Season Liberally

While I was watching "Top Chef" the other night, Bravo ran an ad for their new January show, "Top Design" (based on the winning formulas seen on "Project Runway" & "Top Chef"):

http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design

The show will be hosted by Todd Oldham and one of the regular judges is boy wunderkind designer Jonathan Adler (whose stuff I kinda like, but could never afford). The other two judges I am not familiar with (one I never heard of and another from ELLE Decor). Personally, I might have chosen Angela Adams and Thom Filicia (from "Queer Eye")--Adams for her sense of style, which is tres moderne, and Filicia for his sense of humor, which is tres silly.

I'm not sure how they're going to work this, exactly, but if "Project Runway's" challenges are any sort of clue, the designers will have to decorate a room entirely with food or garbage or something (and they must do it in ten minutes!). Of course there will be the requisite Sneaky Editing Tricks and an unhealthy focus on designers who make scenes, scheme, or throw tantrums, but I'll still watch it.

I have to, because the gauntlet has been thrown down: in the ads for "Top Design" now running on Bravo, you can hear one of the judges chastising one of the contestants with "You cannot design a room around a cat!" Oh dear. There goes my plan for the guest bedroom, with a color palette based on my Siamese cat, Tallulah: a vision in black, brown, and beige, punctuated with bright spots of blue to match her luminous eyes. And now they're telling me I can't do this? Pish tosh. I can understand not designing a room around, say, a leopard or a tiger or a calico, but a Siamese? It's all the rage, dahling. In fact, the combination of brown and blue has gotten so popular (look in any West Elm catalog if you don't believe me) that I may change my mind and go with something less trendy, like an orangutan or a cockatoo.