media

New York Times News Service
1.31.02

Decorating to Stir Passions

by Julie Salamon


A woman named Pam confronts her newly redecorated living room for the first time. Staring at her fireplace, whose bricks have been concealed behind a sleekly painted structure, her eyes well with tears. She whispers, "I'm going to have to leave the room."

After she walks out, her husband shakes his head. "She's not happy," he mutters. "Boy, she's not happy." Her off-camera sobs reverberate.

Sad, perhaps, for Pam and her husband, but pay dirt for fans of "Trading Spaces," the home improvement show that has become a cable cult phenomenon like Food Network's "Iron Chef" and Comedy Central's "Battlebots" - but without the delightfully peculiar pageantry of those shows. "Trading Spaces" couldn't be plainer, with its home-movie production values and over-eager participants. The premise: neighbors swap houses for 48 hours and redo a room in each others' houses with the help of a decorator and a $1,000 budget provided by the show. The makeovers are often radical, turning white walls crimson or sawing legs off coffee tables; but the drama is usually subtle, involving lots of strained cheerfulness and some grumpiness and grimaces - rarely tears.

So Pam's breakdown on the Jan. 19 episode was an Olympian moment in this homespun corner of reality television. "Oh my God, wasn't that incredible?" said Walter Curley, a 35-year-old record store employee in Albany, N.Y. "When my boss Sharon brought up the crying episode, we spent the next hour ignoring customers and talking about it."

These are the prosaic pleasures that make for hits in the cable universe. "Trading Spaces" is the top-rated program on TLC, formerly known as the Learning Channel, with shows like "Archaeology" and "Great Books" (which is still shown). Now, with the anonymous corporate name of TLC, the channel's slogan is "life unscripted" - meaning life distilled into dramatic, edited portions. The channel's self-described "comfort" lineup includes "A Wedding Story," "A Baby Story," "A Makeover Story" and "A Dating Story." What you could call its "discomfort" lineup includes "Maternity Ward" and "Trauma: Life in the ER." (both produced by New York Times Television).

Cooking shows and fixit shows can no longer merely instruct - they must entertain. "Trading Spaces" is "This Old House" as game show and soap opera (and a knock-off of "Changing Rooms," a hugely popular British show that can be seen in the United States on the BBC America cable network). Since "Trading Spaces" began 17 months ago, the hourlong show has captivated surprising numbers of people - and 6 million take a look each week - across demographic boundaries, though a personal survey indicates that it seems to be a special weakness of teen-age girls, gay men, compulsive re-arrangers and people who like to watch "Friends." (The categories can overlap.)

That broad appeal is why "Trading Spaces" now seems to be on television almost all the time - including Saturday evenings at 8, where it has become TLC's prime-time jewel. Initially scheduled as afternoon filler in September 2000, the show pulled such strong ratings that weekend slots were added. By last March, "Trading Spaces" was running every afternoon and at midday on weekends.

Periodically, TLC puts on a "Trading Spaces" marathon, hours of back-to-back decorating, bickering and worrying. "Trading Spaces" is deliberately unpretentious, with a predictable routine and a regular cast of distinctive characters - including Ty and Amy, the sexy male and female carpenters whose tool belts tug suggestively on their low-slung jeans.

There is a perky host, Paige Davis, who wanders between houses exclaiming enthusiastically - but who also has a wild glint in her eyes that suggests she might go off the deep end at any minute. Above all, there are the decorators, imposing their idiosyncratic visions on the homeowner-contestants, who do most of the grunt work - painting, scraping, sewing, stripping and schlepping. The homeowners also offer advice, most of which is ignored by the decorators.

The homeowners chosen to appear on "Trading Spaces," while selected from all parts of the United States, tend to be reluctant decorators, judging from the blandness of the spaces about to be traded. Though the show has been taped in almost 30 cities, the houses frequently seem interchangeable, situated in faceless suburban developments because it's less expensive to park production trucks there.

So the show has a fascinating subtext, a sneaky undermining of the generic architecture that's been spawned by America's sprawl. "You can be in a city 1,000 miles from the city you were just in and it's the same strip mall, and the same houses with the same colors, wall texture and carpeting," said Genevieve Gorder, one of the show's resident decorators (the bubbly one). The homeowners are remarkably the same as well, most of them white, middle-class and conventional.

Gorder has a degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she lives, though she grew up in Minneapolis, daughter of habitual remodelers. "The show gives me the chance to introduce personality into an oatmeal world," she said. One of her favorite personality injections was a moss-covered bedroom she designed in San Diego. "Most homeowners are pretty anti-change; especially in these development houses, change is considered, like, bad," said Gorder. "My job is to convince them that what we're doing is interesting."

Each of the show's designers has a particular appeal to very different kinds of viewers. The 27-year-old Gorder, for example, is considered free and fun, as a decorator and a personality. "I don't know if you've noticed, but you will never see her with her shoes on," said Ken Tear approvingly. Tear, a human resources director for the State University of New York, says he has seen every episode of the show at least 10 times.

"It's pretty embarrassing, especially when I found out how popular it is with teen-age girls," he said ruefully.

Rose Paine, a 13-year-old from Maine, doesn't mind that middle-aged men share her passion for "Trading Spaces." She'd like her father, a custom carpenter, to watch it, so he'll finally get around to building her the new room she's been promised. What's the big deal, since it takes only 48 hours to completely redo a room? (Of course, there are no follow-up visits, to see how the shelving has held.)

Paine doesn't have a favorite decorator, but she likes Frank Bielec, an avuncular man from Texas who specializes in cozy touches like slipcovers and benches and the color pumpkin, and uses folksy expressions like "We have been scootin' our boot."

During the 48 hours of renovating, neither team can see the other's handiwork until the very end. That's the "reveal," the climactic moment when the neighbors see what they've done to one another's rooms. Will the husband like the Scrabble motif that's been threaded through his basement hangout? What about that eggplant wall? Most of them want desperately to be polite, even as you can see them figuring out how to undo the damage, and some are genuinely excited. Either way, the most common response is simply "Oh my God" and a squeal.

But occasionally there's a Pam. Her thwarted expectations were both poignant and laughable, as she ripped through the show's veil of restraint with her palpable (and audible) disappointment. "I don't even know where to start," said her husband, trying to explain what was wrong. "It's not remotely us."

With that he touches on a significant aspect of the show's fascination.

People may think they would like to be Cinderellas, but how much transformation do they really want? It's one thing to admire strangely patterned walls and tables made out of garbage cans; it's another to live with them. Or maybe it's simply asking too much of a decorator to match an unarticulated yearning. "The whole thing brings up such an emotional response," said Margie Weintraub, a decorator from St. Louis and a "Trading Spaces" addict. "They may have had something else in mind that they weren't able to describe and that's when it gets complicated."

But Douglas Wilson, the "Trading Spaces" designer whose starkly muscular living room brought Pam to tears, has no sympathy with homeowner angst. On the crying episode, he addressed Pam's desire not to have her fireplace painted. "I can understand being hesitant, but that's part of being on the show," he said. "You've got to let go." But if it were as easy as that, who would watch?


Transcript appears courtesy of The New York Times News Service, copyright 2002© All Rights Reserved