HGTV Design Star: Next Gen, Episode 1

Ari’s Profound Observations and Sagacious Thoughts

Hello friends!

Welcome to this new blog series where for the next 6 weeks, I will go ahead and masterfully breakdown and thoroughly discuss each episode of my season of HGTV’s Design Star with a primary focus on my own unparalleled performance! Sounds exciting, right?!

Let’s dive right into this; it turns out that much to my chagrin, all of my castmates and fellow designers are inconceivably talented, so that’s unfortunate! Jokes, jokes; but really, being apart of this amazing group of people is a true honor and competing against them is something that will truly give me nightmares untill the day I die. Love you, and proud of you all.

I digress; raise your hand if you thought I was going home that night?! Bottom three, you guys. Bottom. Three. Not a fun place to be. The walk of shame, hoping and praying that when you reach for that door handle it opens, and you are able to rejoin your castmates in the collective trauma that is this competition?! Fear not, “80’s drug lord meets your grandma chic” lives another day!

Lets go ahead and check out my space! For the first challenge, we had to convert ugly rooms into living and dining rooms that accurately represented our brands and personal styles. Really quickly, look at the before!!

It was pretty bad! Just getting this room torn apart and prepped for paint took forever!!! Now, feast your eyes on the “Golden Girls X Pablo Escobar” parlor!

I really wanted this space to feel really warm and welcoming! You all know that I love” rooms” and hate open concept, so while I did rip out my pony walls, I went ahead and we custom built some big slat walls! I love the way they turned out; they created separation but still allowed all the natural light to flow through into the dining room! I wanted a big mirror on the back wall as a focal point and for the illusion of expansiveness! I love the mismatched velvet couches and I layered on more velvet pillows and a velvet ottoman! I went with wall to wall carpet in a seafoam green and I adore the way it looks layered with the cowhide. I was one of the last ones to get into the furniture warehouse this week which meant slim pickings! I reverted to my thrifting roots and pulled this coffee table from Peti’s trash and it’s one of my favorite pieces in this room!

My vision for the dining room was a really large round table with 6-8 chairs surrounding it. I think the dining room is where I struggled most in the furniture warehouse! I just couldn’t for the life of me find what I had envisioned, so I had to change plans and regroup! I love my cowhide chairs and how they play with the hide in the living room! I was really trying to add more color to this space, but overall I’m happy with the color palette! We were tasked with repurposing items in our ugly rooms for this challenge! While the show focused on some lamps I played with, my favorite project was this art installation in the dining room! I took a room divider from the space, broke it up, and put arched panels on the faces! I upholstered some with a blush velvet and did a fun paint splash on the others and I love how it looks!

Another fun project was this floral install I did in the living room! I drilled foam blocks into the wall and then gathered up a ton of dried florals and got to work! This is such a fun way to be expressive and creative as well as take up wall space and create some good focal points! I love how it turned out and it really pulled in a lot of the colors from the space!

Is this room everything I ever wanted it to be and exactly how I would do it if I could do it again?? No. Am I proud as hell?? Yes! I really do like my space and there is no way in hell you can say this “isn’t on brand.” This really was a true representation of myself and of my incomparable brand and I’m a winner, damnit!

I feel like I really struggled to get my footing in the first challenge. I think I was shell shocked by the gravity of what I was participating in! I feel like a lot of the other designers just jumped in and really thrived, but for me it was a little less swimming and a little more sinking and thrashing around. My style is definitely really unique and I think I just really had a hard time making my vision come to life with what was made available to us. That being said, it obviously was not a problem for everyone, as was made apparent by the stunning designs of the top three, Chris, Carmeon, and Justin. Seeing the way that those folks really just so seamlessly put together immaculate spaces was honestly a huge reality check. Time management is NOT my strong suit and I realized I really need to focus on getting things done quickly and efficiently as well as being more resourceful! I think I started actually moving in furniture in the last hour! Styling and getting to really play with the space is my favorite part, and I had about 30 minutes to try and style it and that was a a huge let down. My space didn’t feel “finished” and it definitely showed. Jonathan Adler may have said it was ugly, ha, but in real life he also had a lot of good things to say about my design and style and also gave me some really good advice that I took with me into episode 2!

I may have been bottom three when it came to our design challenge, but your girl was the brand building social media challenge winner!!! At that point in the competition, I was feeling a little low in regards to how much I had gotten done, how little time we had left, and with how my space was coming along! Winning that challenge was the perfect pick-me-up and honestly something that maybe saved me from elimination that night! We were given two hours to work on our content and I spent the ENTIRE two hours working on it, and I won 30 minutes. . . . . While the reward wasn’t as lucrative as I was hoping, I made a good first impression on the judges and that’s what was most important to me!

Overall Synopsis

Your girl struggled. I grappled with time and self doubt which lead me to make rash decisions. While the struggle was real, I carried myself with pride and stayed true to myself and my brand. My design challenge was ill-favored and seemingly lost in translation, but my” brand building challenge” win acted as a welcomed safeguard to my imminent demise. NBD

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and being here for this journey! I’m still in it, and it only goes up from here!!

Ari