Design Star: It's Nate!! It's NATE!!!!!

Okay, so I was gone last week but they have this new thing called a DVR that allowed me to watch the show when I got home. Which i did, and will now recap in a few sentences:

• Karl got all architectural and camera ready and won.


• Mark went all woody [again!] and used some old things he found as wall art [again!].


• Meg hoisted a 200-pound ottoman over her head, and the lifted a Toyota Prius off of a kitten, and half-designed a room with a crooked art display.


• Kelly refused to listen to a five-year-old who wanted bunk beds and should have gone home but for some reason did not.


• Leslie turned a two-year-old's show biz performance room into a guest room with a wonky stage from which she was cancelled.


• Kevin went all pop of color and yappy little dog and, eventually, he went home, too.

Caught up? Good.
This week the designers are tasked with taking one of the smaller condos in their building and using $2500.00 to spruce it up, like say, the owner of the condo might do. They are given identical spaces with furniture and some accessories that they can use or discard. This is like the White Box Challenge from weeks back, but now it's a White Room.
There are no new ideas.
Let's rip:

Meg
For some reason Meg makes up a whole story about the person who lives in her space; some sort of brokedown, trust-fund baby named Graham Wilcox who used to travel but now she's poor and living in a giant loft in Brooklyn and eating Ramen and hanging baskets on the wall.
Oooooooooooookay.
She has the painter paint the room gray and then takes long strips of molding and attached them vertically to the wall. Oh yeah, she paints the molding yellow. All of the designers picked bland and boring paint colors. Did they never hear Kevin talk POP!!!
But the idea of the molding, and the floating shelves attached to each piece, was interesting. What wasn't interesting was the large silver L-bracket you could see beneath each shelf holding it up. Um, Meg? Perhaps some yellow paint on the brackets? Or, better still, get actual floating shelves and notch then around the moldings so you don't see the supports?
Just sayin'.
For her Camera Challenge, presented Live! on The Nate Show, Meg took an old coffee table, painted it gray, and then did some sort of loopy, swirly, squirrelly design on it. Seriously, she called it chic and modern, when it looked like something a seven-year-old might do. And then she goes all Beefy and The Beast and demands that the audience ooh and aah as she paints the table. Frightened, the audience submits.
But the judges loved the fact that Meg finally finished a room, on her own, and on time, and she gets the win.

Karl
He's mostly worried about the Camera Challenge since he's been a little off in that area. And he's even more afraid when he's told he'll be presenting Live! on The Nate Show. But his repurposing, or creating something a homeowner can do themselves, was a cool idea. He took store-bought, boxy shelves, stood them om end, and used actual books to make the book shelves. It was a cool ideas, and worked in his space, but would have looked better had there been more of them.
Still, his presentation, again, Live! on The Nate Show, went very smoothly and he generated oohs and aahs naturally, not through inti-Meg-ation.
His one mistake, other than more sad paint colors, was to take what looked like a bunch of paint stirrers and make them into a small dot of a clock along the biggest wall in the condo. It looked a little lonely.
But, because of his shelves and his Camera success, Karl gets a Second Place finish and some more tears.

Mark
Hottie Mark is at a loss. I so wanted to hug him, but then, i always want to snuggle a hot Latino. He gets all caught up in what to do for the Camera Challenge--to repurpose an item that a homeowner can do themselves--that he forgoes things like art. And design.
There's a lot of moving of furniture. A lot of painters painting. Some hanging of boxes all crookedy and crazy on the wall, and the purchase of some thrift store chairs that he could have painted some fabulous color and reupholstered as part of a, oh, i dunno, Camera Challenge.
Instead, he opts to silver-leaf a desk lamp because everyone can silver-leaf, right? I know.
Mark presents his Camera Challenge Live! on The Nate Show and gets all tongue-tied and nervous and calls silver-leaf tinfoil. i imagine a lot of bored housewives in some of the square states rushing to the kitchen for the Reynolds Wrap, and a hot glue gun, then cursing Mark when it doesn't turn out well.
Still, even with all his troubles--Hey! Maybe he should have gone woody and recycled wall art again!--Mark gets a save.

Kelly
She decides to create the condo space as if it were her own.
Mistake One.
I mean she's a suburban wife and mother, not your typical New Yorker. It'll be like Iowa in Brooklyn, and those two don't really mesh.
She buys rag rugs and then decides to use them to reupholster some stools. Ooh, never seen that before. Padding. Rug. Stool. Staple gun. Done. Très exciting.
Mistake Two.
And, in all her shopping, she forgets to buy window treatments for the one huge window that hits you in the face as you enter the space. So, she hangs table-cloths up there, and then places sheers behind them, and lower than them.
Mistake Three.
Her Camera Challenge, presented Live! on The Nate Show, was very clinical and dull. She must have said, two or three times, while holding up a rug, a stool a piece of foam, and a staple gun, "We've all seen these before." And we have, which made it a boring segment.
Mistake Four.
Out the door, Kelly. You've been cancelled.

Rants
I have a few.

This season is dull. Except for a few designs in the White Box Challenge there have been no Oh my god moments and no Wows. It's dull. And boring. And it's been seen before.

Genevieve Gorder is a moron with the design sense of dirt. I mean, the woman wore culottes and pumps last week, and is more high school girl giddy on TV than anything else.

Vern Yip is an annoying little queer who says things like "super interesting." The last time anyone said super interesting was in the 80s, and she was a high school girl. In fact, I think she was Genevieve Gorder.

Nate Berkus. I mean, come on, without Oprah, it's be Nate who? And his raves about Meg had me wondering: He's from Chicago. She's from Chicago. I sense a schoolyard reunion, where the bully is on a relaity show and the bullied one is a judge and too afraid the bully will take his lunch money again so he picks her as the winner.

And finally: Bring back Candice for crying out loud.

buh-bye, Kellie. You are out of this picture!