotel to the Rogers box at SkyDome to a two- year- old’s bedroom.”
“ This is going to allow us to reach a lot of people,” Matt, the somewhat shyer, Ben Shermanwearing Designer Guy, who grew up on a farm, added a little later. “ But I think we’re ready for it. We know our stuff.”
“ We wanted to bring a more urban feel to the show,” Allen, the really smart one who did a master’s at Columbia and has the slight Beatle hair, explained. “ Make it slicker.”
They talked over each other that day, like good friends do, talking a good game of architecture, landscaping, furniture, even eco-design. And the women of Canada, I couldn’t help thinking, just got themselves a new boy band.