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Ladies and gentlemen, we have our Top Designer! Congratulations to Mr. Matt, to Carisa, and all of the gifted designers and carpenters whose talent and hard work helped craft a wonderful first season of Top Design!
Not to suggest that Matt and Carisa felt unrushed, but considering the usual time allotment given, the full two months they were afforded for the final challenge must have felt like gold falling from the sky.
Time. Is. Everything. Time allows for reflection and the flexibility to change your mind.
Returning to Los Angeles having done their due diligence, I felt both Santa Fe lofts flourished under the design thumbs of Matt and Carisa.
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Let’s start with Carisa. Though a bit of a fit-thrower, an expressive personality does often go hand-in-hand with the creative spirit. Polish and control will come with experience -- look how Carisa’s confidence has...]]>
To create a dreamy living room and be judged on the overall design, execution, and whether or not you captured the essence of an Elle Décor cover on practically zero money? Ouch and double ouch.
Rising to a new level of resourcefulness, Andrea, Carisa, and Matt were a bit more stressed than usual this week.
The killer time-constraints only go to prove how amazing our three remaining designers are. It’s getting down to the nitty-gritty, and in case no one has noticed, a toll has been taken on our stalwart contestants. Poor Matt lost 17 pounds during the course of the competition; 17 pounds! Who knew stress diets were so effective?
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Matt contended with a new carpenter/relationship & confessed a distracting crush on Margaret. Carisa grappled with her opinionated carpenter and gave the eye-rolling a real work over. Andrea wrestled with furniture & color indecision...]]>
“If you know exactly what you are going to do, what is the point of doing it?”
-- Pablo Picasso
For the designer presented with a challenge you are not immediately comfortable with, Picasso’s quote encourages us to take heart. Few designers are lucky enough to receive those mythical flashes of inspiration where an idea appears whole in your mind. This means your job is to simply recreate that flash of inspiration as faithfully as possible. The rest of us may have to do what I usually do, start layering out the job, one layer at a time.
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Matt, whose chic interpretation of water won this week’s Top Design, is a self-professed “floor snob.” His chic interpretation of water...]]>
Now all the contestants fit into one car.
Andrea, Carisa, Goil, Matt, and Michael’s tasty task this week was to create a Chef’s Table adjacent to the kitchen of a fine restaurant. Our celebrity client and guest judge was hoping for more than a fantastic gastronomic experience for his future guests; he wants to engage all five senses.
Did anyone notice how Andrea was glowing when Todd visited her during the design phase? It was certainly a harbinger of things to come. When you love what you do, it shines through, and not only in Andrea’s rich textural room that you simultaneously felt impressed by and yet comfortable with.
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Carisa’s knowledge of arts and crafts allowed her to hit the sketchpad running. Having a well-rounded base of knowledge will always help you. You never know what situation you might stumble upon and a good designer...]]>
Although I think we can all agree that the key ingredients to any successful party include fun friends, yummy food, tasty drinks, great music, and a neat location, this may not necessarily occur to the interior designer doubling as a party planner. While many party planners double as interior designers for a night or weekend extravaganza, few interior designers are invited to venture into party planning.
While this week’s challenge of designing a crisp party had to be more enjoyable than redesigning last week’s filthy garage -- it was important in that it forced many of the contestants to stretch their creative ingenuity in an altogether new direction.
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Think of building a wall around your field of knowledge. When you are learning to think in new ways it adds confidence and expands your horizons. Thus, the wall you build extends far and wide. When you are...]]>
One of the more unexpected facets of being an Interior Designer For Hire is the ability to be an amazing listener. Student letters often ask that I name the “most valuable thing I’ve learned” over the years, and being an amazing listener is it.
Once you have the client’s information, your job is to make their desires flourish in ways they never expected. It’s about meeting the need, making it your own, and taking it to a new level. This was difficult to demonstrate in this week’s challenge, however. Talk about paying your dues. Oh lord, this was it.
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Thus far, the overall task of redesigning the garage definitely takes the prize for most tedious: sifting through the discombobulating needs of a disorganized family, excavating their mess, and then creating an altogether new vision for… a garage! Ho-hum.
Like Ryan, I might not have taken this...]]>
Monica wrote:
Where do shop? Because every week your clothes are obviously carefully chosen.
I never limit myself and try to shop everywhere. The Internet, catalogs, department stores, boutiques, and of course, vintage clothing stores.
Phyllis wants to know:
You stuck up for Ryan in the last episode for "having a point of view" versus a "successful room." Can you tell us more about what you mean?
Most designers improve over time, and I feel it is so much harder to be creative and original than to create an ugly or boring room. Ryan's room was highly original.
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QueenLady asks:
Why don't we see you guys asking the designers questions inside their...]]>
I get shivers when I remember some of the college & post-college pads I designed and made my own. I remember finding a rug at a vintage store and using it as a wall hanging. The rug’s graphics were amazing, plus I lived in a basement so it really helped with acoustics. I love taking what you find and re-imagining it into something altogether new...
...which brings us to a central point regarding this week’s episode: It’s not always where you buy, it’s what you buy.
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Shopping usually involves knowing you’re going to Rodeo Drive for hats & handbags, to Storyopolis for children’s books, or to the nearest Whole Foods for organic food. When you go garage saling or shopping at a flea market, the opposite is true. Everything you could possibly find will be a surprise.
Andrea was horrified...]]>
Tahiti, Miami, St. Tropez; all destinations that evoke a pulse-pounding mirage of sun, fun, & glamour. While it was great going barefoot and seeing everyone outside, unfortunately, this week’s three cabanas suffered from a crunching time-constraint and a little too much of one main ingredient: sunshine.
Today, people seek refuge from the sun, a primary function of the cabana. As the owner of a collection of parasols that are always ready & available to shield my skin, I couldn’t understand why Team Tahiti blew off the roof, so to speak. This, in spite of their fantasy design, rendered the cabana unfit for occupancy, as far as I was concerned.
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However, Team Miami’s color scheme was a bit iconoclastic for our tastes, and the daring architecture & blah furnishings of Team St. Tropez’s cabana had a discordant dialogue at best. So, ultimately, it was Team Tahiti’s roofless...]]>
This week’s design challenge definitely had its obstacles, which, unfortunately, are not uncommon in the real world of interior design: a less than desirable budget, no initial client meeting, plenty of questions and fewer answers, and ultimately, the design curveball of learning the “clients” were unavailable for their client meetings because they were still in elementary school.
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You have to be prepared to expect the unexpected in almost any profession, interior design being no exception. Design programs are not written in stone (which could be quite chic) and the vertiginous whims of a client are your marching orders.
In addition to a fickle client, value engineering, material selection debacles, scope changes, time frame and fabrication, and even shifts in the global market can affect your job unexpectedly. This...]]>
