Design Star Tiffany Brooks talks about embarrassing rooms that she’s found through HGTV and in her own home.
Tiffany describes her design style as “classic with a twist,” and enjoys mixing traditional pieces with a little rock ‘n’ roll.
She shares her insights to picking the perfect color, how she deals with designing her own home, and what she discovered while working on HGTV’s ‘Most Embarrassing Rooms.’
Mark: You’re back inside MyFixitUpLife with my wife, Theresa.
Theresa: My husband, Mark, and we have a design star on the phone.
Mark: What’s up? Winner of Design Star.
Theresa: This is a great season for stars too because I’m just thinking about the holidays, and glittery things, and beautiful stuff. It’s coming up!
Mark: I’m thinking about DIY design train wrecks that our guest …
Theresa: I want the train around the Christmas tree to go all smooth.
Mark: It’s why traffic slows down at a car accident.
Tiffany: Don’t we all.
Theresa: Hi, Tiffany Brooks. How are you?
Tiffany: I’m great guys. How are you guys doing? I’m not sure where you are if it’s morning or it’s afternoon. It still feels like morning to me.
Theresa: I think it feels like morning to me all day long until I look outside and it’s dark again. I’m like, “Where did the day go? What happened?”
We’re excited. You’re a Design Star which is exciting to me. One of our friends, Tyler Wisler, I think he tweeted this out recently that he was very proud that he’s actually taken his photo with every single Design Star winner from every season.
Tiffany: Yes, but me! I’m the last one.
Theresa: He hasn’t gotten yours. Well, there you go. We’re going to have to figure out a way. We’re going to have to tell Tyler that we talked to you, ha-ha beat him.
Tiffany: Him and I are going to get together soon and work on some things and see what type of mischief we can make together.
Theresa: Oh no. That’s going to be mischievous. I’m excited too because you’re doing a show called Most Embarrassing Rooms in America and we want to know: what are you finding?
Tiffany: Oh my gosh! The thing is, is that you find a little bit of everything that you wouldn’t even expect people to have. I’ve found art projects gone wrong. We found taxidermy. People were stuffing squirrels. It was just hot mess after hot mess after hot mess. It’s all compiled into one half-hour show. It was great. It was fun to do. It was just a lesson in how extreme people can get with their homes in a bad way.
Theresa: Taxidermy squirrels kind of scare me a little bit.
Tiffany: It was nuts. We found urns with people’s remains in them in coffee cups and they had them on display. I’m like, “Oh no! Are you kidding me right now? Did I really just walk into this?”
Mark: What was your biggest jaw drops open and no words come out moment in that whole journey?
Tiffany: You know what? I think that once I walked in … There’s an episode that we shot where the homeowner had, I believe it was 39 pieces of taxidermy on their walls. That by far was like, “How can you do this? All of your walls are taken up and even some of your floor space with stuffed dead animals.” I’m like, “Really? Do these people take the time to mount all this stuff up?” You couldn’t walk past the wall without getting hit in the head with a deer horn. It was crazy.
Mark: Was there an element throughout all the things you saw on HGTV’s Most Embarrassing Rooms in America? Did they all have some element like hoarding or … I don’t know what?
Theresa: Collecting?
Mark: Collecting, that sort of stitched it all together in your psychological diagnosis?
Tiffany: I would say, with the exception of the kitchen because kitchens are just totally a different area, but the main similarity in all the rooms that we were able to re-do where the collections just out of control, clutter everywhere. It was collections to the point of clutter. People have what people have and people have their collections. They are prized possessions to people. However, when you have just too much of it, it’s clutter. That was the underlying thing in everything that we shot whether it was taxidermy to holiday decorations. It just was out of control. It’s like balance not clutter.
Mark: When you’re designing a not Most Embarrassing Room in America, do you focus on that kind of thing? Differentiating the spaces and looking for what might be artful versus what might be clutter?
Tiffany: Oh yeah, most definitely. I think finding those pieces that add the personality, the focal of the room. That is something that you’re constantly working on through the whole design scheme. You can by a sofa, a couple chairs, some lamps and an area rug but it’s the touches, the accessorizing. What makes this house, this homeowner, these people stand out? What are their souls? What are their stories? You often find an answer in that main underlying fact of what makes them tick in what they collect, what they have in their home, what’s prized to them. What trophies are there? What family photos are there that we can reuse? Can we do a gallery wall with this entire collection that you have hidden in boxes? What is going to pump some life into this otherwise manufactured room?
Theresa: We’re thinking.
Mark: I like that you just said in all the design conversations we’ve had, you might be the only one who’s said, “Get some stuff out of the boxes …
Theresa: I love it.
Mark: ” … and bring it to life.” That’s awesome.
Theresa: I liked that and is this in this theme of a Facebook post we saw recently, which is “Where in Sam’s hell to start when designing your home?”
Tiffany: I wouldn’t say I would start with what’s packed away, secrets we have and what treasures. I would say you have start with a floor plan. What happens is people are surrounded with this room that they are so used to looking at every day, day in, day out.
Their eye becomes trained to look at this room. They have to empty it out and that’s hard to do when you’re sitting in the room. What I suggest doing is starting with the floor plan. Start with the bones of the room and then step out of the room.
Rearrange the furniture and everything like you are starting from scratch. Put ideal pieces in there. You’ll see your floor plan and your space open up in a totally different way if you start with a floor plan, blank slate.
Theresa: That brings to mind something else that you have that is really good, helpful advice to people getting started in design thinking about their room, thinking about their spaces, thinking about their home. On your website, youandyourdecor.com, you have a paint guide that I downloaded that is really interesting, going through all the little steps and thinking about color and what’s right for you inside your home.
Tiffany: With color, that’s a sensitive issue. A lot of people just walk up to me and ask me, “OK, what color should I paint my house?” Actually, I was just talking to somebody about this over dinner the other night, and I’m like, “I don’t know. Please don’t ask me that question.” It is the most asked question that designers get, hands down. We don’t know you. We can’t just pick out a paint color from the air.
Say for example, you are in love with the color blue or violet. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a designer will come in and suggest painting all four walls blue or violet. It means that we will probably come in and say, “OK, look, possibly toning back, what about a white wall? However we find this really cool, navy fabric and we reupholster your sofa with it.” When I’m suggesting paint colors, I like to think of paint as a backdrop versus the focal point.
Theresa: I like that. I’m curious now about your house. Do you change the rooms in your house frequently? Like color and bring in different things and move furniture around as you go along?
Tiffany: This answer is going to disappoint everyone. Right now I hate my house. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The thing is and there is a perfectly logical reason why I don’t like my house. I get exposed to so much stuff day in and day out, I cannot seem to ground myself and make a solid decision on how I want to live.
I’m able to adapt and embody what my clients need me to be at that time. It’s like you almost lose yourself in the whole designing process. While everybody is like, “Oh my God, I would love to get a sneak peek inside of her house.” My house is if I can say it, excuse my French, it’s A-S-S; it’s ass. I hate it.
I would be my own worst client because I have no clue what I’d do with my own home if given the time or the resources to redo everything. I just know that it’s not where I want it to be right now.
Theresa: I kind of feel you in a way because I’m constantly moving everything around in our house. Our house is never done.
Mark: Included but not limited to my wallet, my keys, my sunglasses.
Theresa: I do.
Mark: That’s not what it looked like yesterday!
Theresa: I tell you I move the spots to put all that clutter that happens on the kitchen counter. I move that where that’s going to be constantly so he can never find his keys.
Mark: By move, I mean hides and re-hides.
Tiffany: Everybody has that little secret drawer. If we had one of those bedroom drawers or it could be that drawer in your kitchen, the drawer that no one can open because it’s just a mish-mosh of mail and keys and bobby pins and paper clips and things that don’t even work anymore. It’s that forbidden drawer. Everybody has that.
Theresa: Then on top of that, I always say, “Well, this would be a nice place to keep our stuff in this little basket or this little container. We’ll put it by the front door. We’ll put it by the back door. We’ll put it on the shelf.”
Mark: I’m never consulted, Tiffany Brooks, never consulted.
Theresa: It’s true, never consulted. It’s crazy.
Tiffany: I can solve the craziest, biggest dilemmas that my clients have, but it will always remain a problem or mystery in my own home.
Theresa: Are the walls in your house painted at all?
Tiffany: Yeah, my walls are painted. I have this peachy, peanut buttery color on my walls and that needs to go too. I’ve decided what I want to do in my head it’s just execution is also another problem. Every time I get ready to execute it, I see something else I fall in love with. Like right now, I’m huge all about this watercolor wallpaper I found online, all about it, but I can’t put that in my living room.
I have to figure out a way to incorporate that in and then be happy. Here’s the trick. I have to be able to live with it until the next big thing happens. It happens quite frequently with a designer.
Theresa: I absolutely love that. I feel very comforted knowing that you’re out there feeling that way because I feel that way too. You should go to this website I just found. It’s called youandyourdecor.com. There’s this really good advice about picking paint colors and all kinds of things. The designer of the website, her name’s Tiffany Brooks, and she’s really in tune with how to make beautiful spaces. The pictures on her website are gorgeous.
Mark: It’s possible that she’s funny and nice to talk to as well.
Tiffany: Crazy! I heard about that girl. She’s a little bit cute and fabulous too.
Theresa: She is fabulous.
Mark: You also have to follow her on Twitter @TiffanyBDecor8. Check her out on Facebook. Check us out after this break, which we’re taking right now. We’ll be back with more of MyFixitUpLife.
