'Trading Spaces' decorating guru adored by fans
By Kyra Kirkwood The truth about home decorating, according to "Trading Spaces" star decorator Frank Bielec: "I have never seen a U-Haul driving behind a hearse," he said with his slight Southern drawl. "You can't take it with you. The things that are important about a room are the love and memories that happen there, not what it looks like." The "Frankisms" don't stop there. Bielec, who looks a bit like a cleanly shorn Santa Claus, teaches life lessons with the same aplomb as he rips off kitchen counter tops and splatters walls with leather-like finish paint. "I hope I get people to stop apologizing for how things are," he said. "This is the now. Deal with it. Go with the moment. Live each day as if it were your last, honey, because tomorrow just might be." Bielec appeared before packed crowds at the 48th Annual GMC Southern California Home and Garden Show at the Anaheim Convention Center. The event, which runs through Sunday, features more than 750 exhibitors offering gadgets, ideas and professionals from the gardening, home-improvement, cooking, decorating and remodeling arenas. From painting vines on walls to dishing trash on his "Trading Spaces" co-workers, Bielec was one of the show's biggest attractions. His audiences loved this teddy bear of a man and let him know with laughter and applause. "I used to be this fat guy who mowed his lawn," Bielec said in a rare serious moment. "And now I'm Frank from `Trading Spaces.' To take a little man from Texas and show him an enormous amount of love, it's touched me." Bielec thought it unlikely he'd be selected to star on Discovery Channel's hit decorating series which each week features two neighbors redoing two rooms in their neighbors' homes, aided by a designer, a carpenter and a $1,000 budget. "My friends think it's hysterical that they'd trust me in a room full of people and paint brushes," Bielec said. After he got the part, Bielec predicted "Trading Spaces" would last six weeks. That was three years ago. (The show on which it was based was "Changing Rooms," a hit in Europe. "I've eaten my words since then," he said. "I'm just amazed by it." As the crowd gathered for his first show of the week at the home show, Bielec bantered with the group, stopping only when a newcomer screamed in delight at the sight of this Texan in red-flame shoes. "Frank!" shrieked Yogie Weinmann of Long Beach as she clapped her hands and jumped up. "He's so talented! He walks into a room and he can do anything." Bielec said he's amazed people let him and the other designers into their houses to completely revamp a room when they aren't there. "I wouldn't have anyone under God come into my house and do a room," he gasped in feigned horror. "What a nightmare!" "Trading Places" homeowners often have to wait a year after they apply to see if they are selected for the show. Bielec remembers one neighbor in particular who screamed when he saw Bielec standing on the front porch the day before the filming commenced. However, unlike his fans, this gentleman was not screaming for joy. "He said, `Please don't paint farm animals on my wall!'" It's true Bielec once engineered a kitchen revamp that was spiced up with a painted-on egg layer. "Now I've only done one chicken in the history of `Trading Spaces' and now I'm labeled a procurer of fowl," he said. "My God! You'd think I put an entire farm scene on the wall." Bielec said he admires his show co-workers. "We're all like family," he said. "It's like summer camp for bad adults. Hilda (Santo-Tomas) is there for the room, Doug (Wilson) is there to wreak carnage. I've seen Hilda stand on a kitchen stool and pound a nail in the wall with the heel of her $800 Prada mule. I love her for that." He shared bits of "Trading Spaces" trivia: Designer Laurie Hickson-Smith gave birth to a baby boy named Gibson, two more designers will join the show next season, carpenter Ty Pennington "is beautiful and talented" and practical jokes flourish on set. "I have been known to Super Glue (Ty's) drill bits to the case," Bielec snickered. Bielec said designers and team members bond during those two days of backbreaking labor giving birth to a new room on the show. "That stuff coming off me isn't Georgio... it's sweat, honey," said Bielec. "You share everything from body fluids to ideas." Bielec doesn't stick around after the work is done to see what the homeowners' reactions are to the redo. "If we like the room and we've worked real hard, I'm OK with that," he said. "I don't even judge my rooms as beautiful or not. I just judge if I've had a good time with my team. I don't get a buzz from decorating as I do from working with the people." Decorating isn't brain surgery, he said. Anyone featured on the show can do it, even if they aren't blessed with a designing flair. "You work with their strengths," said Bielec. "I like it if they're not Martha Stewart; they don't have any preconceived notions." People should learn to listen to their "inner decorator," following what it tells them to do, instead of what glossy, upscale magazines dictate, he said. "Just do what you like and go with it," Bielec said. "You don't have to listen to trends, you don't have to follow the herd... just to be eaten by wolves in the end. Anything goes!" Bielec adores color, despite living in an all-white home. People should use hues to accessorize, and those hues should flatter the people who live there, he said. "So when you sit in that room or on that couch, you look good," Bielec drawled. "If you go into a room and can't think of conceiving a child in there, something's wrong." His fans love Bielec for his down-home wit and common-sense designs. "He gave me the courage to do my room like old leather," said Cheryl Goddard of Colton. She drove an hour to the home show so her daughter, 10-year- old Kelsey, could get Bielec's autograph and present him with a hand-drawn picture book. "We love him; he's our favorite." |
