What America’s Favorite Home Reno Show Reveals Now

25 years after its debut, "Trading Spaces" exposes the reality of wanting something different out of our homes.

Americans live in cruel homes. ­People think that owning a home­ will transform them, but cruel homes make people feel lacking—in security, com­pany, stability, love—­even while promising to provide those things, a cycle leading to people feeling hollowed out, scraped to the point of feeling separated from themselves, not feeling real even while being tricked into thinking­ they’re better off than they are. Cruel homes sell back bits of the feeling of real­ity that they take away.

This cruelty isn’t uniquely American. It has roots in some of the most fundamental ways that many­ people think about being in the world. It springs up through the origins of colonialism from the basic promises of Chris­tian­ity that find a perfect vessel in which to blossom in Amer­ica. And in reality TV homes, those vessels take some surprising shapes.

Consider Trading Spaces, TLC’s classic home-improvement show, which I took in as a teenager, slack-­jawed, on after­noons in the early 2000s. Trading Spaces was a happy show with its bright colors, funky background music, and radiant host, Paige Davis, with her perfect pixie cut. Mostly the show was comforting and fun, not cruel, and it inspired me to paint my bedroom a questionable hot dog combo of mustard yellow and ketchup red. Like millions of ­others, I was rapt by the show’s positive glow.

Trading Spaces had a pretty simple structure: Every ­episode, neighbors swapped homes for a­ couple of days, and with the help of designers and carpenters and $1,000, redid one room in each other’s homes. At the end, the neighbors would go back to their homes, and cameras would watch while they saw their new spaces for the first time.

Some of the renovations were modest—­new wall colors, rearranged furniture, and built-in shelving, maybe—­and others were more extreme: a basement turned "beach" with real sand covering the floor, an upside-­down room with the furniture hanging from the ceiling. Reactions varied from squeals of joy to sobs. The show traveled around the United States, featuring different residents each time and a rotating cast of designers, who became the show’s stars alongside Davis and the carpenters. It premiered in 2000, originally in a 4 p.m. weekday slot, but when it was so successful, executives added a prime-time airing. It became a smash and was nominated for prime-time Emmys in 2002 and 2003. It was light, it was fun, it was breezy. It was a hit.

Ty Pennington, who was one of the show’s on-­screen carpenters, became a particularly ­popular personality on the show, and he tells me about a Beatlemania-­esque moment when fans mobbed one of the show’s sets: "I couldn’t even get to my car to get out, and I had to put a trash can over my head, and like, I could smell, like, the garbage juice that was already dripping on me. And I was like, wow, so this is it. This is fame. Like, it smells like garbage."

"It was a movement," Genevieve Gorder, another of the show’s designers, tells me. "It ­wasn’t just a show."

A living room transformation from TLC’s home reno show Trading Spaces.

Photos © A. Smith & Co. Productions / Courtesy Everett Collection

The show’s host Paige Davis and one of its carpenters, Ty Pennington.

Photo © TLC / Courtesy of Everett Collection

Designers Genevieve Gorder and Douglas Wilson were designers on the show.

Photo © A. Smith & Co. Productions / Courtesy Everett Collection

See the full story on Dwell.com: What America’s Favorite Home Reno Show Reveals Now

When Did Scandinavian Design Get So Boring?

Everyone’s been thinking it. Now, legacy brands and emerging designers alike are talking about how to keep the region a part of the conversation.

This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.

At a dinner in Stockholm earlier this month celebrating the late Danish designer Verner Panton’s 100th birthday, Erik Rimmer, editor of Bo Bedre, the unofficial bible of Nordic design, put questions to a panel of design-world honchos to get a pulse check on the future of the region’s long-standing dominance over our homes. The room shimmered tip-to-toe in chrome, including Panton’s Panthella lamps and Pantonova seating, runners lining banquette tables, and a cascading backdrop for the panel. Rimmer had a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he baited a big hook. "I’ve covered a lot of Scandinavian design in my career," he said, "and I must say, it can be quite boring." What did they think about that, he wanted to know.

Nobody swallowed the barb, but there was nibbling. Phillipp Materna, the design lead for Ferm Living, a high-output Danish brand that makes blob mirrors and bouclé lounges for millennials matriculating from Ikea, said he "wasn’t going to go there." (If we did need a new perspective, though, he suggested we might look to distant shores; Materna himself is from Canada.) Louis Poulsen’s chief design officer, Monique Faber, gave Rimmer’s prompt the side eye, too—was she really going to say the modernist goliath she helms is snoozy? Nobody on the panel of four was ready to agree with Rimmer—fair enough. But collectively, there was an admission that yes, there might be room for some fresh thinking.

The squeamish moment during Stockholm’s design week embodied what has now become a long-simmering anxiety for Scandinavian design: that it might finally be losing its luster. Its aesthetics and now-clichéd descriptors—sleek, minimalist, clean-lined, natural, hygge, timeless—surged through the late 2010s. (In the last few years of the decade, Dwell ran no fewer than 50 headlines using the word "Scandinavian" to describe a home—since 2020, there have been far fewer than that.) Several of the influencers, critics, and designers Dwell spoke with at the beginning of the year said they were done with minimalism (to many, shorthand for the Scandi aesthetic) and ready for richness and complexity, or at least to step away from the idea that subtlety is the only path toward serenity—or that paring things down is an end in itself.

An exhibit during Stockholm design week curated by furniture shop Nordic Nest celebrated the late Danish designer Verner Panton’s 100th birthday, showing his Pantonova modular seating and Flowerpot pendants, and Poul Henningsen’s PH lamps, all in chrome.

Photo by Duncan Nielsen

Pockets beyond the Nordics reflect a desire for something punchier, too. From Puerto Rico, Estudio PM won a design contest last year at ICFF, North America’s biggest furniture fair, for tables and stools made from reclaimed textiles, one of which draws inspiration from horned masks worn during festivals on the island to ward off evil. The pieces are essentially collages celebrating ephemerality, "intended to change over time as an exploration of form and narrative." Some of the most memorable pieces from 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen last year came from Belgium. Valerie Objects, based in Antwerp, debuted Klasky-Csupo–colored lighting by design duo Muller Van Severn based on a lamp shade they unearthed from a flea market—the results might feel precious, but the input isn’t. At We Design Beirut in Lebanon, which ran its second edition in 2025, if designers put anything on a pedestal, it was only to knock them off of it. In one moment that can really only be described as performance craft, Dwell’s managing editor Jack Balderrama Morley looked on as a ceramics artist shattered pieces on the ground only to work them into new pieces on the fly. "It was a simple but effective metaphor for the continual reconstruction that Lebanese designers must take on," he says. More important than the act of preservation, or sealing an object in time as to crystallize it into some kind of gesamtkunstwerk, is the practice itself of destruction in the name of perpetual renewal.

Those holding the keys to the masterworks of the Nordics, including Faber at Louis Poulsen, do not enjoy this kind of liberty. (Although it is exhilarating to imagine Carl Hansen & Søn sledgehammering a Wishbone chair and puzzling it into some kind of new seating and the horror devotees of the Danish designer might suffer.) In Stockholm, it was apparent that heritage brands were grappling with how, exactly, they might evolve. Often, a brand’s biggest obstacle is its own legacy, and the farther back it reaches, it seems, the more difficult to stray from its core offering: In celebration of its 300th anniversary, Rörstrand, the Swedish tableware brand, only now released a colorway that marks a meaningful departure from its usual greens and blues, a caramel tone called Jubilee. (For tea cup sets gifted to press, including this writer, it was the classic blue.)

Rörstrand is the second oldest homewares brand still in existence in Europe, after German company Meissen. Founded in 1726, the company showed pieces in its classic delft-inspired blue, a newish green colorway, and a 300th anniversary collection in a caramel hue.

Photo by Duncan Nielsen

Swedish rug maker Kasthall, founded in 1889, partnered with London design studio Barber Osgerby to bring a fresh perspective to the brand, says the company’s CEO, Mirkku Kullberg. The new collection will debut in Milan this year. In Stockholm, Edward Barber explained how he iterated in real time with weavers in Sweden to determine new colorways.

Photo by Duncan Nielsen

See the full story on Dwell.com: When Did Scandinavian Design Get So Boring?

Before & After: They Rebuilt Their Home’s Historic Brick Facade—but the Back Is a Different Story

"These clients really wanted it to be as dead accurate as it could be," dSPACE Studio architect Jordan Snittjer says of the Chicago town house’s masonry, which transitions to an overhauled interior and a glassy rear extension.

In Chicago’s landmarked Ukrainian Village, rows of brick town houses still stand from the late 19th century, when waves of Ukrainian immigrants settled in the district. The densely populated neighborhood was largely spurred by the 1895 construction of an elevated train line, and today many of the homes are finding new life through historic preservation.

Having restored several homes in Chicago, local firm dSPACE Studio Architecture was excited to take on a project in Ukrainian Village, where they had yet to work. "The neighborhood is just 15 minutes from our studio," says the firm’s founder Kevin Toukoumidis, who worked with Jordan Snittjer on the design. "The project was a negotiation between historic preservation and a contemporary architectural intervention—the past and present converging." 

The homeowners, Murat Ahmed and Katherine Mackenzie, are patrons of the arts and avid collectors—and they were game to treat the home like a livable objet d’art.

Before: Exterior

Before: The home’s original brick facade had been covered over with a faux finish called Permastone in the 1970s.

Photo courtesy dSPACE Studio

Before: While the couple were hopeful the original brick could be saved, it had been too damaged over time, so dSPACE Studio set out to recreate the facade.

Photo courtesy dSPACE Studio

When Murat and Katherine bought the property in 2020, they were excited to move out of their downtown apartment and into a historic home where they could literally touch grass. "We were drawn to this neighborhood as one that would retain its design and history over time," recalls Katherine. "Over the years, the house had been split into three small rental units and had seen a variety of renovations, so we knew we wanted to turn it back into a single-family home."

The street-facing facade had been covered over with a concrete faux stone material called Permastone in the 1970s, but Murat and Katherine were hopeful they could remove it and bring the home’s original character back to life. "After finding a photo of the house before the Permastone went up, we knew we wanted to restore the original brick facade," says Katherine.

After: Exterior

Working with local company Bricks Incorporated, the designers faithfully recreated the home’s original brick facade, complete with custom-made decorative shapes.

Photo: Mike Schwartz

See the full story on Dwell.com: Before & After: They Rebuilt Their Home’s Historic Brick Facade—but the Back Is a Different Story
Related stories:

• Even the Loft-Level Netting Has Water Views at This Chilean Beach House
• Budget Breakdown: Their Dream Home Can Come Later—First, They Built a Tiny Cabin for $40K
• An Expansion Preserves What Makes This Melbourne Midcentury So Renowned

Tall Trees Surround This $3.6M Mountainside Midcentury Near Vancouver

Barry Downs and Fred Hollingsworth designed the 1967 home with long banks of windows, extensive wood paneling, and a pool at the forest’s edge.

Location: 6510 Madrona Crescent, West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Price: $4,950,000 CAD (approximately $3,631,400 USD)

Year Built: 1967

Architect: Barry Downs & Fred Hollingsworth

Renovation Date: 2020

Renovation Architect: Burgers Architecture

Footprint: 3,662 square feet (5 bedrooms, 4 baths)

Lot Size: 0.21 Acres

From the Agent: "A secluded woodland sanctuary reimagined for modern life, Madrona House by Barry Downs and Burgers Architecture offers a rare synthesis of West Coast heritage, privacy, and refined family living in West Vancouver. The arrival sequence—from open street, across the bridge, and into the sheltered light of the entry—acts as a decompression chamber, gently washing away the urgency of the city. The layout is intuitive, vertically separating public treetop living above from the private retreat below. The bedrooms are tucked into the lower level, all oriented toward the secluded pool terrace."

A zinc-covered gas fireplace warms the living room.

Photo by James Han

Photo by James Han

Basaltina tile flooring gives way to a walnut-clad staircase.

Photo by James Han

See the full story on Dwell.com: Tall Trees Surround This $3.6M Mountainside Midcentury Near Vancouver
Related stories:

• For $310K, You Can Scoop Up a Revamped Midcentury Duplex in Minnesota
• Wait Till You See the Conversation Pit in This $475K Oklahoma Midcentury
• If You Dream of the Catskills, Here’s a Brand-New Cabin for $1.3M

For $310K, You Can Scoop Up a Revamped Midcentury Duplex in Minnesota

The 1955 home comes with original wood paneling, new built-ins, and a separate unit on the lower level.

Location: 635 West Summit Ave, Fergus Falls, Minnesota

Price: $310,000

Year Built: 1955

Footprint: 3,128 square feet (4 bedrooms, 2 baths)

Lot Size: 0.24 Acres

From the Agent: "Step inside this beautiful, expansive four-plus bedroom, two bath home and fall in love with its warm character and thoughtful design. The midcentury-modern style shines through with vaulted and beamed ceilings, custom touches, and lots of natural light streaming through the new windows. The bright, main-floor living room invites you to relax and soak up the sunshine, while the two family rooms—each featuring a cozy fireplace—offer perfect spaces for gatherings or quiet nights in. You’ll appreciate the modern lighting, abundant storage, and two-stall garage for convenience." 

Photo by Kaleb Rotering

Recessed lighting makes the upstairs common areas glow.

Photo by Kaleb Rotering

A wall of east-facing windows spans the dining and living room.

Photo by Kaleb Rotering

See the full story on Dwell.com: For $310K, You Can Scoop Up a Revamped Midcentury Duplex in Minnesota
Related stories:

• Wait Till You See the Conversation Pit in This $475K Oklahoma Midcentury
• If You Dream of the Catskills, Here’s a Brand-New Cabin for $1.3M
• For $1.8M, a Palm Springs Midcentury That Feels Like a Trip to the Tropics

L.A.’s Graffiti Towers Might Have a Buyer—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

Tom Pritzker’s Epstein ties complicate the Pritzker Prize announcement, Trump gets swift approval of his White House ballroom plans, and more.

• Downtown L.A.’s Oceanwide Plaza, which has become known as the Graffiti Towers for the street art covering its facades, have found a potential buyer. KPC Group and Lendlease are teaming up in a joint venture to acquire the long stalled and bankrupt project for $470 million. (Bloomberg)
• After it was recently revealed that Tom Pritzker had extensive contact with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire and heir to the Hyatt Foundation has stepped down as its executive chairman. The news is now delaying this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize announcement, which typically happens the first week of March. (The New York Times)

• The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—which is supposed to be an independent federal agency, but is stacked with appointees of Donald Trump—approved plans for the $400 million White House ballroom after a single virtual hearing, despite ongoing litigation and public outcry. Here’s how the approval was whisked through. (Bloomberg)

• In 1986, writer and native New Yorker Judith Chernaik had the idea to slip poetry into the ad slots of the London Underground, turning packed train cars into ad hoc poetry galleries. Now, Poems on the Underground reaches millions of commuters, and has even inspired other programs of the like. (The New York Times)

Even renters of "affordable" housing in NYC are struggling to pay their rent, prompting calls for a new diversion court to fast-track aid and keep residents housed.

Photo by Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

• NYC’s so-called "affordable" housing is proving too expensive for many low-income tenants, with a recent analysis finding that government-subsidized landlords filed more than a third of the city’s 120,000 eviction lawsuits in 2024, largely over unpaid rent, prompting calls for more emergency aid and rent assistance. (Gothamist)

Top photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

From the Archive: The Chicago Factory That Doubled as Designer Michael Heltzer’s Family Home

Signature pieces and leftover materials from the late founder’s namesake furniture company cohabitated with him, his wife, and their three children in the same building where the line was manufactured.

Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the December 2001 issue.  

The Heltzers of Ravenswood, Chicago, have the kind of unconventional lifestyle that might belong to the characters in a John Irving novel. However, instead of residing in a ramshackle hotel or a boarding school, they live in a furniture factory.

Actually, the three-story brick building was built in the 19th century to house a candy factory, with a small orchard next door to supply homegrown cherry flavor. It is one of a string of industrial buildings, all past their prime, stretched out along a railroad line that used to carry freight but is now mostly used by commuter trains. Michael Heltzer, 40, a furniture designer and manufacturer, purchased the building from the Chicago Historical Society in 1987. When he moved in, the former orchard was a vacant lot cluttered with empty Thunderbird and MD 20/20 bottles. He camped out on the third floor and began, in a modest way, to manufacture steel, concrete, and glass tables and chairs downstairs.

Today, the Heltzer factory takes up 13,000 square feet of the building, including a basement metal shop, a first-floor wood shop, and an office that occupies half of the second floor. Finished pieces are stored in a warehouse several blocks away, and are sold through a string of showrooms, most notably one in the Chicago Merchandise Mart.

The factory building also houses a floor and a half of living space (3,400 square feet) for the Heltzers and their three children, George, Rose, and Henry, who range in age from two to seven. While urbanites across America move into lofts that are often carved out of facsimiles of industrial buildings, the Heltzers live in a real factory that is still very much a factory.

Michael Heltzer started out his professional life as a lawyer at a white-shoe New York firm, Milbank Tweed. But Heltzer, whose wardrobe favors T-shirts, worn jeans, and dust-coated clogs, was not at home on Wall Street. "I knew I was in trouble when I started picking up stuff on the street and making things at night," he recalls. Eventually, he left New York behind, moved back to his native Chicago, and started taking classes at the Chicago Art Institute, while continuing to practice law.

"A teacher from the Art Institute gave me keys to his factory," Michael continues. He spent all his spare time learning how to use vintage, prewar machine tools. "I was welding, forming, bending."

Heltzer’s first product was a glass-and-stainless-steel cafe table on a concrete pedestal. Using contacts he’d made through family and friends, he sold it directly to architects and restaurant owners. "I got 6o orders the first month," Michael says. "Then I quit the law."

Today, the Heltzer line consists of over 150 products, everything from teak-covered coat hooks (they use up the scrap wood left over from larger pieces of furniture) to wall units, all linked by a shiny, stainless-steel aesthetic.

When he moved into the old factory and began the long process of restoring it, Heltzer was single. In 1991, his girlfriend, Elizabeth, a social worker, moved in and in 1993 they were married. "When I moved in, it was Michael and two people working with him downstairs," says Elizabeth, 37. "Upstairs, it was a bedroom and an open loft space."

As soon as Michael and Elizabeth started having children, they began carving rooms out of the raw space. "Henry was born in January of ’94. We needed the space to be different, so we turned a walk-in closet off the bedroom into his room. As the business started growing, more things came upstairs."

The empty loft gradually filled up with the ever growing Heltzer line of furniture.

"This was the showroom," Elizabeth says. And she remembers the old days, when potential clients would call and say they were on their way over. She and Michael would frantically clean up the mess made by a family that was growing almost as fast as the product line.

"When Rose was born, it pushed us out of the back of the building, and we moved to the front. Then the back space was for the kids." The room in the front, which was the primary bedroom, is now dominated by a sleeper sofa and a VCR. Elizabeth calls it the "late-night movie room." Hanging over the sofa is an old black-and-white scene showing some big piece of industrial equipment at work. It looks like one of Lewis Hine’s photos of heroic factory workers, but Michael says he found it in a dumpster. Today, the parental bedroom is, once again, toward the rear of the building.

The floor immediately downstairs was rented out to tenants, and when they moved out, bedrooms for the two older kids were framed and painted down there. Then George was born and a third bedroom was added.

The style of the Heltzer furniture sets the overall tone for the living space: Room dividers and stair rails are made from woven strips of mahogany that are used in the furniture line. The bathroom is tiled with hand cut pieces of aqua slate left over from the renovation of the Chicago showroom. The prototypes for the teak hooks hang on the bathroom wall. The dining table and chairs are signature Heltzer pieces in steel, glass, and wood. One of the latest products, a glass birdbath on a concrete pedestal, is out in the garden.

Downstairs, the small, brightly painted children’s rooms surround a communal playroom that is outfitted in pure Heltzer. Stainless-steel panels were custom designed for the children so they could hang up their art projects with magnets. They have their own "work" area, where small chairs surround stainless-steel tables mounted on wheels. Michael also made a series of wooden hutches for their toys and art supplies.

On a summer afternoon, the youngest, George, can be found sprawled, bottle in mouth, on a beanbag chair in front of a Sesame Street video while his older brother and sister are at day camp. Unofficially, the play area extends into the office immediately next door, where Rose often hides under the desk of the marketing manager.

See the full story on Dwell.com: From the Archive: The Chicago Factory That Doubled as Designer Michael Heltzer’s Family Home
Related stories:

• They Built the Most Colorful Home on the Block. What Do the Neighbors Think?
• A London Home’s Glassy Addition Gives the Owners Room to Grow
• Sandblasted Cedar Blocks Finish This Island Home in British Columbia