Early in 2021, the particular fascination of my household became Home Again With the Fords, a new HGTV series from the sister-brother designer-contractor duo Leanne and Steve Ford, who work interior wonders in their native Pittsburgh. Leanne recently moved back to her hometown from Los Angeles, echoing a trajectory of many Americans her age who—either because of children or pandemic or both—decided to return to the nest and set up a more comfortable life close to family.
No less stylish a life, though. Leanne’s designs are by far the sleekest on HGTV, casual-chic dreamscapes full of warm earth tones and the satisfying convergence of different aesthetics—SoHo loft blending with Scandinavian rustic to alluring effect. As a TV personality, Leanne is offbeat and charming, though her banter with her brother is teasing and affectionate enough that the hashtag #SiblingsNotSpouses sometimes runs at the bottom of the screen. Partnerships on HGTV shows are always a little cloying like that. The Fords, though, manage to keep it mostly cool.
Home Again is a rich source of almost impossible aspiration; the gorgeous, fashionable remodels are expensive, and the lovely furniture we see in the final reveals usually isn’t even part of the budget. “It is staged,” says Leanne. “But they can keep it if they want. It is what I hope to fix if we do future seasons, so that it is soup to nuts. The hard part is that people use all their money on the construction. That one’s a tough one for me, as a designer. I want to leave and it all stays there.” This complicates the fantasy, money inevitably coming to bear as it does in nearly all things. Genially, Leanne encourages me to see the somewhat more limited possibilities of my own apartment. “I love the rental tricks,” she says. “You can change the lighting, you can actually take off the uppers. That being said, don’t expect to get your deposit back.”
Were I to follow Leanne’s suggestions, I would by no means be alone. An estimated $465 billion will be spent in the home-improvement industry in 2022, with owners (and, yes, some renters) taking sledgehammers and color swatches to their spaces in the hopes of living a better, prettier, more camera-ready life. Or, you know, just finally fixing the back deck that your cousin put a foot through two summers ago. HGTV has become the mascot and chief spiritual leader of this economy. The network was watched by some 60 million people per month in 2020, more viewers than anything else on cable that isn’t the relentless scream of 24-hour news networks.
They are by no means the only builder on the block. YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram are vast repositories of aspirational home content; swiping through a carousel of manicured stills or watching an echoing-audio home-tour video offers a more immediate version of HGTV’s delicate balance of invitation and alienation.
And there are emerging competitors in the TV market, like the upcoming Magnolia Network—a television outlet under the lifestyle company started by former HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines—and Netflix, which is swiftly erecting structures on the territory first settled by HGTV. If one wanted to, as I often have, one could spend whole weeks awash in nothing but discourse about marble countertops versus quartz ones, bearing happy witness to the ongoing wars between Shaker cabinets and the equally craved and dreaded open shelving. (Dreaded by me, anyway; I could never abide such a constant invitation to gaze at my own disorganization.) The domestic-design media boom has turned the idea of home into something terribly adaptable, full of possibility and never quite nice enough.
These shows are often described as harmless fluff, soothing and diverting entertainment free of all the prickly politics of the world outside. But, as happens with all growing phenomena eventually, home-design programming has taken on an actual weight, moving through the world with real consequence.
There is the story of Waco, Texas, where Chip and Joanna Gaines lay their scene, under the banner of Magnolia. Their HGTV series Fixer Upper was long Magnolia’s and HGTV’s flagship product, its success helping to hasten migration to Waco, bringing with it the attendant issues of gentrification and housing inequity that always arise—or are further highlighted—when a city suddenly becomes the locus of a trend. The Gaines empire has been forced into a consciousness about its role in the city—the company has, of late, been consulting with the local chapter of the NAACP and the Community Race Relations Coalition on racial-justice matters and given $200,000 to the cause—but their growing footprint has undeniably shifted the balance of the city and brought it the glare of the spotlight.
Other home-reno shows have had sizable impacts, affecting housing markets and reshaping neighborhoods in their respective communities. Husband-and-wife duo Ben and Erin Napier have completely transformed the faded southern city of Laurel, Mississippi, with the success of Home Town, which pairs locals with an affordable house and then gives it a dream makeover. Erin’s designs are graceful and homey, Ben’s carpentry is Nick Offerman-esque gentleman-builder artisanship. Small as Laurel is—population 18,000-ish and growing—the city’s post-Home Town story has been huge, the downtown once again bustling and prosperous, tourists and prospective home buyers flooding the area. The mayor of Laurel, Johnny Magee, says the Napier effect is nothing short of “amazing.” “We have people that have bought houses in the city of Laurel without ever physically looking at the house.”
Might all this national attention—bringing with it waves of migrants looking for their dream house and chasing a bit of the Home Town glow—badly alter the social fabric of a town like Laurel, where the median home price hovers around $100,000 and the median family income is only $30,000? When I pose the question of gentrification to the Napiers, they are surprised that the issue even comes up, telling me that it is the first time they’ve ever been asked about it. “Gentrification’s not really a thing here,” says Erin with a laugh. “No one’s trying to improve property values.”
“Gentrification has a negative context with it,” adds Ben, “because I think it’s about trying to push a certain group out of an area. And we’re not trying to do that. When we do get to work in areas that are lower income, we’re trying to improve it for the people who live there. That’s really important to us. Magee concurs. “We still are very modestly priced,” he says. “The cost of living and the cost of homes is still probably lower than most places in the state. People that want to buy homes can afford to buy homes.” The Napiers will soon apply their revivifying skills to a different municipality, Wetumpka, Alabama, in a new series somewhat ominously titled Home Town Takeover.
Oftentimes the home-reno industry’s impact is hyperlocal, helping lay waste to viewers’ own homes. In response to such follies, HGTV has two new series about doomed DIY-ers in need of help from the very network stars who inspired their failed projects. Prolific Detroit home restorer Nicole Curtis hosts Rehab Addict Rescue, featuring homeowners who’ve attempted Curtising their own careworn gems but find themselves in way over their heads. It’s riveting, as long as you can overlook online rumblings about Curtis’s controversial vaccination views.
In and around Huntington Beach, California, laid-back contractor-designer Jasmine Roth tends to disasters in Help! I Wrecked My House, a show that serves as a careful reminder to invested viewers that home repair and remodeling are not as easy as they look on TV.
How aware does HGTV need to be about what they’re communicating to the non-construction workers in the audience? “I think that shows do have a responsibility,” says Roth. “And we do try to show as much as we can. But there’s only so much that we can show, and at the end of the day some of the things that have to happen don’t make good TV. So we’re not going to include those, because you’d change the channel.” There are, at least, these service-y new series, stepping into the flow of information to remind people of the perils of self-taught plumbing and electrical and roofing work. It’s a fascinating development, that the ecosystem of the network, its stars, and its fans has become so total and immersive that it is now in reactive dialogue with itself, a community newly in need of regulation and civic safety practices.
As HGTV turns to address its own shadow, other entities are elbowing into the home-design space. Fixer Upper, once HGTV’s crown jewel, has been plucked out and reset in a new diadem: the Gaineses’ very own Magnolia Network, which will launch digitally in July and replace the DIY Network on the cable lineup in January. A redux of Fixer Upper will anchor the fledgling channel, joined by a host of other programming covering home, food, and other domestic genres. The launch of Magnolia was delayed by the pandemic, though Discovery+ made a sampling available during quarantine, most notably a cooking show from Joanna Gaines called Magnolia Table. It’s an awkward transition so far—Gaines seemingly following recipes from other people rather than offering new culinary inventions. She’s better suited to Fixer Upper: Welcome Home, a continuation of the original program that made her a star.
According to Discovery’s 2020 earnings report—accounting for the successes of HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Magnolia, and other brands owned by the company—Discovery+ had a healthy start. About 12 million subscribers currently pay to access a trove of programming, including an endless stream of House Hunters episodes, essentially operating as its own single-service channel. (Reader, I have drifted down that river of home buying for days at a time.)
The strategy has worked so far, further reifying HGTV’s brand dominance. The Magnolia Network, which will do linear and streaming, is more complement than HGTV rival, adding to the tight, cohesive synergy of Discovery’s various brands. (One does wonder, though, where viewer loyalty will shift given the cultish adoration the Gaineses have engendered since they first started covering the city of Waco in shiplap.)
Discovery+ is a tiny blip compared to the world’s biggest streamer, Netflix, which seems not content to merely rule over all other television arenas. The platform has waded into the real estate and design market in the last two years and plans to do much more.
Thus far, there is the wildly popular—though somewhat ironically watched—real estate series Selling Sunset, about a group of Los Angeles Realtors trying to unload dreamy-ridiculous mansions. Get Organized With the Home Edit takes the ethos of the popular Instagram account the Home Edit and translates it to the TV makeover-reveal model. That ethos is, essentially, to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on clear plastic tubs (now Home Edit-branded and available at the Container Store) to organize your closets, pantries, and refrigerators. The show is a maddening and grimly satisfying testament to conspicuous consumption, validated all the more by the celebrity clients who appear on the series. If Reese Witherspoon can have her memorabilia closet ordered so beautifully, why can’t your linen closet follow suit?
Less zeitgeist-y but no less compelling is Dream Home Makeover, hosted by designer Shea McGee and her husband, Syd. The couple—good-looking and youthful, but anodyne and apolitical—reign from their Insta-ready mansion in Utah, having moved there from California because, like in pioneer days, they saw vast land to build upon—and a growing client base of homeowners eager to give their cookie-cutter homes some gentle pizazz.
The McGees found themselves on Netflix after one particular false start, Shea tells me. “We were approached by a production company to pitch to a well-known design network,” she says vaguely, though we can probably guess which network. “We had no idea what we were doing. We were just so flattered that someone was interested in us. We went through the process of filming a sizzle reel and it was a disaster. Everyone tells you, ‘Be yourself, be yourself.’ And then they were asking Syd to pretend to be a contractor. They would call us on the way to filming and be like, ‘Hey, could you just pick up a sledgehammer on the way?’ It was not authentic to us, and I’m sure it read that way. It wasn’t a great experience.” Then Netflix came calling, and everything fell into place. “We’re not going to have Syd pretend to be a contractor,” Shea says. “When we had those meetings with Netflix, we made our own sizzle reel.”
While the McGees’ core business is high-end, foundation-to-finish home design, on Dream Home Makeover Shea is content to do just a few rooms. I first became familiar with the McGees through their YouTube channel, where they posted tours of each room of their new house, a gleaming, gabled palace looming over the scrub desert outside Salt Lake City. Shea’s taste is soft and clean; she plays with muted patterns but otherwise keeps things milky and serene, glowing just enough to pop on Pinterest but not glaring with anything as unmarketable as individuality.
Her designs are soothing, offering a glimpse into a world where there are never spills, never stains, never clutter, only beautiful expanses of creams and copper and lush fabrics. This could be your life, too, if only you could get your shit together—organizationally and financially. The McGees have a thriving e-tail business, selling that lifestyle—or furniture-size pieces of it—to happy consumers.
The image crafted by the McGees and many of their HGTV counterparts is blindingly white and often affluent, a grim reflection of the realities of home ownership in America. According to the most recent census, the homeownership rate for Black alone householders is just 44.1 percent, a huge drop from the 74.5 percent for white alone. There is also the matter of age: Homeownership among the under-35 demographic is just 38.5 percent, something these networks and platforms will have to be conscious of as they program for the future.
HGTV is cognizant of a lack of diversity in its roster. “We feel like we have probably not done the best job in terms of our talent, and it’s time for that to change,” says HGTV president Jane Latman. “We have, over the last year and a half, been actively diversifying.” That initiative has yielded some tangible results, with this spring’s premiere of $50K Three Ways, with Tiffany Brooks, and the upcoming Sister Fixers, with Courtney Robinson and Leslie Antonoff, among other series in development.
As for economics, Netflix says it wants its home content to run the gamut, from the impossible glitz of Selling Sunset to Marie Kondo urging everyone to throw out whatever belongings they have. The gleaming sock bins of Get Organized might fall somewhere in the middle.
Those who don’t own homes might also be drawn to HGTV by its recent infusions of real-life drama into some of its series. In 2020, we saw Mina Starsiak Hawk, cohost of Good Bones, deal with fertility issues while fixing up houses in a little corner of Indianapolis. On Windy City Rehab, brass-obsessed Chicago developer and designer Alison Victoria grapples with the legal, financial, and public relations fallout of her former business partner’s alleged misdeeds. It has been jarring to see personal struggles suddenly invade once relatively conflict-free programming. There will be more of it to come, says the network, though producers can’t exactly plan for lawsuits from angry home buyers or the duplicitous business practices of shady, largely off-camera associates. Those are just unhappy, or happy, accidents.
A refrain I often heard from people I spoke to across these channels was that they are in the business of storytelling, rather than just showing us what people’s homes look like—and what ours could, too, someday. Which might be alarming for loyal viewers, like me, who have always enjoyed the home genre for its near absence of story. Or at least for the spare design of its narratives: A problem is addressed and made better, a material want is met with tangible results. That’s long been quite enough. But it seems the powers that be have done their own reassessing during this troubled time, looking around at their environs and figuring that—as so many of us have—it all could be so much more.
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