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Bravo gave them $12,500 cash, a furniture/accessory memo budget of $150K at the Pacific Design Center, the assistance and wisdom of their favorite carpenter plus the opportunity to hire more help, and two full months with which to design a loft for the client they should know best: themselves.
Kelly, Jonathan, our superchic guest judge Trudie Styler, and I were totally awestruck by what they created.
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The Santa Fe Lofts are located in downtown LA, a place I’ve visited only while shopping the nearby wholesale flower market for a photo shoot. It’s an urban neighborhood in transition, and the Santa Fe apartments are a terrific opportunity to live in a residential building that has a gutsy, industrial feel and walls of amazing windows. The producers took us to an empty loft on another floor...]]>
How could I not love this week’s challenge?
The designers were given three days and the choice of ten Elle Decor covers to use as inspiration for a luxurious room -- all on the relatively small $7,500 shopping budget. As Andrea, Carisa, and Matt are all seriously talented and come to the competition with diverse sensibilities and experience, I was fascinated to see which covers they selected and how they approached their projects.
Here’s some background: The producers asked me to send them Elle Decor covers from the past three years and they narrowed them down to ones that suited their purpose. Cover images can be an enigma: many rooms are photogenic, but not all will make a strong cover, and the cover and its coverlines are truly what sell the magazine on the newsstand. I wish there were a foolproof formula for creating terrific covers each and every month, but sadly there’s...]]>
A fun, interesting challenge and an extra day to work -- what more could a Top Design contestant possibly ever ask for?
Okay, I'm kidding.
The PDC pods served well as a blank canvas on which to create an idyllic, high-end suite focused on “the needs of today’s travelers,” and the rooms that Andrea, Carisa, Goil, and Matt designed were diverse, polished, and posh. Linda O’Keeffe, the Design + Architecture Director at Metropolitan Home magazine -- Elle Decor's sister publication -- served as our insightful guest judge, and Jonathan, Kelly, and I were truly impressed by the contestants’ efforts.
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Nearly everyone can relate to this challenge -- we all hold hotel rooms up to a high standard of comfort, functionality, and style.
Even sweet Goil (who last week admitted that he rarely tried any restaurant more adventurous than his local noodle...]]>
As editor-in-chief of Elle Decor, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting an incredibly disparate group of fascinating people -- fashion designers, architects, artists, athletes, politicians, actors, and chefs. I’m not easily intimidated, but our guest judge, Tom Colicchio, scared the heck out of me.
He has piercing blue eyes, a strong voice, and a focus that is gripping. If you think he’s intense on "Top Chef," he’s even more so in person. And if he affected me in this way, I can only imagine how the contestants felt.
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This week’s challenge was to create a private dining room keeping in mind Chef Colicchio’s personal tastes. He requested a space that is eclectic yet modern and clean, he likes Arts and Crafts style and mid-century design, and he asked for nature motifs and a mix of materials -- especially stone and wood. Most importantly, the room must be luxurious.
Now, don’t even think of complaining about the subject of this week’s challenge, because interior designers are often commissioned to produce events. Such projects require both enormous creativity and attention to detail and the result can have a long-lasting impact. Even decades later, people are still talking about Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White ball in honor of Katherine Graham, the launch party for Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium scent, and the 70th birthday bash that Malcolm Forbes threw for himself in Morocco. These events were memorable for their guest lists, but also because of the environment and ambience their party designers conjured.
What goes into a terrific party? A lot—including the overall theme, decor, music, food, drink, and flowers. This week, the remaining six contestants were divided into two teams of three and asked to produce a party to celebrate the launch of Bacardi Limon. They had little time, a...]]>
Let’s be honest: This week’s challenge is insanely demanding. But it’s a perfect project for anyone who wants to be a designer because it focuses on the least glamorous aspect of the profession—personal service. None of the contestants seem eager to work on the Bells' garage, and with good reason; it was beyond scary.
A “before” picture was flashed in front of Jonathan, Kelly, guest judge Mark Rios, and me for only a second, so it wasn’t until I saw the show that I realized how much had to be accomplished in so short a time frame. With all due respect, the Bells didn’t need the "Top Design" team, they need a HazMat house call.
The family lives in a lovely Paul Revere Williams-designed house on a treelined street; such homes are prized in the L.A. real estate market because of their classic details and gracious scale. Isaac Bell said...]]>
Donna asks:
"You judges have a tough job and I commend you for that. The question is ... can you get the "Top Design" set designers to give you some functional, comfortable chairs?"
I think the White Room set (designed by last week’s guest judge Joe Stewart) is glamorous, but I’ll admit that the stools are not the most comfortable -- or easy to slide off of gracefully when we leave to review the projects. (I used to dread when Jonathan would say, "Let’s go see what they’ve done, shall we?")
Peter asks:
"How is your toe?"
My toe is fine, thank you, although it wasn’t that first day. I shamelessly brought my four-inch stiletto to the hospital the morning it happened and begged the...]]>
Would you like a behind-the-scenes look at Top Design’s fourth episode? First of all, the judging was taped on a Sunday evening at the same time as a boisterous bar mitzvah was going on one floor below at Wolfgang Puck’s WP restaurant at the Pacific Design Center. The music was pounding, we couldn’t hear ourselves think, and at one point production was shut down because the band’s rendition of "It’s Raining Men" was drowning out anything going on in the White Room.
It was beastly hot, as the air-conditioning had to be turned off whenever the cameras were rolling, and our stylish-but-stiff "Dating Game" barstools seemed more unforgiving than usual. (Kelly and I had microphone packs attached inside the backs of our dresses and we had to either sit ramrod straight or we found ourselves slumping over to avoid the discomfort.)
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There were eight contestants’ design...]]>
Ryan was asked to design for a client that he assumed to be a 50-year-old woman with a cat. It seems that he changed his scheme only slightly when he learned that Madison was a 10-year-old girl, and the judges agreed that he focused too much on the cat instead of the client. So please feel free to design a room around a cat, just don’t expect to win a fancy SUV, a four-page feature in a national magazine, and $100,000 for doing it. Got...]]>
When I watched Episode 2 on DVD, I was as surprised as you might have been by John’s disclosure that he was HIV-positive and struggling with the after-effects of a massive dose of testosterone. It was clearly distressing for all of the contestants, however Jonathan, Kelly, and I didn’t know what had taken place.
Every week, just like you, I’m learning what happened day-by-day. The judges see only what occurs in the White Room and as we walk through the finished product -- we are clueless as to snafus that take place during construction or any behind-the-scenes drama. (In the White Room, Michael tried to justify some snarky moments more than a few times by shouting “Just look at the footage!” But the backstory is irrelevant, what’s key is who succeeds at each particular challenge.)
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John’s dismissal was not because of his cantankerous personality or constant excuse-making....]]>
