Design Star Recap Part One: Joker’s Revenge

Shopping highlights:

• Lucas finds some big sofas for his big ego.
• Kris allows Bex one decision – purchase of a giant glowing match stick.
• Yuki chooses a striped wood floor to go directly on concrete (Holmes would hate this) and provides a vendor some long pauses of product placement.
• Hilari doesn’t feel anyone will be performing séances in the den.  Why not?  Despite this sad fact, she finds a kick-ass sofa I would love to have room for.

Yuki and Stanley are having typical artist quibbles over the design, but seem to be focusing more on the art projects than the overall function/design of the room.  What a good sign!  Yuki stops to tell the painters green, green, purple, purple…

I’m sensing a theme in Yuki’s ‘art’.

Meanwhile in the Great Room, Danielle comes up with a few ideas to cover those towering walls:  picture molding on one side and blown up pictures of the objects on the other.  Good idea, since both objects were pretty fug on their own.  Blow up pictures of fugly objects to make them artistic instead!

Delicious David comes through for a little mentoring of all the designs.  Here are some highlights:

• David approves of the moose head treatment, but warns about having two focal points in the Den.
• He doesn’t warn Bex and Kris about the nasty paint color selection, at least we don’t see this on camera.
• David likes Britany’s 3-D wall effect in Bedroom 1, but warns Michel to have a signature look in the room as well.
• He barely holds in the vomit walking into Yuki and Stanley’s hot mess (and it has barely begun).

So you realize the other contestants will need to be working in this room after you’re kicked off, right?

• The team effort seems to be appreciated in the Great Room, but since Luca spends the first part of the shot sucking up to David — no surprise.
• Team shiny in the bonus room has hit a snag – the alligator hide is actual small hides of alligator.  David provides platitudes and no real advice (ha).

Jordan redesigns the headboards into sections to prevent Miera from learning the specialized skill of sewing straight lines.  Rachel designs a quick coffee table for the carpenters to make.  Bex creates a tall ugly daybed with huge holes drilled on the side to look like ‘stars’.  Good idea, but needs a piece of plastic or frosted glass on the interior to diffuse the light. 

Michel upholsters an ottoman with a shower curtain to get a piece of his design esthetic in the room.  Stanley proves how common his ‘art’ really is by doubling it in size to stretch across the entire window with little/no effort required.  Yuki gives us further proof she is color blind by choosing a huge orange (ORANGE) couch to put in her purple and green room.

Stanley is an artist, people!  Taste and originality are not required.

Danielle is worried about completing all the carpentry projects on time, but Luca is a superstar carpenter (if not designer) so it all gets done.  Just ask him.  Seriously, Luca is an amazing guy who can do any job someone else is not capable of.

Stapling is designing on HGTV; you guys already look like pros!

Hilari makes an unfortunate choice of putting a television in the middle of her ‘molding sculpture’.  I understand the addiction to reality TV (I’m guessing we all do), but many of the other rooms in the house have much bigger televisions in them already.  Why draw attention to the substandard quality of your molding versus Danielle’s design with molding in the great room?

The daybed is as fugly as I feared it would be.

But the 3D Wall looks better than I hoped.

Miera spends her extra time channeling Charlie Brown to create a border in the bedroom.

The collage WAS ugly.  Adding floating frames, torn art paper and spray paint make it a new level of awful.