34 ArchitectureBoston - Boston Society of Architects

I SAW
IT ON
HGTV
3 4 ArchitectureBoston
The most influential source of popular design
education is not a school but a television network.
by James McCown
It started a few years ago: Residential architects
noticed that clients were referring to products and
design concepts that they had seen on a cable television
show. HGTV is generally thought of as a “network
about decorating,” but that might be too facile a way
to describe this highly successful broadcast format. It’s
all real estate, all the time at HGTV, formally known
as Home & Garden Television. If we are a society
obsessed with residential real estate, then HGTV is
our virtual national campfire, a place to gather round
and be voyeurs of other people’s private abodes. We
are observers as they engage in the endless search for
bigger, better, and more elaborate places to call home.
HGTV goes beyond mere decorating to expand
the notion of what decorating and design are. In
HGTV’s treatment, design becomes refracted and
given completely new cultural grounding. The notion
of interior design as a genteel, relatively upper-class
pursuit is quickly blown out of the water. Here, design
is democratized and diverse. Ladies who lunch in
Chanel suits are replaced with machismo men with
tattoos and women who are not afraid to get tough to
get what they want.
Take one of HGTV’s shows, The Antonio Treatment.
Based in LA, star Antonio Ballatore refers to himself
as “not your average designer” — and he’s not kidding.
He appears more like a repo man than the aristocratic
image of the Back Bay or Upper East Side decorator.
“It’s about going slick or going home,” Ballatore says
of his design approach. (In a recent episode, he took a
client’s existing colorful bedroom and gave it a rusticcave treatment, complete with thousands of small wooden
blocks in various lengths that formed a headboard
reminiscent of stalactite.) Ballatore is a design celebrity, not
because he has been recognized through the awards and
publications that usually anoint the design profession’s
elite, but because he has won the network’s popular
Design Star competition. Following a formula straight
out of America’s Next Top Model and American Idol, a
dozen or so designers compete for a chance of starring in
their own show; divas and drama queens — male and
female — abound. This is design as entertainment.
This is also design as media conglomerate. HGTV’s
roots may go back to the venerable This Old House,
started as a shoestring public television series 32 years
ago on Boston’s WGBH and now something of a
conglomerate of its own, having launched spin-off
programs and a magazine and now owned by Time Inc.
HGTV formally launched in 1994 and is now
owned by Scripps Networks Interactive. It reaches
a staggering 99 million households in the United
States and is one of cable’s top-rated networks; its
website, HGTV.com, is the leading home-and-garden
site, attracting an average of 4 million unique visitors
per month. A new site, HGTVremodels.com, was recently
launched, and a new publication, HGTV Magazine,
hit the newsstands in October. Scripps Networks
Interactive’s lifestyle empire is also vast — it owns and
operates Food Network, DIY Network, Great American
Country, Travel Channel, and Cooking Channel
(formerly Fine Living). Scripps Networks Interactive
posted second-quarter 2011 revenues of $534 million,
up 12 percent from the prior year. So much for suffering
in the recession and housing bust.
The Design Star participants are in residence at a loft
in Manhattan when their “mentor,” David Bromstad
(winner of the first season), enters with great pomp
and announces that the teams are headed to Spring
Lake, New Jersey, to redesign a bed-and-breakfast.
“Let’s go, designers!” Bromstad commands, as they
pile into a van and head west.
It’s at this point that a viewer of HGTV begins to
realize the network’s creative modus operandi. It’s all
about repetition. After a program breaks for a brief
commercial, which is often, we are put back in the
scene and given a recapitulation; the pacing is two steps
forward and one step back, but it accommodates casual
viewing and short attention spans.
We also realize how much “creative merchandising”
is being done between the network and sponsors — Shaw Carpets and Sherwin Williams, for example, have
their own HGTV brands. You can “shop” a program to
buy featured products, and at least one of the stars,
Candice Olson, has launched her own product line,
including upholstered furniture, fabrics, wallpaper,
lighting, and bedding. There’s an “HGTV Green
Mattress” by Serta and even a proprietary line of software
allowing viewers to design their spaces themselves.
Winter 2011 3 5
James McCown is a
design and culture
writer in Somerville,
Massachusetts. OPPOSITE AND THIS PAGE All images courtesy
HGTV.
(although they seem to age out in the mid-40s).
Their circumstances and motivations are varied and
sometimes comical — does a young couple really want
to buy a vacation home in Barbados with in-laws from
both sides?
House Hunters International feeds not just our
curiosity about others but also our natural wanderlust.
Who doesn’t dream of chucking it all and moving to
some exotic locale? And HHI shows how people of
relatively ordinary means can actually afford places
like seaside villas in Nicaragua and elegant apartments
in Buenos Aires. This is voyeurism to an extreme, as
we follow the chosen couple through their rounds,
contemplate the wisdom of their decision to move and
bet on the probable longevity of their relationship, and
then imagine ourselves making the choice along with
them: “No, pick the stucco townhouse, not the brick
stand-alone!”
For all the frivolous air of many of the programs, some
of them do teach basic lessons in design. The comments
of Design Star’s design panel are often wise and valid;
the imperative of form and function working together is
repeated constantly. Before-and-after shots underscore
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But despite the repetition, despite the obvious
commercialism, we stick with it all because the
programs deploy an age-old storyteller’s technique — the narrative based on suspense: Which house will
they choose? Who will get voted off the show? What
will it look like? Will they sell the house?
HGTV succeeds because it is about people — perhaps
more than it is about design and real estate. Programs
are built around strong personalities who often
challenge our assumptions, as in the case of Ballatore
or Kimberly Lacy, a project manager on Curb Appeal:
On the Block. Lacy is a sassy, self-confident AfricanAmerican woman who is not afraid to take on
contractors or clients. “There’s a lot of testosterone
around here,” she intones, surrounded by male
colleagues at a building site.
But it’s the client/participants who capture our
voyeuristic interest as we peer into their personal
lives and pass judgment on their choices. Just
as HGTV draws from a wide pool of talent for
Design Star — industrial designers, shop owners, and
antiques dealers in addition to interior designers
and the rare architect — featured couples and families
represent a broad demographic mix-and-match
the transformative power of visual ideas.
But there are other assumptions that are
unquestioned, namely that everything needs to
be redesigned. Yes, that’s the point of the shows,
but it would be refreshing — and environmentally
responsible — to occasionally hear “we only need to
do minimal intervention in these rooms.” It is as if
the hegemony of granite countertops and stainlesssteel appliances is now almost universal. What’s
actually wrong with the white appliances and Formica
countertops? True design creativity could find ways
to freshen up spaces without the cost and waste of
completely gutting, as if updating Thoreau’s dictum of
“simplify, simplify” into “reuse, reuse.”
For HGTV, design is more than design. The network
seems intent on expanding the notion of the human
habitat to virtually every sphere of our lives. This, of
course, is a major theme in 20th-century design;
Le Corbusier’s “machine to live in” was meant to
fundamentally transform the way in which people
of all classes lived. But what’s especially noticeable
throughout HGTV is how rarely “high design” comes
into play — there’s hardly a reference to Mies van der
Rohe, Marcel Breuer, or any of the rest of the Modernist
pantheon, let alone well-known current practitioners.
Unsurprisingly absent are the well-known academics
who talk about “edge conditions” and “aesthetics and
design that transgress Middle American morality.”
But let’s not forget that TV is a fiction: Everything
is accomplished quickly. Experts are unchallenged.
Homeowners are always grateful. Collaboration is
unknown and unnecessary. And architects are nearly
invisible (which some might argue is not a fiction) — a
fact that should draw the attention of the profession
both as an opportunity and as an omen.
Is it a stretch to compare this frothy entertainment
with the design profession’s international “starchitect”
culture? Yes and no — the David Bromstads revel
in their fame and fabulousness, while the Frank
Gehrys and Zaha Hadids feign indifference at all the
attention they receive. Both feed our endless desire
for celebrity.
It all seems to highlight the primacy of design as an
intensely personal human endeavor. Who better to do this
than HGTV, which has embraced design with gusto — and
in the process made it possible for us to observe and
critique the redecoration of a Prague apartment while
munching popcorn at 2 o’clock in the morning. n
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