A Top Design Contest: This is Bologna Sandwiches!

Look here kiddos I have a plane to catch in less than 24 hours so I'm gonna cut right to the awkwardly decorated chase on my Top Design post today. Here are my bullet points: 1.  There is a crazy contest happening over at Blogging Top Design and you dudes are invited to enter.  If you are kind enough to suffer through my hasty post you can gather all the details at the end. Next bullet point.

2.  Alternate titles for Episode 8: Light it Up include but are not limited to:

"Top Design:  A Very Special Product Placement Episode"

"Preston VS. Granny Chic:  an Imperial Trellis Martha Stewart Bloodbath"

"Simon Doonan:  What You Need To Know About Your New Favorite Judge"

"I May Not Be Kelly Wearstler But I Can Crazy Dress Your Pants Off.  And I Have An Accent"

"Name the Ballsack Chandelier"

"Top Design:  We Don't Take Erin's Advice About Incorporating Bookshelves Into A Space"

"The Secret is Out:  How the Top Design Cast Learned About My Marriage to Child Star Ricky Schroder"

"Kelly Can't Be With Us This Week Because She's Putting the Finishing Touches on Bravura Modernism, In Her Honor, Our Contestants Will Put the Last Nail In the Coffin Of Hollywood Regency"

"Watch as Our Contestants Fall Deeper and Deeper into The Stereotypes Our Production Team Has Crafted!!!!!!"

And Another Name for this Post:

"Top Design:  It makes me wordy"

PICTURE TIME!!!

Preston wins for the second week in a row.  Confused teenage girls across the country applaud his victory.

Side Note:  For the sake of my mother's health:  please stop with the all black and white, she claims she will vomit if you do it again.  Me: messenger / Her: bad guy

Nathan Comes in a close second with his insane foray into a world of mismatched nightmares.  Was it the North Face Backpack on the bedpost that drove this one home?  I don't get it, and you dudes know that I usually like-a the crazy.

Andrea cries a river over her children and her inability to accessorize (isn't that sort of the point of decorating, Andrea?) And gets chastised by guest judge Simon for her "shell centerpiece that screams '80s." Ironically, Kelly is absent so that she can fight tooth and nail to bring the '80s back to our living rooms. There's more double speak than in the McCain / Palin campaign.

Ondine makes a sad homage to Carrie Bradshaw.

Eddie channels his inner Martha Stewart which leaves Simon and Jonathan inspired for the mortuary waiting room they may one day decorate.

That's all kids.  Now it's time for la contest:

The good kids over at blogging top design, who just so happen to be much nicer than Erin and Myself, are putting on a contest for all you TD fans.  And guess who's judging?  This week's best dressed judge herself: Margaret Russell. Here's the scoop:

(their words)

The October 22nd show challenged the contestants to decorate a room around a fantastic Swarovski chandelier from their Crystal Palace Collection.

How would you have done?  Now's the time to find out!  You are invited to submit a design board that illustrates your design creativity.  It can be a standard mood board created with paper and or you can create it digitally, or step outside the box and paint a picture - the sky's the limit! (okay - the digital image is the limit!)

Then there are a bunch of rules and stuff that you can read about on their site.

Bottom line:  Margaret Russell will be picking a winner and bestowing upon them a signed copy of her book So Chic, plus some other goodies TBA

Now, go, scoot, mood.

Top Design: I Have to Admit It's Getting Better (Can't Get No Worse)

Well, well. Finally a challenge where each person has to design a real living space, and no ridiculous swithcharoos took place to amp up the contrived drama. Is it just me, or was last night's episode actually... better? I kind of even found myself beginning to identify with the contestants. Eddie didn't come off as a bitchy subhuman prima donna, and Natalie said the word "Caesareum" to her carpenter. Someone's not as stupid as she looks (or at least as stupid as the producers script her to be). Maybe I'm just feeling warm and fuzzy because I kicked ass on the Pop Design. Was that a clever manipulative tactic by the producers to give viewers a means to participate in the show? Whatever. I WON. So I liked that part.

On to da important stuff: Critiquing each contestant's "Room of the Future," all of which were furnished largely with pieces from Ikea, Modernica, and lots of spray paint. I could point out here that only one of the previously mentioned categories is actually futuristic, while the other two are rooted in the 60's vision of Stanley Kubrick futurism, but why bother. It's clear that contemporary design is largely pastiche anyway. Let's go from worst to best, shall we? First up: Natalie.

Wow that's a lot of junk in that gross tangello colored space. The bookcase is particularly vile, and to that end I have a word of advice for all the contestants: don't use giant bookcases because you don't have anything to put in them! I mean, how many tchotchkes can a person collect in two days? Also, I would like to know what happened to the holographic strip club background that Natalie was pole dancing in front of. Even though I hated it, I kind of miss its extreme tackiness. This room just looks like a poorly staged Ikea showroom.

Second up: Andrea.

This room isn't horrible, it's just boring and tired. Sadly, I actually own that giant badass wicker light fixture* and a zebra rug. It's making me want to get rid of those two items even though my dining room is thankfully NOT saccharine pepto bismol pink. Point is, this room is so 2007, ergo, it's NOT FUTURISTIC. In the future, we have eaten all the zebras, wicker is an endangered species, pink is outlawed, and we have learned to hang multiple items in odd numbers. (Although I'm pretty sure even the Greeks knew that last part, right?)

*Where did Andrea get that light fixture? Didn't she have another one that she was unable to put together???

Third: Ondine.

Ondine, Ondine. I kind of like this chick, and I even found her headless chicken routine to be a touch endearing, as I imagine that's how I would act if I were on this show. However, her designs are always missing something. I loved Kelly's idea to have 16 of those industrial fans mounted on the wall, and I think her comment speaks to the fact that Ondine can't just pick one idea and really go for it. Still, her colors are goodish, I liked that she did a lot with lighting, and overall there were some worthwhile ideas in this space. I just reread everything I wrote and it sounds... nice. What's happening here?

Fourth: Nathan

Ok, so this room is way over cluttered, but Nathan's concept of boxing up vintage design to display it like an artifact was so much more interesting than anyone else's. At first I thought he was going to have a giant plexiglass vitrine with an old, tattered dining set inside it, and I thought that was such an awesome idea. Instead, we got this unedited mess. He should have yanked that rug out, or painted it. Or whatever. But I still think that Nathan's better at making something out of nothing than the others are. I like his bundle of logs as end table and I see the beginnings of a layered room here, which must be hard to achieve when you have such limited resources in terms of shopping and time. I mean, would it kill the producers to give them an extra day and a chance to go to a flea market? The results would be EXPONENTIALLY better.

Fifth: Eddie.

This is Eddie's lobby at a cloning firm, which looks like American Psycho slaughtered Beetlejuice. Kelly called it "Granny Gone Wild," which I found to be utterly confusing, but Kelly is confusing, as I will get to in a sec. Anyway, the red mantle is cartoon to the max, but I kind of like lampshades and the paint splattered wall... just not in blood red. Actually, it's too bad he didn't go ahead and give his Ikea Klippan sofa the jackson Pollack treatment after Ondine started the job for him:

Winner (and deservedly so): Preston.

What a terrible picture, whereas many of the previous pictures made the rooms look better than they really did. Oh well. This room was kind of... good. I liked the black wall with space portal pictures, the dark wallpaper which read more as texture than pattern (thank god!!!), the fabric panel that separated the spaces and acted as a light box, and the weird molding wall painted glossy white. Oh, and the industrial light fixture made from several bare bulbs. I hate the cow print pouffle. Otherwise, I am pleasantly surprised. Hmmm.

On to the most important issue -- what was Kelly Wearstler wearing?

No seriously, what IS this? It looks like Joan Crawford in a navy blue Big Bird costume. Although I think her hair looks good under that... hat thing. Turban. Flower pot. Whatever it is. And she has nice legs, although I don't really feel like I need to see that much of them.

All in all, this week still felt like a Science Fair project on steroids, although I see a few faint glimmers of talent in there. I may not wish that I could stab my eyes out rather than watch Top Design next week.

Is that an ice pick in my skull, or are you just happy to see me, Top Design?

Sorry for the late post today everyone, I had quite the whirlwind evening last night.  After trying out a new Indian restaurant and going to see the Yelle concert, I made my way home to watch a late night taping of Top Design.  Despite the fact that I didn't have a drop to drink, I still feel like I blacked out through the lobotomy inducing design show.  Let me try to remember what happened. Yes, yes, It's coming to me: Opening montage of the winner and looser for the week so that we can start to feel their story.  The challenge is given:  take an ugly office, use some recycled crap and green standards (read:  something we can pretend you messed up later when the producers decide that you are no longer entertaining) to make a small office that our cameras can't quite fit into look nice.

Step two:  Once you've planned your design and are SO SUPER EXCITED to prove how great you are on your own, abandon ship and take over someone else's project so that there's virtually no hope that anything will look good and everyone will have hurt feelings about taking credit for other people's ideas (more on that later)  Let's stop with all the paragraphs and look at the design train wreck (drain wreck?)

Abort, Natalie!  Abort!

she never listens.  And pray tell, why are the judges just now picking up on her lack of sophistication?  Everything she does looks like it was made for a homecoming queen's self decorated bedroom.

OH NO!!!  It's the room that (stomping feet) Eddie totally stole from Nathan.  Gosh, darn, it's just not fair. 

Calm down now, let's get a few things straight:  the producers are working overtime to villainize Eddie, pitting he and Nathan into an imaginary tete-a-tete to which we are respond with screams of injustice at our television set. Ok, seriously though,  Eddie is kind of a bitch, but, what do you expect, he's got a big fancy design job that many would kill for.  And he's good at it.  Wouldn't it be SO MUCH WORSE if he were phony squeeky clean nice?  

Plus the whole point of last night's event was to take credit for someone else's design, a sad attempt at inducing a blood curdling rage in our otherwise bored hearts.  In 5 years of Project Runway, there has never been a "take over someone else's design" challenge.  You know why?  Because that would be stupid.  

I'm sick of writing about last night show, it's making the hole in my skull bleed.  Let's just look at the pictures and get it over with.

Oh, Preston, Preston, your room was so great.  I think you're so wonderful, HOW did you ever think of painting that bookshelf.  Ok, seriously everyone? Lame.

(side note, according to our stats, several people end up on our site after googling the following:  Is Top Design Preston Gay?)

YES

Next

I didn't totally hate what Ondine did with Wisit's table scraps.  I kinda like that chair.

-Holy Crap my computer is going slow today, this is really just fueling my Top Design Rage-

Oh, Andrea, I REALLY REALLY want to root for you.  Despite how annoying it is to CONSTANTLY hear you talk about your (shhhhh) secret marriage to childstar Ricky Schroder, there's something about you that I kinda like.  Now GET. IT. TOGETHER.  And, listen:  no more desk chair cozies.  Got it?  Got it.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Nathan, did you hear what I told Andrea about the chair cozies?  

Since we don't have Kelly to disect this week, we'll have to make do with India, who's outfit I was oddly drawn to, even though it reminded me of this Debra Messing get-up that I've never really loved.  I think it may have been the colors.  OH!  now, a room in that pallet may actually be a contender for Top Design, but sadly, nothing this week even came close to vying for the position of Medium Design.

One last thing before I go:  you know, I'm really starting to blame the production for this crap that is getting tossed across my screen once a week.  Would you please just stop trying to squeeze every last bit of drama and name calling out of this event and give these designers a chance to really do something great.  If they each had, oh, I don't know, say, a budget, and time, and a clear direction, not only might we finally see some good work, but I'm willing to bet that the level of jealousy and insecurity might raise to such a level that we would actually get to watch REAL drama, not this phony crap that you keep peddling. 

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On an entirely different note, it is a little cooler in austin today (woo-hoo!  74 degrees!) so I treated myself to a hot chai from starbucks.  It is magical and is making up for my top design sadness.

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Ha Ha, I just checked weather.com and it's actually 87 degrees.  I think I'm so used to the insane heat that I thought it was in the mid 70s.  Plus, my thermostat says 74, so, you know, I assumed.  Anyway, just a nice, crisp, cool 87 degree day.  Why am I telling you all this?