Thanks for the recommendation. I just watched a couple of episodes, including one in which a Florida couple “downsized” to a river-side 7,000 square foot house with four bedrooms, home theater, in-ground pool and four car garage.
…and let me guess: It was a couple in their mid 20s with a budget no higher than 750K, but maybe 800K if it’s a house they really like.
What was a couple in their mid-20s? The Florida couple I mentioned was older, he a real estate investor, with three kids and fourteen grandchildren. Clearly they had the money to afford a nice house.
Is that the one where their own son was the real estate agent? I liked where he tried to pass off the river behind the house as actual acreage.
That’s the one. I was amused by what they considered an downsized house (although I missed what the current house looked like).
And by the way, one of the houses had that thing on the master bed where a bunch of pillows were lined up. One of the comedians counted twenty pillows (ten on each side). Who does that sort of thing? And why? It’s not just on TV; according to my mother, one of her brothers does that and he’s overseas.
The cover story on the April 2020 issue of HGTV Magazine is “EXACTLY How to Style Sofa Pillows.” The COVER story. So apparently this is a major obsession of a lot of people.
(Cover can be seen here:
https://www.ebay.com/i/264671077590?chn=ps**strong text**
Well, that cover story is about sofa pillows, which is another issue entirely. I was wondering about the trend of multiple, decorative bed pillows. Here, for instance, is a slideshow showing what I’m talking about. Most of those pillows need to be removed from the bed before you can actually go to sleep, so you either pile them on the floor or have to store them someplace. It seems such a stupid trend (but also not a new one).
Talk about your First World problems…
But, yeah. Stupid to have to arrange pillows on a bed and then take them off to sleep. (Stupid, also, to have to remove them to sit comfortably on the couch. But maybe the couch isn’t sat on very often–only when visitors appear.)
I like a nice-looking interior, in general, but all these fussy trends can just pass by and leave me alone. I can’t care.
The pillow thing always drove my mom nuts as well, for as long as I can remember we had the same furniture, so call it 1966 to mid 80s when their house had a fire. There was a random seeming array of pillows on the couch and chair - everybody had different favorites that they found comfortable. My dad liked a particular floppy pillow that he folded to ‘fill in the chinks’ to prop his back in whatever way he found comfortable [he wrenched his back and broke an arm slipping on some rocks on vacation in the late 70s] while my brother liked to sort of flop down and use a bed pillow in pillow case and sort of lounge around - and we had one of the first ‘throw blankets’ on the back of the sofa he would sort of drag over himself and fall asleep [I think he just hated sleeping in his room, for whatever reason and preferred the sofa] and I liked a small sort of pillow on my lap to hold whatever book I was reading.
And we have just the basic pillows on our bed for sleeping, and one of those wedge back pillows for when I am sitting and using my laptop on the hospital table. I don’t understand the whole flock of pillows thing either =)
There are a lot of trendy things that always seem to make an appearance in these shows–things I don’t seem capable of caring about any more than I can care about the pillows. Examples: the color of kitchen cabinets; the height of kitchen cabinets; “peninsulas” instead of “islands” (UNACCEPTABLE!!!111!!!), and the material of the kitchen counters. Admittedly some materials are more attractive than others, but some of the show-participants seem wildly outraged by very nice counters.
At some point the pendulum will start to swing the other way and these shows will have people who absolutely REFUSE “open concept” and kitchen islands.
I tried watching a couple of the episodes of the offshoot on YouTube, but every few seconds they zoom in on someone’s chin or forehead for a moment then zoom back out. Quickly made me dizzy. Is that how the actual show is, or is that another cheap ploy to try to fool the copyright detectors?
I watched the episodes On Demand, and I don’t remember seeing weird zooms like that, so I imagine it was the people who posted the shows on YouTube who did that.
The actual shows are not like that.
I was always appalled by the trustafarians and other entitlement asshats [which is why we always tended to refer to the shows as entitlement whores international and entilement whores US 
]One show the female was appalled at the half bath/watercloset/‘public spaces loo’ being immediately off the kitchen, but she didn’t like the house where it was off the living room. Where did she expect visitors to go pee, the garage? Or disliking room colors [ever heard of paint, bitch!] or the topper, a bitch who absolutely insisted on a midcentury modern, yet when shown a pristine beautiful classical one, complained at the lack of an ensuite and walk in closet in the master bedroom [it had 2 of the 3 foot x 3 foot classic single closets] and the bedrooms were tiny … well, she asked for a midcentury modern. The realtor actually suggested that she go to an architect and have them draw up what looked like one but had the large rooms, all the bathrooms and all the huge closets. Another one was shown a gorgeous Victorian [not a Queen Anne, but the slightly Edwardian looking one] with all the classic crown moldings, embossed plasterwork on the ceilings, all the varnished woodwork, the intricate wallpapers … and wanted to gut it and make the rooms larger. sigh
And I would love to know how a couple that work at dabblie jobs [I think she was a cheerleading trainer and he did something just as useless, underwater basket weaving or whatever] have the money for a $900K US property in one of the tropical island paradises to start a residential cheerleading camp … or $280K US for a beach front property in Costa Rica [dudes, no beach houses in Costa Rica now, they have to be 300 meters inland unless the structure is grandfathered in.]
To be honest, it’s a little embarrassing to hear noises from the guest bath while sitting in the living room or standing in the kitchen and knowing exactly what is going on in there. (I mean, we all urinate or defecate, but I’d rather not hear it, nor would I want others to hear me doing either.) I had one friend who had a combination half-bath/laundry room right off the kitchen, but when I visited I went upstairs and used the guest bathroom in the hallway. Or, if there is an exhaust fan in the bathroom, I’ll run that for camouflage. If I ever build a house, I may ask the builder to insulate the walls around the bathrooms.
There were a couple of stand out entitled weirdos from the original HH that stuck with me. One woman who hated trees and not only didn’t want any on her property but didn’t want any in her house’s line of sight. And the other who looked at the beautifully re-done original parquet floors and said, “Ugh! How much do you think it’ll cost to pull that up?”
If I were on the show I’d probably sound like a weirdo every time I walked into a kitchen and saw stainless steel all over the place. “Ugh! Who’s gonna spend hours every day wiping this shit clean?”
Yes, the show producers seem to go out of their way to build shows around people who have ridiculous expectations.
It’s quite possible that those shows deliberately try to build viewership of people looking for the chance to do some “hate-watching”.
It is absolutely all staged. My friends were told to come up with complaints to build a storyline. Theirs was “she wants modern, he wants historical charm”. The wife was especially hard on the 100 year old house they had already bought, talking about tearing down walls and wanting to get rid of all the historical elements. The husband “acted” appalled. To be honest, I don’t think they did themselves any favors by being on the show. They are actually nice people (and love their house) but they didn’t come off that way. But what can I say. I still watch the show, making my snarky comments about the home buyers, who I know are playing for the camera.
And back to the OP, I did watch the comedian hosted episodes and enjoyed them. I with they would do more of them.
I wouldn’t call that a trend. That “style” has been around forever. my bed in the 80s (when I was a teenager) had 2 real pillows and 8+ decorative pillows. (And since I didn’t sleep with a pillow at the time, they were all, technically decorative.) And they all went on the foot of the bed at night and (on days when I made my bed - I was a teenager), they all went back in the morning.
These days, I have a better mix of functional & non-functional pillows. But still.
I love pillows. They’re comfy and cushiony (and yes, I sit and lean, and rest on the “decorative” ones and I constantly think I need more. It’s the one feature that I can remember wanting when I was a little kid that I actually have in my adult house. With everything else, my taste has changed, the house is not the right style, or it is not economically feasible.