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‘Design Star’ Episode 1 recap
Tera Hampton, Austin’s hometown contestant on “Design Star,” breezed through the first episode with a strong performance, but not a lot of camera time.
For their first challenge, the contestants were paired off and had to design a bedroom for each other. They had only $500 to spend and could only shop at an Asian market.
In the challenge, Tera was paired with Trent, who told her that he loves to travel. She designed a serene grass-green room with an Asian feel. We didn’t see much of how the room came about, but that’s to be expected on these early-season crowded episodes of competition shows.
The judges didn’t look too favorably on Trent’s room for Tera, though. He said he wanted to give Tera, a busy mom, a place to relax. When the judges stopped by to see the rooms, Tera said the room seemed a little heavy on the tchotchkes, which made Trent bristle.
Among the other contestants, funky Julie and button-downed Tom seemed a doomed mismatch, even though Julie says they “felt attracted to each other’s energies.” She did an ugly, color-washed wall and scattered feathers on the floor (“Maybe they just didn’t get it,” she said of the judges’ negative reaction).
All reality competition shows have their own version of the “Quirky!” theme, and “Design Star” broke it out quickly for Emily, although her room for Michael ended up plain and depressing instead of odd. Alex got a dose of the wacky, music, too, for leaving some of his purchases at the store. When asked by the judges, Courtland lied about liking the parasol-strewn room Nina did for him, while she bluntly told the judges she hated the room he did for her, saying she was “more Bohemian,” a word Courtland says she never used when they were talking. As a consolation, the show should have given him a trophy for being the first contestant to mention being “thrown under the bus.”
When it came time to announce results, the judges quickly dispatched the top six contestants (Tera was among them, though Nina was the overall winner), and then told the bottom six they would be recording host presentations to fight for their survival on the show.
When they grilled the bottom six designers, the judges scolded Courtland for not speaking up about Nina’s seeming subterfuge, Alex for his incomplete execution and Tom for the cliched, poorly edited room he did for Julie. The judges told Trent he had just bought stuff and arranged it, without creating something new.
Ah, Julie. Here’s judge Vern Yip’s thoughts on her feathery floor: “My first thought was ‘Who decided to execute all the geese?’” Wonder if he was reminded if his offbeat former “Trading Spaces” colleague Hildi Santo-Tomas. Emily admitted her room was underwhelming. Vern more than agreed: “It looks a prison cell for a monk.”
Emily and Julie were the bottom two, so the judges watched the host presentations they taped. Emily used hers to apologize for her room; Julie gave a dubious-sounding feng shui explanation for her room. And, in the end, the judges sent her packing.
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