Design Star: The One With The BJ.....And By That I Mean, Bye J

THE CHALLENGE
This week it was the always exciting White Box Challenge, where the designtestants are called up to take an ordinary white room, with some nondescript white furniture, and turn it into something fun and wacky and wild, and, really, not at all functional. In fact, they were practically ordered to stay away from functionality.
Think outside the White Box, if you will. And some of our designtestants did just that, and others put themselves in the box, labeled it, stamped it, and mailed it to Boringtown USA.
Forcing the designers to rethink their design aesthetic, they were told they could only shop for supplies at a restaurant supply warehouse. Floor mats, soup pans, spices. Those were just some of the tools they would be using.
Let's Dish.....

MEG

She starts off by telling us she hasn't designed a non-functional room in eons. Makes me wonder, who would hire a designer to create a room they cannot use? And then who would hire a bulldog like Meg. I'd be afraid she pummel me if I didn't like her work.
And she plays it safe, by creating a living space with salmon pink walls and weird green pathways running to a bureau and a couch. When David Bromstad comes by to mentor her--and, well, grrrrl needs some mentoring--he says she's playing it too safe.
If you're told you can get crazy, then get crazy. But criminologist Meg's idea of crazy is two Boilermakers after work. After David leaves, she lumbers through the salmon space in fear, and I don't blame her. But she then does what she does best. She breaks out the cheeseballs.
She paints the cheeseballs green. She doesn't eat them, but she does tell us she'd rather eat them, and that it's a waste to paint them. I say it's a waste either way. But then she gets one cool idea, perhaps from being surrounded by a sea of green, inedible cheeseballs.
She takes coffee grounds and uses them to cast shadows from the furniture along the walls. This is a cool idea in a roomful of mediocre cheese....balls.
Meg then removes the legs from the desk to make a coffee table! How avant-garde! Repurposing a desk as a shorter desk. She uses green painted stemware as the legs, but makes the mistake of not securing the desk/coffee table to the glasses. Uh.......oh. Tjis doesn't bode well.
And, as the clock ticks down the final seconds, Meg runs into her space like a bull in a badly decorated china shop and knocks over that table. As time is called, Meg hoists the table over her head, a la King Kong, and murmurs, 'Seriously/"

LESLIE

She's going over the top! Go big or go home!
She's gonna bust out the....cliches.
At the warehouse store, she grabs floor mats to create wall art, and bags of beans to make a soup. I think. She doesn't have any real ideas, but keeps telling us the room will be all Leslie.
In her space, she begins to write words, er, scribble words, along the all that describe herself. See, rather than showing the judges who she is, she's gonna make 'em read about her. She's a designer! Really? She's an artist! Do tell! She's a fighter. Say what?
She takes the chairs and turns them into chairs! The futon becomes a futon!
Tinfoil is art!
And teal is a good color.

CATHY

Instantly she decides to go with functionality and create a living space. For a former Emmy-award-winning news reporter, she doesn't pay close attention to detail.
At the restaurant supply store she loads up on white dinnerware and spices of all kinds. She's either creating a dining room, or dinner, and if it's dinner she needs to move on over to the Next food Network Star. She shatters the plates and begins to create a mosaic tabletop, whilst reminding us that she has a global perspective and is a world-traveler, and broken china and spice blends will be winging us to Barcelona.
Doesn't she know it's pronounced Barth-a-lona?
In the Camera Challenge, where they must show how they repurposed something from the restaurant supply store, Cathy coldly and clinically tells us how she mosaics a table top and how we can all do it in an afternoon for a 'bit of that Spanish influnce'.
For more Spanish influence, she peppers the floor with spices. Chili powder tiles, if you will. Cumin tiles. Paprika, too.
Cathy is too on the money, too, "Let me make a room" She has not spice of her own.

TYLER

He enters his space, and instantly tosses out the chairs, the end tables, the desk, the dresser, the lamp, and the futon, but he keeps the futon cover. Someone has an idea!
Which will include some metal mixing bowls and 400 bottles of water. He's one of the few designers who is embracing the chance to go cray-zay.
For his Camera Challenge Tyler busts out the metal mixing bowl, drills a hole it, shoves in a light kit and, voila!, lamp!
He paints a big splash, literally, along the walls and floor and then turns his 400 water bottles into a piece of furniture, draped by a futon cover. Good enough, i think, but then he sets a light under it and the whole things glows.
The room is playful and fun, and not functional.
It's chic and urban and cool and fantastic. And I want one.

KELLY

She has no idea what she's doing whatsoever. While shopping she is just grabbing anything and everything, with no clear focus or direction,. I see a direction: headed for D-I-saster.
After shopping, she unloads her supplies in her space but still has no idea what she's going to do, or how she'll use anything she bought. D-I-saster.
But she does want everyone who walks by her box to recognize it as Kelly's box.......crickets..........there's a joke there somewhere but when it has to do with ladybits, I just don't get it.
But she comes through in the Camera Challenge by taking mixing bowls, pizza pans and salt and pepper shakers and turning it into a side table. But, as David tells her? The way she speaks? In all those questions? Makes her sound unsure of herself? And her design?
With good reason. It had some cool parts. The dripping can of paint artwork that spilled on the floor. That was cool.
Okay, that was it.

KEVIN

The Pop'o'Color King, er, Queen, wants to be chic, and, for him, nothing screams chic like a roll of brown butcher paper.
But then he shreds the paper and wrinkles the paper and staples it to the wall to create this very organic, textural wall covering, and I'm thinking how to I get Carlos to let me do this in the guest room....
And then he takes mop heads and creates these beautiful shag rugs around the room. From mop heads. Excuse me while I talk to Carlos.....
But Kevin upped his game this week, and went from the kitschy end of kitschy chic all the way to the chic end. That butcher-paper wall was great, the mops were great, but they kind of overshadowed the rest of his space. If he had gone wack-a-doodle with his furniture, he might have been Top Three.

BRET

He decides that since graffiti artists are sometimes called bombers, though I have never heard the term from my graffiti artist cohorts. He plans on painting literal bombs along the back wall of his space. Bret is nerdy gay cute, so I hope his bombs aren't too literal.
For his Camera Challenge Bret busts out the soup pot, drills a hole it, shoves in a light kit and, voila!, lamp! I may have seen this before.
He has turned his room, with the bomb-dropping wall graphic, into some kind of industrial chic space, that he accessorizes with bowl s of Granny Smith apples and red bell peppers.
Reall Bret? The only person who uses Granny Smith apples as decoration is Granny Smith herself.
That was a bad call. he should have made a pie and served it to the judges. Maybe then he would have earned Extra Cedit.

DOUG

He's the man with the plan and he gets his shopping done in record time, and then stands around the cash register watching the other designers scurry like rats. He waers a sly grin, but I'm not sure he any reason to be smiling.
Back in his space, he tells us he was doing graffiti when graffiti was cool, and then proceeds to plagiarize Keith Haring by painting Keith Haring all over the room. Apparently his style of graffiti is the stealing kind.
So, after ripping off Haring, Doug decides his room needs a bit of whimsy and begins gluing and hammering silver plates against a black wall because he loves how silver pops off black walls.
Literally. The plates are a'poppin' off'a the walls, and it doesn't scream whimsy at all.
It screams desperate and safe, though it's the only part of the room that doesn't scream Haring.

KARL

He really does look good in jeans. Just sayin'.
He buys a boatload of plastic to-go containers and tries to hot glue them into a chandelier. But on Day 2, he still has no color on his walls. I guess building a plastic chandelier out of take-out salad bowls is a day long task. Note to self: don't do that.
Karl color blocks the walls, and the paints the furniture exactly the same to blend in with his walls. I like how the furniture seems to blend in to the walls and floor. it's cool, and not that easy to accomplish, but I find it more amusing than greats.
Still, he does have those jeans.

MARK

His inspiration for his room comes from his grandfather, and the years he spent in the military. he's going to paint a mural, and build a plane, and give it guns. And then, I'm hoping, fly it over to Bret's box, grab some bombs, and then head to Cathy's box, and drop them on Barth-a-lona. Or, as I soon call Cathy's box: Barf-a-lona.
For his Camera Challenge Mark busts out the metal mixing bowl, drills a hole it, shoves in a light kit and, voila!, lamp! Seriously. Is this all you people can do?
But he's painted this incredible Air Force insignia mural on the wall, and the uses the futon to simulate wings. He paints bottle silver and they become guns, and the whole thing floats above the ground on a bed of upturned mixing bowls. Where was Mark when I was playing war with my neighborhood kids? But, then again, where was Mark when I was discovering my sexuality?
But that's another show for another network.
His salute to his grandfather was very cool, and still very sweet. He used his design to really tell a story about himself, and he did it beautifully.

J

She immediately begins to complain about how she is being given nothing, when, in fact, she's been given free reign, which you would think might make a designer ecstatic.
Not so much.
Out shopping, she buys Sterno, or as she calls them, chafing gels--which is something I think one might use for those itchy between-the-legs rashes--and black beans. Back at her space, she tips over two end tables, pushes them together and calls it a fireplace. Really.
When David views her space, she tells him the firebox....with the chafing gels and the black beans....will create a 'nice' moment. David bitchslaps her and tells her that 'nice' moments don't get their own TV shows!
Honey! We don't do nice!!
So she goes all wacky by tin-foiling a table and then hanging bottles of parsley to along the wall. O, J!
 That doesn't say nice! That says I've ruin out of ideas and I should give up right now!

THE JUDGING
Guest judge this week--for the missing Candice Olson--was Thom Filicia, who looked like he could have used the Queer Eye guys to get his 'hur' did. But worse than his hair was Genevieve Gorder in leopard. I mean leopard is so 20..........................05. And Vern is still teensy.
But I digress.
The judges found Doug's room more of a Keith Haring room. and showed none of Doug, at all. They loved Karl's light, but GG wants him to do something other than really great paint techniques. Really? A designer shouldn't paint? Was she hoping he'd crochet the walls, or make a soup? What? This woman is daft.
She loved Kevin's paper wall and mop rugs, and they all liked Bret's bunker chic room, although the fruit garnish seemed a little Martha Stewart to Thom Filicia. Careful Thom, I think Martha learned how to make a shiv out of a Granny Smith, and she'll cut a bitch.
As they step in front of J's room, they all utter 'Oh no.' And Meg's room gets a group, 'Uh oh' before GG calls it creepy. Vern nearly dies when he sees Tyler's room and it's all he can do not to grab a ladder and climb up on the H2O bottle chaise. Luckily, GG has him on a child leash and he stays put. Thom says his room is powerful without a lot of embellishment.
At Leslie's space, Vern wants more. He wants the graffiti to cover all the walls. GG says her head keeps pingponging from one graffiti wall to the other, but I think it's just a fan in the room bouncing her empty head back and forth.
GG loves Mark's "bold and playful" use of color. We know this because she whipped out her handy, Tried And Trite Designer Word Handbook to tell us so. It comes right after "Pop of color". I found it interesting that she like his "b&P" use of color, but then lamented Karl's "B7P" usage earlier.
Proves she's schtupping someone high up to be on TV.
In Kelly's room, they like the pizza pan table, and the set of pink footprints, and not much else. That's because there isn't much else. In Cathy's room they call her conventional.

THE EVALUATION
Karl, Bret, Kelly, Doug, and Leslie  are safe, only because, as GG points out in her blank-eyed cheerleader style, they played it safe. This coming from her is, for me, the most high-larious line of the week.
The Judges then critique the remaining six designers, and this week also take the Camera Challenge into co0nsideration.
Mark gets props--Get it? props? propellers? The Air Force room? Props? I'll stop--for his design and for his presence on camera, but not for his "Mixing Bowl Becomes A Light" .
J is called scattered on camera, and wordy on camera. And she's told she just doesn't seem interested in her design. How could she be? it was awful.
Tyler gets called out for his "Mixing Bowl Becomes A Light...Been There Done That" design tip. But he gets praise for his beautiful room. GG goes all mumblemumblemumble meh mumblemumblemumble stepped it up. Whatever that means.
Meg appears angry, like she's ready to charge the table and use Vern as a toothpick to remove some leftove cheeseballs from her incisors. But then she cries when they say her room was creepy and it's spooky, and altogether ooky.
Kevin gets high marks for chic, and he's funny and relaxed in his camera challenge though GG thinks he's a shouter. I say, Hey! At least he makes sense.
Cathy is called cold, with no personality, just like her room. There was no inspiration and she seemed to take the challenge too literally. GG hand gestures and says Blibbety blah blay blue which is Moron for I have no idea what I'm doing here..
In the end, Mark wins over Tyler--and I think Tyler was robbed--although Mark's smile soon makes me think, Tyler who?
Kevin gets saved, and Cathy, Meg, and J are on the bottom.
J gets sent packing because she seems to have no interest in design, and no desire to share her non-interesting design.
BJ.
Bye J.