Interior Design Masters #TVReview #BriFri
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Last week, I talked about the film adaptation of Hamnet >by Maggie O’Farrell.
Interior Design Masters is a competition show, kind of like The Great British Baking Show, for aspiring designers. I watched the initial season on Netflix.
The first episode gave me a very British quote that illustrates why this is fun to watch as an American: “In a show home, you can’t be that Marmite.” I think he’s saying that it’s a bad idea to do something that people are either going to love or hate. It’s better to do something less contentious and more appealing to the masses.
I enjoyed getting to know the competitors. The prize is bigger than a cake stand. The winner walked away with a high-value contract to design a bar in a historic hotel in London. This makes the competition a little more cut-throat than The Great British Baking Show, but not so much that it ruined the charm for me.
I suspect that the competitors have learned from The Great British Baking Show. No matter how one does in the competition, the show can be a career boost. The participants were careful to not be so unpleasant that future clients will be turned off from working with them.
I tuned in hoping to learn a bit about interior design in ways that I could use in my own spaces. Unfortunately, that didn’t really happen. Implementing a design for a space is more complicated than baking a cake so there just wasn’t time to allow the designers to explain things like “I’m hanging these curtains higher than the windows in order to draw the eye up and make the ceiling feel higher.”
Instead, I learned more than I ever expected to know about what it takes to have a career in interior design.
The best part, for British Isles fans, is that they travel all over England to design everything from holiday homes to High Street shops. Interior Design Masters is an unexpected way to engage in armchair travel.
Netflix only has a Season 1 of Interior Design Masters. It looks like I can watch all six seasons on Peacock, which we currently have a subscription to, so I may watch the other seasons. First, though, I think I’ll watch Dream Home Makeover on Netflix, the very American show that probably will provide home design tips that I can use in real life.