Kim Myles represented alot of visual vamps out there. She's in her mid 30's. She's had a few different jobs. She has personal style and poise. She slogged it out on Design Star and beat out some pretty good contestants. We wanted a swell girl to win, and she did it.
I have been really looking forward to her show Myles of Style (HGTV Thursday 8:30 PM).
The first show was shaky. The show's pace is fine. But the design work was shaky. The side kick Anthony is great. Kim as a host is great. Kim as a designer is not so great. The finished room was disjointed.
Okay, so it was opening night jitters.
So onto the second show.
It's an orange bedroom. The main problem is that the couple are slobs. They have some interesting furniture. They need to clean their room, and rearrange the furniture. But that's not a TV show, is it?
So Kim comes up with the concept of a hotel suite. Not too original, and I still don't get why people get jazzed to have their rooms look like an impersonal hotel room, no matter how luxe it is. And there's no maid service to keep it looking like a fancy hotel room.
There's some crafty table the dude made, so she takes her color cues from this crappy table.
She ends up doing a soft wall, really just floor to ceiling, wall to wall, curtains, in guess what color - orange!
So she paints the wall some tan color that looks like a lighter version of the old orange.
She ditches their bed, which really was nice - maybe removing the foot board, and repositioning it, and putting some nice bedding on it would have been enough.
But no. She has Anthony make a bed. A platform bed with the sides covered and padded with some horrible jacquard red fabric. It looked like a sleazy water bed. Then the tired padded headboard, in three sections of MDF covered with three different fabrics, in orange, gold, and red. The batting and foam and fabric were poorly executed, and when the three pieces were stacked horizontally over the bed, they looked lumpy and uneven. To add to this horror, two cheap looking silver metal desk lamps were screwed into the headboard as reading lamps.
Then the dude makes two more hokey poky tile tables. And I swear you could see a grout dribble on one of them. The tables were not the right scale for the over padded bed.
The flat screen TV was placed on a too small flat pack looking credenza, all the rage now at Target. It floated all lonely in front of the soft wall.
Some little hippie dippy cupboard the dude had crammed into some weird niche, remained. Kim cleverly turned it into a wine bar. Cool idea, except no wine bottles or glasses fit in the ugly thing. She could have put some chunky floating shelves in that niche.
Anthony made some new closet doors with a spilt medallion in the center, that looked like a cheap Jonathan Adler knockoff.
Kim designed a window seat in another awkward niche. The space wasn't a proper window seat proportion, and she just threw some pillows on a ledge, along with a tiny sheepskin rug. She hangs a teeny awful light fixture in this "window seat" niche, and calls it a chandelier.
One wall got dozens of little shelves for some flat red candles. Who does this? Have you ever had to clean up candle wax? Red candle wax?
The whole hot mess looked like a hooker hotel.
The next episode has to do with a couple's home office and their dog.
I hope it's better than the first two episodes.
It's okay to do budget things, but it's not okay if it looks really cheap.
I think Kim is over thinking her projects, feeling the pressure to be clever and be a designer.
She should do her rooms, like she does hair, and like she dresses, and how she's lived her life. She has so much talent, but she's floundering.
The photo is of Kim with the original swell girl, Cynthia Rowley, from In Style Magazine.
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