Flipping the script
Celebrity interior designer and Bravo-lebrity JEFF LEWIS on his rise to reality TV stardom
Jeff Lewis never meant to be famous.
“I went through my whole life trying to figure out what my talents were,” he says. “And it ’s still very hard for me to articulate what I do.”
Allow us: The LA native, 46, heads a rapidly-growing lifestyle brand that encompasses his own reality show on Bravo, “Flipping Out”; a house flipping and design consulting business; a paint line for The Home Depot; a toothbrush line with Johnson & Johnson’s REACH by Design brand; and, most recently, a partnership with Chicago-based furniture company Walter E. Smithe Furniture + Design, for which he curated vignettes for its 11 showrooms.
Though he’s now known as America’s most notorious home flipper, Lewis fell into the career more by accident than by design.
“I wasn’t necessarily trained to design. I took — literally — one interior design class in my college career.” Instead, Lewis studied pre-law at the University of Southern California and Chapman University, which worked out in his favor when it comes to his business savvy. “I’ll meet [interior designers] and I’ll think, ‘God, you should be making a lot more money because you’re very good at what you do.’ But they don’t have the business sense,” he says. “So I think that background helped
me [make this] lucrative.”
“I think the show is a pretty true portrayal of who I am. I always say, every time I looked like a jerk, I [being] a jerk.”
After landing a few oddball jobs in his 20s — including working for a mortgage broker, a loan officer and music licensing and entertainment companies — Lewis met a house flipper who changed his fate. “This guy was doing something different — he was creating homes where you’d walk in and it would just tug at all your emotional senses,” Lewis says. “He was furnishing them, installing window coverings, doing wallpaper, light fixtures, landscaping. You walked in and you wanted to buy everything there.” After a year under his mentorship, Lewis bought his first house to flip in LA.
He was hooked — but after nine years of flipping, the housing bubble burst, forcing Lewis to rethink his business strategy. “What I realized after the market crashed was that I can’t have all my eggs in one basket, because when the market dried up, so did my money,” he says. Lewis then took on more client-based projects, tapping into the ultimate California goldmine: the world of A-List celebrities (among his clients, Megan Fox and Leah Remini).
Then, in 2007 — in the throes of the recession — Lewis was hit with an offer that would catapult him into the reality TV zeitgeist: his own show on Bravo. The docu-style “Flipping Out” series — now filming its ninth season — follows Lewis and his skilled yet eccentric team: longtime friend and executive assistant Jenni Pulos, head of business affairs and boyfriend Gage Edward and housekeeper Zoila Chavez.
Still, wise words from his friend and Bravo producer Andy Cohen kept his expectations for the show humble. “Andy was very realistic in saying, ‘ These shows only last two or three seasons. Some opportunities are going to come your way and [you should] take advantage of them,’ ” Lewis says. “But here we are, going into season nine.”
Between Chavez and Edward’s name-calling tiffs and Lewis’ practical jokes on his interns, it ’s indisputable: “Flipping Out” is great TV. And it ’s created a colorful, larger-than-life persona for Lewis as an obsessive-compulsive, quick-witted and often short-tempered perfectionist. “I think the show is a pretty true portrayal of who I am,” he admits. “I always say, every time I looked like a jerk, I was [being] a jerk.”
Maybe it ’s because Lewis still can’t believe how much exposure he has gotten from the show, but he makes sure to keep his feet firmly on the ground. “I just feel like I’m a very real guy [who] happens to have some notoriety,” he says. “Ultimately, what I have is my business. That’s all I have. There [are] a lot of Bravo-lebrities [who] think this is going to last forever, and some of them have even given up their day jobs — I think that’s scary. I never lost sight of my priorities. … At the end of the day, I can’t believe I’m actually getting paid to do this.”