“Yeah, I think the house will look great. I can’t believe we’ve filmed almost five episodes.”
“We’ll have to pick a sixth house very soon.”
“You know who I want? I want Mrs. Chu.”
Nolan nodded. “That’s a good choice. I also like that couple with the house near the Jersey Shore. The one with the wife who has purple hair in the audition video.”
“Yeah. They’re great too, but Mrs. Chu survived cancer.”
“You want this show to be a tearjerker.”
Grayson smiled at Nolan. “Well… yeah. But happy tears. We’d be doing a good thing for a cancer survivor and a grandma who deserves it. Maybe we can help the Purples next season.”
“Ugh, next season. We still have to record all the voiceovers and talking heads.”
“Helena suggested we wear soft clothing for our studio interviews. I don’t know what that means?”
“Soft clothing? As in soft colors?”
“I don’t know. Soft fabric? She says we’re supposed to look like we’re at home in the studio. But I don’t wear soft clothing at home. I dress the same as I always do. Or I wear nothing at all.” They were stopped at a traffic light and Nolan turned toward Grayson, so Grayson waggled his eyebrows.
Nolan laughed. “We’ll figure it out.”
Chapter Twenty
JUSTIN ANDPeter were a very cute couple who had been together for six years. The year before, they’d bought a fixer-upper in the Catskills—after years of living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, they wanted space—but the challenge of renovating a very old house had soon done them in. So they had a house with a fantastic view of the mountains and that looked beautiful from the outside, but once they’d started digging into the walls, they realized how many problems the house really had.
So as part of the renovation, Nolan and Grayson had overseen asbestos abatement, a lot of plumbing and electrical work, a few feats of engineering to remove some of the walls, and all of that had been so expensive that the design budget was paltry. Nolan had called in every favor possible.
Justin and Peter were a young couple, they loved ultramodern design, and the house had offered Grayson an opportunity to shine. Nolan’s aesthetic choices tended to be more traditional and Grayson’s were more modern. Nolan was a master at making colors and patterns fit together, but Justin and Peter had taste that was more minimalist. So Nolan was happy to let Grayson run with his ideas.
The day before the reveal, Nolan and Grayson were finishing the design. The modern direction they’d taken the hardware was sleek and neutral. It wasn’t really Nolan’s taste, but he liked how things had turned out aesthetically, and he thought the clients would be thrilled with it. The color palette was masculine albeit neutral—mostly white and wood tones—because this was not a couple who was into florals or patterns or bright colors.
In some ways, it was nice to decorate for a couple who just wanted a sophisticated living space and weren’t worried about things being cozy or family-friendly. Nolan thought it was good to flex his design muscles for different kinds of clients so his skills didn’t atrophy. The audience for Restoration Channel shows was very family-friendly, and they’d designed the Cruz and Dunlop houses with kids—real or potential—in mind, but Justin and Peter seemed disinclined to have children, so why not cater to their tastes?
Grayson helped Nolan place a gray sofa with a bit of an industrial feel in the living room, then took a step back. “You don’t think it’stooplain?”
“You’re the one who hates accessories,” Nolan pointed out.
“Sure, but, okay, what do you think about blue and yellow pillows? At least for the staging. This room feels like a colorless void otherwise.”
“Try it and see what happens.”
Grayson looked directly at Nolan. “That sounds like a threat.”
Nolan laughed. Grayson rolled his eyes and stalked out of the room, but came back with an armful of throw pillows, which he placed on the sofa artfully.
“That looks okay, right?” Grayson asked.
Nolan had been arranging little trinkets on a built-in bookshelf, but he turned and looked at the sofa. There was a mustard yellow throw tossed over the back of it, and coordinated yellow and blue pillows in each corner.
“It looks fine,” Nolan said.
Nolan wasn’t completely sure what Grayson was looking for here. Validation? Probably. Nolan had been trying to get Grayson to go with his instincts more, but Grayson didn’t always see the stark line between what he thought worked and what the clients wanted.
Nolan had experienced the whole range. He’d decorated the main floor of a house for an actress who had said, “I trust you,” before jetting off to Prague to film a movie for six weeks, leaving Nolan entirely to his own devices. She’d been thrilled with the results, so it had worked out, thank God. He’d also been hired to decorate the main living areas of a house owned by a wealthy couple who owned six high-end restaurants in LA, and the wife had been such a control freak that Nolan hadn’t been able to so much as look at wallpaper samples or a store that sold tile without her sign-off. He’d learned from years of experience that the client was always right, but also how to judge when he was more right than the client. Grayson didn’t quite have that innate understanding yet, but he’d get there.
“I really love this,” Grayson said as they wrapped up around midnight. “It’ssomodern. I bet you don’t get to do houses like this much.”
