It's episode five of Design Star. Last week we lost two designers, so only six designers remain: two with potential to win and four others that can hopefully parlay this experience into a side job at Home Depot DIY clinics.
This week we will honor the country's military heroes, with the use of talent, ingenuity and anything other than the color tan.
Jason appears on screen looking pensive and says that he feels like they're "a steak and the fat has been cut off." I think the audience sees you as a massive artery clogger yourself, Jase. But you consider yourself amongst the lean meat, then ... I've run out of meat analogies.
Tone finds a note from Clive asking the designers to meet him at Applebee's to introduce the new challenge. After they arrive and choose cans, Clive Flynn fills them in on this week's challenge, Design Star will honor two military families with new entertainment rooms. These two families are neighbors and friends, like those found at Applebee's *wink wink*, on Venture Military base. Each team of three will have 22 hours and $10,000 to renovate each space. That's a lot of real design and real sliders for real heroes.
The Maldonados' room will be made over by Dan Dan the Cowboy man, Tone and Torie Sugarbaker. Andrea Olsen's room will be designed by Nate, Meredith and Jase.
Over a nutritious Applebee's lunch, the designers speak to their clients and get a sense of their style and lifestyles. The Maldonados use their room as a living room/dining room/office/baby room where they like to play video games.
They like modern warm design and they need the room to be functional.
Andrea Olsen's husband is deployed overseas and she's currently taking care of her three children alone. Her days are filled with school and therapy for the children. Two of her three kids have been diagnosed with autism and a therapist is by the house several times a week for sessions with the kids. The Olsens stay in a lot and like to watch movies in their living room with the family. In fact, 90% of their time is spent in the multipurpose room.
The designers are released from their lunches at Applebee's and head to the base. Jason is surprised to see how "cookie cutter" the houses on the base are. Every house is the basic Atomic Ranch House. Shocking, because a core tenant of the military is individual expression?
The teams enter the house and Mere is shocked by how small and dated the houses are.
Team Olsen knows they want to build an entertainment center for the room, so Tone will get to work on that. Torie and Dan want to designate a space for the children's therapy. Dan will build a table specifically for the children and their therapist, who hold sessions with the kids several times a week. Sounds like great healthcare, huh? I can only hope all Americans could one day have such comprehensive medical coverage... too political? Sorry.
On Team Maldonado Nate says that he designs and builds furniture, so he would finally like to showcase his skills. He decides to build an entertainment center for the space. He knows they're gamers and would like to build them a center to house all their gaming paraphernalia. He's finally able to draw from his influences and create a gamer's entertainment center. He's debating between a "Chutes and Ladders" inspired shelving and a "Guess Who" influenced armoire.
Team Maladroit allows Jason control the floor plan, shopping and styling. He begins digging through their collectables to find inspiration and to get his greasy handprints on Mrs. Maldonado's bridal bouquet. Once Jason is done tossing their china cabinet, he heads out to start shopping.
Team DT&T can't decide on a color. Initially the men pulled two blues for the walls. However, Torie is pushing for beiges because Mrs. Olsen specifically asked for warm neutrals like browns and beiges. Tone doesn't approve of painting a wall tan. He'll stake his place on the show on it. He feels that a designer's role is to challenge convention and try to introduce color into a room. Torie would like to honor her client's request and the tension mounts.
To appease Torie and not waste any more time on this argument, Tone lets Torie pick out a shade of brown and he heads to the store to pick up paint.
« Top Chef: Viva Las Vices! | Main | My Antonio: Baloney and His Bimbos »
Comments (8)
Great recap. Do you love Tone as much as I do? The Tony Soprano of design.
As for the military getting good (public) health care... Are you suggesting that insurance companies don't have your best interests at heart when they refuse to pay for those tests or treatments? Don't you want half of every health care dollar going to profit and overhead rather than, um, health care? Jeesh, in those damn public plans, like Medicare, or the one that covers our congressmen, almost 90 cents of every dollar is wasted on medical care for the patient. How selfish is that?
Back to Design Star. Has every season had such uninspired contestants? There's no creativity here. Fight for the right to go beige!
1 of 8 | Posted by NYdiva | Posted on August 25, 2009 5:42 PM
Loved the recap (wish it were a tad longer though).
Not to be political but.... the therapy the children are getting is not mandated/paid for/approved by insurance. It comes through the state in the form of early childhood education. In other words, your local school system. Regardless of age, school districts must provide early intervention in the forms of speech and occupational therapies for children in their district and these therapies will continue throughout the schooling of said child(ren) in the form of an IEP. It is very important for parents to realize this and advocate for their child even before their child enters Kindergarten.
Again, not being political....
2 of 8 | Posted by ohralphie | Posted on August 25, 2009 7:00 PM
THIS is the Antonio they should have on "My Antonio." Only imagine how scary HIS mom is.
I'll give Mere credit: she did the one and only original thing on this episode with the chevron paint.
Light blue and chocolate brown are quite the trendy combination now. Tone could have appeased Torie by letter her do some brown accents. But my man won't compromise his principles and one of them is to stamp out tan in our lifetimes.
(I actually like certain shades of tan.)
3 of 8 | Posted by pixielated | Posted on August 25, 2009 8:15 PM
Sorry, that's "letTING her do" not "letTER her do."
4 of 8 | Posted by pixielated | Posted on August 25, 2009 8:17 PM
Antonio, sweetie, darling, if I want tan on my wall, and you're hired to paint it, you better fricking paint it fricking tan.
UGH. I hated this episode. I could barely finish watching it.
I grew up moving from military base to military base, dealing with housing that looked frighteningly similar to that. Toward the end we were in townhouses so it got slightly better, but the quality and cookie-cutterness never went away.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here also, but I didn't like the chevron.
And if you're taking votes, put me down for please-don't-inject-politics. We're all bombarded with that shit enough every day. Don't know about the rest of you, but I watch embarrassingly bad crap tv shows to escape all that.
5 of 8 | Posted by memememe | Posted on August 25, 2009 10:58 PM
This episode brought back memories of living on base housing at Fort Benning, Georgia. We put wall-to-wall carpeting over our linoleum floor. Rules stated we had to return the floor to the original condition before we left, so we pulled it up... and found 3 years worth of Carpet Fresh soddered to the linoleum. I can still see the vein bulging out of the inspector's forehead. Good times, good times...
And yes -- I do fully believe they'll make those people tear up those wood floors and restore them to their linoleum glory before they can pass inspection and move. God, I miss the military.
6 of 8 | Posted by Emmyloo | Posted on August 25, 2009 11:03 PM
Well, I for one, cannot justify the argument for tan . . . I'm trying to figure out what to paint my house in my neighborhood of orangy beige to browny beige, and everything dull in between. I get it that neutrals are the safe choice, but blahhhhhh!!!!
Anyhoo, is Tone possibly going to take this . . . seems Candice gets her knickers twitching by him . . . (not meaning to tease the next show) . . . I know I'm certainly twitching, and I would love, love, love to take in more of the Tony Soprano of design in my future. It's actually funny, coz in his diary's I thought I saw some Gandolfini-ness in him, so for that comparison to come up was so ironic to me. Yes, me likey some Gandolfini--go 'head and judge . . . ; )
I was pretty shocked they cut Nathan instead of Jase . . . at least Nathan has had some successes in the past . . . Jase has been lame and clueless the entire time, call me crazy!
Thanks Medusa--even if this isn't a widely watched show, I'm so glad to have it recapped!!!! XOXOXOXOXO
7 of 8 | Posted by juddfan | Posted on August 26, 2009 11:30 AM
Ugh, my house is tan everywhere inside and out, and it's that yellowish pale tan that looks like runny bird diarrhea... My husband and I have been arguing for a looooooong time over this stupid color. Point 1 for Antonio. Then again, tan comes in many shades and like Pixielated says, he could have compromised some. I've also seen some all-blue houses that sucked. Point 2 against Antonio.
So how long are these families going to live in these houses? A lot of my neighbors are navy people and they have to move every 2-3 years, so will these guys even have to live with the wall colors very long? (I assume they get to take everything else with them and the army doesn't keep it!)
8 of 8 | Posted by sayhuh | Posted on August 28, 2009 1:41 AM