Inside ‘Trading’

Sonja Teri and Caroline Krabach were your typical “Trading Spaces” fanatics: Caroline would tape the show daily and watch it when she got home. They’d dish about Vern’s cool minimalist bedroom makeover or Frank’s funky country kitchen redo. They even got their respective boyfriends, Paul Hogan and Chris Wylde, hooked.

Then, one day, they crossed the line. They applied to appear on the show.

Teri: “We were all sitting around and I said, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be funny ...?’ And Paul and Chris wrote this really clever application.”

Hogan: “What did we write?”

Teri: “Something sarcastic.”

Hogan: “Yeah, like ‘We’re the greatest people in the world.’ ”

Teri: “ ‘Cause we’re young and we’re fun.’ ”

Wylde: “We totally lied about the dimensions. The room has to be at least 14 by 14, but our living rooms are rectangular, and, you know, we didn’t understand if it was supposed to be meters or inches. It was 14 something. Cubits, I think.”

Every day some 300 to 500 people apply to be on “Trading Spaces,” the Learning Channel show in which two couples agree to trade homes for 48 hours and redo one room in the other’s house on a $1,000 budget (paid for by the show). Each couple works with an interior designer who plans the makeover, and an on-site carpenter builds whatever is necessary, from kitchen counter tops to a coffee table. The contestants, designers and carpenter paint, hammer, grout and sand while the clock ticks down to the much-anticipated “reveal”--when the couples, eyes squeezed closed, are led into their new rooms and the audience gets to see them gasp with delight or stare in open-mouthed horror.

Now in its third year, “Spaces” has become a certified hit, winning its Saturday night time slot against other cable shows and spawning two knockoffs: “While You Were Out” on TLC and “Surprise by Design” on sister-station Discovery Channel. It’s also turned rather anonymous designers and carpenters into superstars--Genevieve Gorder, Vern Yip, Frank Bielec, Laurie Hickson-Smith Douglas Wilson, Ty Pennington--and inspired effusive posts to the official fan-site chat room, such as: “So far the best rooms of the new season were the two kitchens and Doug’s sage/squares bedroom. The rest of them were absolutely horrible,” and “What was up with the vertical blinds? I just can’t get past the vertical blinds!”

As it happened, the ultramodern makeover of Teri and Hogan’s living room would become one of the show’s more talked about episodes.

Although the four friends, all in their 20s, have many things in common, “Trading Spaces” may have been in the top five when they applied in December. They met in Washington, D.C.--Krabach, Wylde and Hogan as students at American University, and Teri and Hogan while working at Crate & Barrel. Krabach and Wylde moved to L.A. a couple of years ago when Krabach transferred to USC; she now works on “The Wayne Brady Show” as assistant to the executive producer and director, and he’s an actor who hosted Comedy Central’s now-defunct “The Chris Wylde Show.” Teri, who works for an Italian clothing company, and Hogan, a TV production assistant, moved here a year ago and took the apartment downstairs from their friends.

Within a few weeks of submitting their online application, the couples were told a location scout would check out their apartments and interview them. They got the official OK in January, and the show was shot in February.

Hogan: “First they let you know they’re interested, and they talk to you on the phone to make sure you have a personality and aren’t like Sheetrock.”

Teri: “We were kind of nervous.”

Wylde: “The worst part was showing people the way we lived before.”

Krabach and Wylde’s “before” apartment shouldn’t have shocked anyone who was ever young and struggling and living in a utilitarian one-bedroom. Their living room contained a much-hated futon sofa, a shabby slipcovered armchair, a Roy Lichtenstein poster and a bookcase. The otherwise presentable hardwood floor was spotted with stains left by a previous tenant’s dog.

Teri and Hogan’s place had a red-shag area rug, a white slipcovered sofa, a wall-mounted CD rack and a TV stand. Their fondness for modern design was evident in their retro-patterned curtains and kidney-shaped side tables.

Although couples on the show are asked to interpret their friends’ taste, the make-overs are almost entirely guided by the designers.

Wylde: “They wanted Vern, and we wanted Laurie. Or Genevieve.”

Teri: “I cannot stand Laurie! Why do you like her?”

Wylde: “Because I like what she does!”

Teri: “You don’t find her annoying?”

Hogan: “Sonja wanted Vern because Vern does a lot of clean, modern stuff.”

Wylde: “She had the whole thing figured out. It was definitely going to be Vern.”

Teri: “I had seen the show the week before, and this woman cried because she said she didn’t want her fireplace touched and Doug built a facade around it. So when the crew got here I was told we got Doug, and I was crying. But Doug was so cool.”

The crew set up camp the day before shooting started, and the carpentry tent was pitched in the building’s small adjacent parking lot. Ty Pennington was the episode’s carpenter.

Designer Doug Wilson used one of Teri and Hogan’s pillows as inspiration for a bold red-and-white stenciled supergraphic covering three walls.

“Gen” Gorder went with a Havana-revisited theme for Krabach and Wylde’s room, using a serene aqua on the walls and ceiling and black on the floor, and designing an entertainment center with a scorched wood-grain finish.

Krabach: “Just to walk into my apartment and have Genevieve and Doug and Ty in my kitchen was so surreal. The first season I watched this show I was obsessed with these people. Now I couldn’t even walk into my own kitchen, it was like this sacred space.”

Wylde: “My favorite show is ‘The Simpsons,’ and it would be like having Bart and Homer and Marge in my kitchen.”

Teri: We really hit it off with Genevieve. She and Paul went to the same camp together. She went to design school, I studied environmental design. I’m a flamenco dancer and she used to live in Spain. The times we weren’t on camera we’d just sit up there and paint and talk.”

Hogan: “We didn’t talk to Chris and Caroline before the show about what they wanted, we all went into it so open. We had a nice place we liked, but we didn’t care if it got changed. Their place looked like crap, and they admitted it.”

Teri: “On TV I said their place is dingy and dark, and they will never forgive me for saying that.”

Hogan: “You meant to say ‘dim.’ ”

Teri: “I didn’t mean dirty. But if you go on the show, you really have to let go of any of your expectations. You sign up for it, so you have to be ready to suffer the consequences, good or bad.”

Shooting in neighboring apartments proved something of a challenge, and the crew went to great lengths to make sure “no beans were spilled, no cats were let out of any bags,” as Wylde puts it.

The couples were blindfolded before they stepped out, cast and crew put tape over any paint stains, and windows were covered with blackout curtains. Well past midnight after the first day of filming, the couples rendezvoused on the corner to talk (not about the design plans) and snack on Oreos.

Wylde: “We were up until 5 a.m. stenciling the walls. We had one stencil. The most difficult thing was stenciling the radiator.”

Teri: “We had to do the floors solely on our own. The hardest thing for me was putting the rivets in the place mats to make the sconces.”

Hogan: “The hardest thing for me was looking like I knew what I was doing when I was with Ty.”

In addition to the red and white walls, Teri and Hogan also got a custom-made U-shaped platform sofa with red cushions and lighting along the base.

Krabach and Wylde had their futon mattress re-covered in white vinyl and their chair slipcovered in camouflage and black fabric, and gained some lighting with wall sconces made from vinyl place mats.

After two days, it was finally time for the grand payoff.

Wylde: “The reveals are absolutely, 100% not faked. Everyone’s huddled behind the monitor watching, and you have to be completely quiet. I was so excited when I saw our place that I said the F-word. Paul did too.”

Teri: “We were done at 4 in the afternoon, and we waited two hours before our reveal, and we were just sitting there freaking out.”

Hogan: “They said we were going to reveal second because it’s based on who had the most work done and how different the room is.

“And we’re like, ‘The room we did is nothing like it was before, so what could they have possibly done in our place?’ ”

Wylde: “We knew Paul and Sonja would love their place. They wanted their living room to look like a really cool cocktail lounge. And everyone’s, like, ‘What the heck did you do to their room? What is that?’ ”

Teri: “I don’t expect everyone to like it because we don’t think everybody could live in it, but I expect people to understand that we like it.”

Krabach: “In the chat rooms people were talking about how much they hated Paul and Sonja’s place. They hated it.”

Hogan: “Everyone thinks that being in the room is going to make you dizzy or give you a headache, and it doesn’t at all.”

The couples have made small changes to their rooms. Teri and Hogan have put a chrome and wood bookcase next to the TV. Krabach and Wylde have returned a round mosaic-framed mirror to the wall, and Connor and Parpie, their dogs, have made a small tear in the vinyl futon cover.

Soon after the show aired in April the four started getting recognized, from the racetrack to restaurants. They’ve stayed friends with the designers and Pennington, and get together or trade e-mails when they can. The experience, they say, was “fantastic”--except for one thing.

Wylde: “We can’t watch the show anymore.”

Krabach: “I’m more into just the reveals now. I used to like watching the whole process.”

Wylde: “It was fun watching it, and then we did it, and that was so much more fun than watching it, and now we’re like, ‘Let’s see if there are any good music videos on.’ ”