Condo Living savoured some face time with the great Scots between appearances at the Calgary Home & Interior Design Show, for a wee spot of tea to dish on bad taste, Canuck kindness, and their new home away from home.

CL: How did you get started in
design and television?
Colin: We started off pretty much because we have a goal that everyone else has and that is to have a bigger house in a better part of town. When Justin and I, and obviously we’re a couple, we got together and rented a property, then a few years later we thought ‘we’re still a couple, we need to properly set up home together.’ We bought an apartment that was in terrible condition because we couldn’t afford one that was in good condition and we renovated it ourselves. Then when we sold it we doubled our money on it. So we did it again and doubled our money on that and we thought  ‘this is odd.’ So we bought two properties at the same time and we doubled them up and we kept flipping and flipping and flipping. We were getting a lot of newspapers and magazines that wanted to do editorials on these apartments. Then the BBC approached us and said ‘can you do a property show?’

Justin: We’ve never really intended to be in television, although now it’s our rightful home—obviously. We just set about doing our job and stuff opened up around about us, but what we had was a permanent and firm belief that good design can enhance the way of life and that good homes laid out properly and arranged correctly can actually make living in them much, much easier. It’s a no-brainer. A lot of builders and a lot of developers forget that, so we were always insisting that the homes we took over were marketed appropriately for the type of market.

Colin: We had programs like Trading Up which is about getting properties ready for the market, Million Pound Property Experiment where we moved up the property ladder from a house that was £100,000 to a house that was well in excess of a million. And then we did How Not to Decorate, which is a dealing with bad taste program and here we are today we are at our Home Heist mentality and that’s where we’re looking at fusing all of these things together because we are sick of the world being beige and boring and people thinking that they have to get their homes ready for the market. What’s wrong with just getting your home ready for you? Your home is a tool, first and foremost, that facilitates for you and your family. If you’ve got six kids you don’t buy a Mazda MX5 Roadster and put them all in the parcel rack—it’s never going to happen … We are pretty much of that kind of thinking we just know we want homes that are for nesting but also for investing.

CL: How do you go about doing that?
Justin: The journey we have on Home Heist is about character development and making couples better and building relationships between people who live under one roof and looking at why relationships are broken down. We’ve had all manner of things happen on the show and it’s different from the other programs that we’ve done, but at the end of the day it’s fundamentally about design and how good design can have a direct result on lifestyle.
There are lots of factors that need to be taken into account when you buy a home and when you look at the condo market. When you go and see condos there is always the risk that the one you saw one day will merge with the one you see the next and before you know it you’ve got this great, grand property homogeny. We are at diametrical opposites to that … we always try and make condo relevant to the people that live there.

CL: What’s the worst thing from a design standpoint you have ever seen, either in Canada or the UK?
Colin: There would be too many things. You know, we thought you Canadians are really polite, nice people. Suddenly we’ve realized you actually can be polite, you can look after your friends, you can have a beautiful country without any litter but you can also have a wicked sense of humour, you can be slightly kind of dastardly, really good fun. But at the same time, the catalogue of incredible people throughout our cast, if you like, of the great Canadian soap opera, namely Home Heist, have all got one thing in common—hideous taste. The first episode is actually called My Baby Sleeps in a Laundry Room for one simple reason—this couple has a baby who sleeps in the laundry! You’ve got tiny little windows, washing machine, drying machine—baby. They don’t think there is anything wrong with that. No wonder the child can’t sleep, it thinks it’s in San Francisco.

Justin: We called them Oaf and Loaf. They were a really nice, uncomplicated couple. They were good people, but they had forgotten how to look after their home. They looked like they were living in what looked like the Dark Hole of Calcutta with all the design prowess of a couple of slugs—and I mean that in a loving way.

Colin: That’s so unkind to slugs.

Justin: He might have been buying the trousers in the house but she wore them, she made all the decisions in the house, and God it showed. The house was shocking. She needed a visit to the design show in Calgary more than anybody!
The big thing people say to us regardless of where we are is ‘can you make my house look like a condo, can you make my house feel like a loft, can you make my three-bedroom terrace villa in the middle of Oshawa or Calgary feel like an urban space?’ and I think that’s why it’s appropriate for us to chat to you now. People are obsessed with condos, and we bought a condo ourselves. Our program caters to that need. Very many of them, even though they are very, very suburban, are given a very urban feel.

Colin: We have a couple we are working on just now, a beautiful young couple in their late 20s, really attractive—but their house has nothing in it. They actually don’t have taste. Somehow that’s worse. There’s something a bit creepy about their house in that there’s loads of shelves but nothing on them. And, on the other hand, you have people who have clutter absolutely everywhere, you get mum and dad who the kids have obviously grown up and left the home, but they still live in the past. We had one particular couple where the mum said ‘but my son will feel like I have abandoned him.’ We said ‘oh, phooey, phooey, phooey.’ She used to be in fashion, and had this beautiful big master bedroom, but all the clothes were busting out and she and her husband didn’t speak to each other anymore because everyone had lost interest. So we said ‘we’re going to lose your son’s room and it’s all about you. You’re the person who lives here and your husband lives here.’
She was really, really upset until she actually walked into that room and realized we’d turned it into a giant, walk-in Sex and the City-style closet, all for her. She actually forgot about her son. We did her husband’s garage. We cleared out all off the rubbish … he actually had a car lurking underneath the rubbish that hadn’t moved in 27 years. We restored it, gave him his youth back, gave him a big boy’s room, gave her this great dressing room and gave them a master bedroom suite to die for.
Justin: There is a really lovely piece in that episode … I say ‘what would you like best, what would Kevin like best?’ She went, ‘I dunno, the fact is we haven’t spoken to each other for 20 years. We just live this house, we’ve forgotten how to be each other’s partners—we just go about our jobs and go about our lives. I’ve forgotten how to love him and he’s forgotten how to love me.’ It’s a really poignant moment. And at the end of it, they are holding hands. It’s almost like they found each other again as a consequence.
Colin: The other thing I want to say is there are all kinds of mega-naughty kind of fun episodes that are too bizarre for words. We get these amazing families, like in the first episode the husband does dress up in drag, and this man is about the size of this room. He’s a big carpenter, and he used to be a judo champion. He tells us he saw the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and has always wanted to do drag. We convinced him to dress up in drag and they can do things as girls together, so we get him to build their daughter’s new crib and something really odd happens. They do it kind of as a twosome without nagging each other, so they learn to be a unit.

CL: How have you found the
Canadian people?
Justin: Canadian people without a doubt have the most incredible sense of fun. Well, I’m half American and very proudly so, but I’m also delighted to discover that Canada has got an incredible sense of fun and just as important, an incredible sense of warmth, and Canadian people seem particularly fond of Scottish people. I wonder if it would have been the same for us if we’d been English. I’m not sure. I think it probably would. There are so many people two or three generations back that are from Scotland.

Colin: One of the things we’ve noticed of Canadian bad taste is people become caricatures of the homeland. So the Italian people have big pillars and lions and concrete. The Scottish people have a bit of tartan here and golf and stuff—everyone becomes an extreme version of their homeland. One of the couples we do, they have a tartan basement, tartan wallpaper and a lot of golf things and they’re Scottish. Their daughter and their granddaughter actually got them on the program. So we give them something that’s modern Scottish and they love it, this old couple, and it’s totally not what they had before.

CL: We have a lot of new homes here in Canada, and especially in Calgary. Is it possible to do more damage to a new home than an older one?
Justin: It is. With new homes there’s this mindset that it should be all white and you’ve got to have a blonde timber floor and your kitchen should always be this colour or whatever. We’re trying to educate people that isn’t always the case, that you can take a dramatically neutral space and turn it into a really warm space by accent walls, the clever use of textiles, by interesting furniture with either a period feel or a modern feel according to what you want. But it’s easy to be boring in a modern space because you often play by the decorating rules that you see in the show flat designers put together. We’ve just bought a big condo in Toronto and we’ve used jet-black flooring and we’re doing soft grey and black marble kitchen. We’ll be adding all sorts of warm shades and interesting textures to bring it all together.

CL: Do you have any design advice
for people with condos, especially
new ones?
Justin: Our big advice with anyone with a neutral space is just to be bold, don’t be scared, and sling one big strong colour onto accent walls and pick up those tones in accessories, and textiles and cushions.

Colin: There’s nothing worse than someone who moves into a condo and treats it like their suburban grandmother’s house. If you’ve got fabulous full-height windows and loads of glass—don’t get huge drapes and valances that bring down the height. You should really just embrace the fact that, if you’re moving into a condo and it’s modern, quite architectural, quite significant … you should really just embrace the fact that, if you’re moving into that building you should really think I’m that modern architecturally significant person and do something that actually echoes the outside.

CL: Do you think more people have bad taste than have good taste?
Justin: As far as Colin and I are concerned there are only two types of taste in the world. There’s good taste, which is ours, and then there’s everybody else’s, you see. With that in mind, our perpetual mission of global decoration continues.
There are in fact three types of taste out there—bad taste, good taste and no taste—and no taste is almost more offensive. Bad taste is a disease. Good taste is a blessing. But no taste is a scourge from which there is often no recovery until Colin and Justin arrive. Were it not for us, this country would have continued to fall into decorating and designer collapse and I’m delighted to report we’ve arrived just in the nick of time, just as Canada was about to flat line in design terms, and pull it all back together. We’re like Tammy Faye Baker with tassels.

CL: Would you do another project like Colin and Justin on the Estate?
Colin: Yes, actually. It was really difficult to do. We were there for eight months. We had an office on the Estate and a block of flats where no one lived. You felt caged in and you actually felt like the people there were caged in. After the event, and it was a good TV show, the youth centre is open five days a week, this tiny wee girl used to come and watch us film all the time because the kids were bored, they weren’t bad, they were just bored—she’s just become the Scottish young volunteer of the year because she volunteered to be in the youth centre. The old folks’ community hall is thriving, the Internet café is thriving so loads of people are actually in this world and able to reach out. The young people are able to find out that the opportunity doesn’t stop at the end of the street.

Justin: The premise of the Estate was that everybody, no matter where they are on the social strata deserves a good standard of living. By good standard of living we merely meant a home that is impervious to the elements, a home that is secure and safe, and in an environment where the amenities are good. That sounds very grown up for Colin and Justin but it was a good opportunity for us to go back to basics and strip away all the other layers, not that we’re not very happy with the other layers of our career, we are. I love adding the glamour, darling. Glamour oozes from every pore, oozes. We loved doing that program just to be reminded how important housing is. We do a lot of work with a fantastically hard-working charity called Shelter and Shelter are campaigning for 30,000 new homes to be built in Britain every year because we have a colossal shortfall.

CL: Is it frustrating when you reno a home and the residents go change it?
Justin: To an extent, it’s frustrating. Our mantra is not that they must live as we create it forever, it’s simply that we give them a template. And to get that template more appropriate they’ve got to live in their home for a few weeks after we leave, so that’s when they make the little changes.

Colin: That’s somehow better at least—that somebody gets a feel for what we’ve created. We have homeowners in the past don’t change anything to the point where we’ve got one woman who has taken Polaroid pictures of where all the accessories are on tables so that when she does the dusting she knows can put it all back. We’re not doing this for our egos … it’s about creating the right space for people to live in.

CL: In your new condo you won’t find plastic on furniture?
Justin: No. When people come to our house we’ll never say take your shoes off. I want people to feel comfortable when they walk in rather than feel that they’re standing in ceremony. It’s a Canadian thing; it’s not a British thing. Nobody would ever ask you to take your shoes off in Britain. If someone asked you to take your shoes off in Britain you’d feel a bit awkward.

Colin: You’d know that at least there’d be one person in the party that had holey, smelly socks on. And you’d just go ‘put your shoes back on.’

CL: What are some other differences between the UK and Canada?
Colin: Canada’s a very outdoorsy country. The air’s great and the light is fantastic. And we have become outdoorsy; we’ve been cycling a lot, walking a lot of an evening, going to the beach and all sorts of stuff. I’ve lost a stone and Justin’s lost 17 pounds.

Justin: We came across here with no contacts in Canada really. We’ve a couple of friends in Toronto and funnily enough, my old next-door neighbour lives in Calgary. I haven’t seen them since I was a tiny little boy. One of the differences we see, and this isn’t intended as a criticism of Britain, is when walk around the streets in Britain, we get stopped all the time and people say ‘can I have a new kitchen, can you get me a new bathroom, can you get me money off a carpet, can I have my house featured on your home show … when will you give me something?’
In Canada, people say ‘Oh my God boys, welcome to Canada. You’re so welcome here. What are you up to? Nobody ever asks for anything, nobody ever says ‘what do I stand to get from having met you?’ People just say thank you for coming. To be made to feel so welcome in an alien country is fantastic. CL