Top Design Look with a Trading Spaces Feel
Top Design Look with a Trading Spaces Feel by Roxanne McDonald
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Episode 4 has the remaining eight scouring sale bins at garage sales for their college student clients. |
Maybe interior design novices typically root through used stuff for kitschy or eclectic. Maybe $500 is a realistic amount of money for a college dorm room or rental re-do. Maybe Top Design creators thought of it all on their own.
Or maybe Trading Spaces set a good precedent and the people who set up the Top Design decided it would truly be a “challenge”.
Whatever. I just couldn’t get the reality show that pioneered the let’s turn other people’s outside trash into our inside treasures out of my mind as Ryan resentfully rooted and Felicia foolishly floundered.
Yep. Ryan, whom I think is one of the best minds in the line-up, is getting even pissier, all the while creating these amazing pieces and sets that they just, he moans, “don’t get.”Felicia gets so fixated on frumpy additions to otherwise clean and classy rooms she designs that her aim shoots and misses the shabby chic look and lands on dead granny land.
Then there’s the contestant who takes every challenge, every command as a most serious opportunity to experiment in the most intelligent and unique of ways and to do so with a friendly humility that elicits a giggle from the garage sale owner and a look of approval from the judges:
Goil (as in gargoyle, he reminds everyone he meets) does it again with a one-of-a-kind concept—a college space that has chairs that ride along ledges, their front legs standard length but their back legs sawed off to rest atop the built-in bed and around the multi-use table. The only thing that keeps him from being Top Designer this week is his recessed mattress in that built-in bed, which one judge (I can’t recall which) notes would be a shin-bruiser.
There’s also the designer I have pegged as one who will be standing at the finale: Erik. This week he successfully keeps to the ridiculous budget and meets his client’s needs/desires for industrial/contempo design. His steel or aluminum and clean lines make for a smart set.
But there is also the surprise success this week: though she brings in the client-requested orange and though she uses that sometimes-hideous Exorcist green, she has successfully made use of space, delivered balance, and used the 500 bucks well. Brava, Carisa, for your first Bravo Trading Spaces…I mean Top Design…win.
*Addendum: Just read on Todd Oldham’s blog how it was his idea to do the garage sale challenge, as he was looking to go outside the “safety net of good choices and fine taste that the Pacific Design Center offer[s]”.
Hey, that makes sense, especially for creative minds and even for those of us who have by default decorated our homes in chabby chic–by way of garage sales and flea markets–for lack of “finer” resources…or cash.
Still a most compelling show.
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