Million Dollar Decorators: More Important Than AMERICA

Hey Bravo, how long do we have to wait for an episode called “If These Walls Could Talk”??

Well we definitely got more design meat this week, but there was way less Jacqueline, so there’s no such thing as free design meat.

To make up for the absurd lack of photos in last week’s recap, this week is going to be a little photo heavy. I caved and bought the series on iTunes to bring these to you, because Bravo is SO ABOVE hulu and there were too many instances of crazy-face to resist sharing (or maybe just one special crazy face). That’s right I threw a fistful of laundry quarters at Steve Jobs to bring you this screengrab glory, so be grateful. Winky face.

The designers are actually solid underdogs in this episode (except for Mary, she’s a bully. Always.) Their clients are fussy and often plain old rude.

Jeffrey Allan Marks and current boyfriend business partner former-model Ross Something, are headed to La Jolla, a new “international playground for super wealthy” I’ve never been to La Jolla, but that sounds a tad exaggerated.

JAM and Co (including TWO assistants named Demetra… youguys) are wrapping up a three year project, designing a twenty million dollar house, for people who will live there only about one month a year (most of the time they live on their yacht, their SPACE yacht? no just their plain old luxury yacht, yawn)

This week is the “install” which means putting all of the furniture and vases and sconces that they’ve spent THREE YEARS buying, trekking around the globe for the perfect this thing:

So, basically, they’re at the best part of playing The Sims… but in real life, which is an overwhelming logistical nightmare. I have two paintings and it took me SIX MONTHS to decide where to hang them, and another two months to actually put nails in my walls and hang them. This project would be my beach at Normandy.

Designer Nathan (“just jack”) is also headed south of LA to Laguna Beach (yes, the very same). He’s helping a client/”friend” with a veranda crisis (apparently a thing) When she calls him in the car she doesn’t even say hello, just “you’re late”. Good friend.

She had, like, a leak or something and had contractors tear up her porch.

Nathan lays out a floor plan for the porch, with a dining area and a comfortable seating area. He’s going to treat the space as an outdoor living room, great for entertaining. Bitchy McMillionairess (pronounced “Melissa”) lurvs it.

Mary McDonald is still working on the divorcing couple’s guest house from last week. She’s going to bring in the chocolate colors from the house for a common thread, but also add some of these “weird colors”:

As we learned last week, Mary’s project manager Nancy gets “ideas” and she likes to fight for them. Right away she suggests a placement for the bed that Mary doesn’t want. Million Dollar Conflict!

Why are they are keeping the black velvet pool table in the guest house? Pure class?

Back in La Jolla the yacht couple who hired JAM, put their daughters in charge of overseeing his work, and they are terrible you guys. JAM describes them as “extremely difficult”, which is as diplomatic as an employee can be about these bitches. They show up before the house is ready (reality!)

It really doesn’t look terrible, but daughter Lindsay just comes in like Goldilocks (Goldilocks had a kowtowing sister and an infant son who were also eaten by the bears, yes?)

JAM and Ross are understandably a little miffed that she is so picky when they aren’t even done putting all the pieces together.

The fact that they don’t tell her off makes me think that the ugly uncomfortable rugs were a scripted element. Which is unfortunate because Lindsay is such a perfect brat, I just want her brattiness to be real so I can hate on it with conviction.

JAM and Ross are professional, note her complaints, and set out to fix the things she wants fixed. Including the most ridiculous tiny sink!

Haha, Tiny Sink, one day an unplugged fortune telling machine will grant your wish to be BIG and you’ll learn such a valuable lesson!

Nathan takes Melissa veranda shopping at a store named by my fourteen year old cousin.

It’s an “amazing store that carries all imports from Morroco”  Really Nathan? Even inorganic chemicals, transistors, and crude minerals? REALLY??

(yeah, I wikipedia-d Moroccan imports, because I do this out of love)

His vision for the porch, besides shallow bowls, is to put lanterns with tea lights scattered on the floor and then a variety hanging from the beams. I think it will look beautiful, but I wouldn’t want a bunch of drunk people in my house kicking over dozens of tiny flames.

I’m borrowing the name of the next store for the self help book I plan on publishing when I hit 50 and dry up.

They bought three of these $10 terra-cotta pots for $295, to counter balance all of the “ethnic stuff” they’re doing.

Nathan also buys a bunch of plants that are hard to kill, because Melissa probably won’t take care of them. That’s pretty smart so I’m going to tag it #protip even though, most likely, Melissa already employs a gardener…

They cap off their spending spree at a flooring store and buy antique reclaimed terra-cotta tiles recovered from a 250 year old Spanish Villa. Probably walked on by Jesus, I’m sure. Tiling her whole patio in a one-of-a-kind version of the mud that the poorest people on earth build whole houses out of, will set Melissa back between $20,000 and $50,000 dollars. Which seems not only steep, but also kind of a big range?

Martyn finally appears, FINALLY. He does his best to put on a show and in his eyes you can almost see him apologizing for his plot line being a stupid chocolate addiction. He says “delicious” but it doesn’t have as much impact when he’s actually talking about food and not furniture or paint.

True to his star fucking, (he would NEVER sell that out) his assistant name drops Ellen Pompeo (If you don’t know she’s Grey of Grey’s Anatomy, and please watch something scripted.) See, dear dear Ellen, sent him this box of chocolates, and Martyn eats the whole fucking thing (sure.) while his assistant ad libs about permits and walls, etc.

Her acting is super believable, so I like her, even though she spells her name like this:

Martyn however licks the chocolates with the tippy tip of his tongue, like they’re testicles and he’s trying to avoid all the hairs.

It doesn’t help he’s also making faces like this:

Back at the guesthouse built with sadness, Mary McDonald is fighting with Kendra over how much money to spend decorating a space that Kendra is selling. It’s a bit hard to follow, because Kendra has a bit of a little girl voice (who listened to loveline, any armchair analysts want to take this for a spin?) but basically, Kendra wants to cut Mary’s $100,000 in half, because the realtors want it to be simple and it’s a waste of money.

Mary railroads Kendra, a women who is losing her marriage and her dream house, into sticking with the original budget. She throws a bit of a hissy fit about how she wouldn’t want her name on a shitty cheap room. But mostly she just comes off evil.

Meanwhile, the saga of the Moroccan patio continues when Nathan gets a call from Melissa, she’s freaking out because “half of the tiles are broken”, you know those ANTIQUE 250 year old tiles. Nathan, to his credit, puts twofitty and twenty thousand together pretty quickly, asking her if she is SURE that they are not just chipped, but her rich person crazy switch has already flipped, they’re BROKEN.

It’s exactly what Nathan thought. The tiles are old, they are uneven, that is why they paid so much money for them, for CHARACTER. After he explains this (presumably for the second or third time) to the contractor, Nathan asks that he be contacted first before Melissa, so he can manage the project and keep her unstressed.

JAM gets a normal person-sized sink, wraps up the uggo rug, and really hopes that Lindsay sees progress. But a custom bed that they ordered is late. So Ross hops on his iPhone and plays some bad cop.

Bad cops always have the best hair. And like Ross says, seriously he actually says this, “Nice is for ice cream.” As if that is supposed to make any kind of sense to anyone. Even Ben and Jerry were like “wtf.”

Martyn and Kathryn have meet for lunch and have a very entertaining conversation about their boring forced plot lines. Martyn is addicted to chocolate and Kathryn cannot find a bra that fits her giant tits. Seriously.

Mary McDonald spends the afternoon spending money at Maison Au Naturalwhere everything sold once had a face or mother or both. Enjoy the patterns of their skin and the frozen looks of horror on their bronzed skulls

Mary spends a ton of poor divorced Kendra’s money on antlers and bronzed turtles

with Nancy annoying her about Mary’s promise to Kendra to not go overboard. Mary brushes her off. “I just need it layered with all sorts of texture and color and shape.” and Ostrich Eggs

Martyn’s chocolate addiction is so monumental that he decides to seek the help of a former client who is also a famous hypnotist. Someone call Harold Camping because a millionaire hypnotist is the fourteenth sign of the apocalypse.

Martyn goes to see hypnotist, saying that he lives in a beautiful home… a home that Martyn JUST decorated, I see why you think it’s beautiful.

So the hypnotist does his thing, counts down from 300, talks in a soothing voice, etc.

Kathy Ireland heads to the flea market. She admires a jar but balks at it’s $85 price tag.

After Mary’s bitchy spending spree this flash of reason makes me really like Kathryn. She becomes even more lovable when she starts trying on vintage bras in public.

Back in La Jolla the JAM install turns a corner, they get a different rug (for $25,000 more dollars but it really makes the room “pop”. I do think it looks better.

Thanks to Ross’s bad cop act the bed finally arrives and the room comes together. With a sigh of relief JAM admits that “sometimes he thinks his job is more important than the presidency of the United States.” to which Ross replies “well that goes without saying”

I’m not sure if a threw something at my television but I know that I was reaching for my cat right before I blacked out. My roommate shook me awake a few hours later, she said I was screaming, I had sweat through all of my clothes, my nose was bleeding.

Seriously? I would have given them a pass if he’d said “stressful” instead of “important”, because stress… stress is subjective. And he’s dealing with people that are self-righteous millionaire douchebags, that’s a lot of stress. But IMPORTANT? IMPORTANT??! Go decorate a condo that’s on fire and die in it, please.

I used to love you JAM, but you just bumped yourself to last place, that’s right, you’re under Mary McBitchypants

The client’s daughter, shitty as always, likes…. the placement of the chairs. You can tell the compliments come hard for her, she’s quick to hate on a mirror… that she picked out.

JAM celebrates the successful install by pushing Ross in the pool. Whatever.

Finally, forty-five LONG minutes into this episode we get some Jacqueline, she couldn’t have come to lunch? gone to the flea market??! ridicule! She has the thickest accent, I think she knows people have NO fucking clue what she’s saying, but it was something about “dinner with ugly Italian men is the best.”

Kathryn is bewildered when Martyn tells her that the hypnotist replaced, in his head, the taste of chocolate with anchovies… why would he want to get “rid of one of the great pleasures of life?” She likens chocolate to good lingerie (full circle!) and then tries to tempt Martyn with some chocolates.

Then K gets a chocolate that actually tastes like anchovies? and runs to spit it out? What?

Back with now-not-my-least-favorite Mary, the guest house install is upon them. Clearly Kendra is in some financial straights and Mary (an asshole) is refusing to acknowledge that for her own gain and self-importance.

If she was your step mother you’d be a princess in, like, three months, tops.

Yet she somehow resists firing her assistant Lavin (Lay-ven) who has trouble doing what she says and focuses on his clothes and own personal relationship dramas too much. There’s some small drama when Nancy has the movers place the bed where she prefers, and then Mary makes them move it back. But otherwise the install goes smoothly.

It’s probably because Kendra, the client, is such a fucking pushover. She seems a little drunk when she’s walking around and admiring Mary’s work, but girlfriends going through a divorce, I’m not going to begrudge her a few shots of whiskey.

Nathan’s porch client is also pleased with her end result. She’s now excited about the “character” of the floor, instead of crying over the fact that some of the tiles were chipped. And it does look amazing.

Nathan goes into the philosophy of the space and his choices (low furniture doesn’t obstruct the view, because the view is what people pay for, the “ETHNIC” color pallet is similar to what is inside the house that maintains an in and out flow)

Do you think it’s easier to be pleased with the outcome of a project that you spent a hundred grand on? Or are you more of a Lindsay StickUpYourWhoHa, never pleased because when you spend that much money everything should be your crazy unspecified definition of perfect? Now that Kendra is divorced should she start experimenting and hit on Nancy? Is being president of the US even that important?

Good questions all.

Next episode FUCKING JOE FRANCIS GONE WILD!! Also the tense drama of a missing file!!