Yes, he has lived through it
Knoxville, Tenn.
Burton JABLIN, head of the home-improvement cable network Home & Garden Television, first spied his dream home nearly 10 years ago, during an autumn walk through a cluster of woods that dapple this eastern Tennessee city.
The structure, at the end of a row of five condominiums, was shrouded by overgrown trees and had a mysterious and neglected air. After a tour with his Realtor he knew the 900-square-foot apartment wasn’t large enough for him. But like a character in a love story, Jablin found himself beyond reason.
“It was magical,” he said on a chilly afternoon recently as his neighbors’ laughter tumbled from the porch outside two Palladian windows. “The light was at a beautiful angle through the fall foliage, which made the villa appear to be from another time and place.”
Jablin spent $79,000 on the place and lived for five years in its cramped, slightly dank condition. Then in 2001, he embarked on his own private HGTV experience: a two-year renovation as the apartment was reconceived into a 2,400-square-foot, split-level house. It is now the flagship of the condominiums on the lot.
And so Jablin became the ideal HGTV viewer: someone with a profound appreciation — real or vicarious — for domestic upheaval in the name of personal perfection.
Now in its 10th year, HGTV’s 24-hour slate of interior decorating, landscaping and real estate programs has launched countless renovations, and a wave of competing shows on broadcast and cable. The most popular weekly program, “House Hunters,” follows prospective buyers as they search for their house, and draws an estimated 1.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. They’re exactly the audience members that the network’s biggest advertisers — Home Depot, Lowe’s and GNC — want to reach.
HGTV has expertly tapped into the wealthy, female, middle-age demographic, viewers who are willing — eager, even — to spend hundreds of dollars on a beautifully designed faucet. They’re different, Jablin says, from people interested in rip-off shows on competing networks, such as ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”
“We don’t do shows that make people cry,” he said, referring to the TV moment known as the “reveal” when homeowners get a first look at their newly done house and sob in astonishment.
“The reveal isn’t [our] emphasis,” Jablin said. “That gimmick had its day. Some of HGTV’s shows do involve a makeover, and so a ‘reveal’ is often part of the story, but the payoff for the viewer is not necessarily the final scene. It’s the entire story of how the makeover happens and why.”
On this afternoon, a cluster of aromatherapy candles flickers in several rooms of Jablin’s house, and the fire in his living room crackles, adding a glow to the already mellow color scheme of celery green and cream. Jablin is dressed in a fine, black V-neck sweater with a mustard-gold shirt collar peeking through. Brown twill pants cover his ankle-high boots, and his short, black hair shines with a bit of gel. He is seated on an avocado-colored PierceMartin couch that feels like luxurious chenille.
The lines of the house are precise, and the feeling is uncluttered. “I’m not an expert on design, but I learned by osmosis, on-the-job training,” he said.
A Chicago native and a Harvard graduate, Jablin spent the decade after college paying his TV news reporter dues in metropolitan markets such as L.A. and Chicago. After taking a 16-month hiatus to travel to Nepal, Bali and Scandinavia, he moved to Knoxville to join a fledgling cable channel called HGTV.
It was 1994, and Jablin was the Scripps Networks-owned channel’s first executive producer of programming and its sixth employee. He was hardly a member of the elite design world, and his fundamental (some would say prosaic) design roots motivated him to avoid overpriced industry leaders in Manhattan.
When it came time to make over his home in 2001, he hired local experts with excellent references. Architect and builder Jim McDonough came highly recommended by a colleague of Jablin’s at the network. When McDonough saw Jablin’s 900-square-foot bachelor pad, he advised him to buy another place rather than proceed with the complicated metamorphosis. But Jablin persisted and asked McDonough to come up with a design.
It took months of gentle nudging by Jablin, but McDonough finally produced a plan that included a spiral staircase leading to a new second floor and a living room that would jut out into what had been the driveway.
Jablin explains that his neighbors, all of whom own the condos in which they live, were a serious consideration when he began the renovation. Some of them had lived here for 20 years, and had become his friends. As recompense to residents for more than two years of construction, Jablin repainted the exterior and landscaped the entire plot of land.
The result is an 85-year-old apartment-turned-condo complex that looks more Great Gatsby meets Mediterranean villa than middle-class housing in Knoxville. “It’s sort of like ‘Melrose Place,’ ” Jablin said, hopefully, “but we’re not young enough or interesting enough.”
For the interior decorations, Jablin hired designer Ellen Capito, who has no connections to HGTV. She too initially saw the house as a daunting challenge, not because of Jablin’s importance within home improvement television, but because of the house itself. “This was an unusual home, but he was able to really communicate to me the feeling he wanted and what he didn’t like,” Capito said. “He likes a very clean, linear metropolitan look that’s also cozy. I learn more from what people don’t like, and the first time I met him he showed me pictures from magazines of heavy drapery, really decorated-looking rooms.”
This is the sort of tip that HGTV program hosts urge audience members to do, and Jablin readily admits he learned it from friend Chris Madden, the host of one of HGTV’s former shows, “Interiors by Design.” The look of his walk-in closet (more on that later) was inspired by ads for Poliform, and the idea of the kitchen’s handmade cabinets can be traced back to design magazines Jablin had read.
Both bathrooms were done in white accessories from the Waterworks catalog, including a striking claw-foot bathtub, whose “feet” are actually dark-stained wooden square pillars. “I had to have it, even though I don’t take many baths,” he said.
Capito’s aim was to conjure an inviting, tidy feeling while avoiding the atmosphere of an Ian Schrager hotel. “It needed to be moody, and we did that with texture, lighting and colors,” she said. Every light in the house is on a dimmer. The wrought-iron chandelier in the foyer is a silk-covered Fortuni piece. “We had it all unpainted,” Capito said, reiterating Jablin’s desire for an “unfussy” look.
The candle tips of the PierceMartin dining room chandelier — on a dimmer, of course — are actually silicone, made to look like tiny flames, and on this day Jablin reaches up and bends one nearly in half to demonstrate.
Rooms flow into one another, with archways that have been repeated throughout, although there is not one hallway in the place. The overall effect is a spacious hive of rooms both efficient and all vaguely familiar. The foyer floor is terra-cotta tile, but throughout the majority of the house, the floors are covered with narrow hardwood planks that have been soaked in a mixture of one-half Jacobean stain and one-half ebony. This was McDonough’s idea, and he says the combination evokes the wood’s grainy texture.
“We refined things to their simplest form,” McDonough said. “The fact that the windows and the trim are stained in a warm, very dark color sets the stage.” The doors have been coated in an espresso stain, and the black doorknobs and hinges are by Bouvet.
The window pane kitchen cabinetry was handmade by McDonough, and it appears to float above the recessed lighting. The cabinets are not modular, and the lack of dividers enhances their ability to hold more, while appearing less cluttered.
“It’s a better look. It doesn’t look shiny and new,” he said. “It doesn’t have a factory finish on it.” The countertops were made with speckled granite from Nepsom Gold, a quarry in Central Southern Africa.
The appliances, like Jablin’s four-burner Viking stove and his Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezer, are finished in restaurant-style chrome, even though Jablin is not a gourmet cook or even an avid entertainer. The two pieces of artwork are watercolor still lifes that were painted by Jablin’s now-deceased grandfather. A lithograph of a zebra in the upstairs bedroom that Jablin remembers was a Bar Mitzvah gift to him from a friend of the family.
During Jablin’s two-year renovation, the country went through distinct phases in its perception of a home’s purpose. Immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, there was an urge to cocoon. But over the next two years, the inclination to turn inward was modified, and Americans began to “nest.” Their homes became centers of activities, with more people gathering for TV watching and dinner parties.
HGTV’s popularity grew at such a rate that the inevitable imitations began to pop up, with more attitude and personalities than most HGTV shows — the Learning Channel’s “Trading Spaces,” for example, or the interiors portion of Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
“We were worried at first, but as long as we stay true to design, we’re fine,” Jablin said.
Still, they’ve modified their lineup with new shows designed to entertain as well as provide information. This fall, the network launched “Generation Renovation,” in which an older home is nurtured back to contemporary usefulness and beauty. It’s part of the network’s new strategy of presenting clear “characters” and “story arcs” in an effort to retain its corner on the market.
“In our other shows you hardly met the people. Now, the fundamental difference is that we get to know the person. This experience is entertaining,” Jablin said, adding that the strategy “hits dead center in our demographic,” of adults 25 to 54 and women the same age, which has risen steadily for the last three years.
But for all the shifts in American’s domestic attitudes in the last four years, Jablin has not changed that much. At 44 he is a gracious host, but he’s also a savvy one. There is no guest room or extra bed. In nearly 10 years in this home — the majority of the time spent in its pre-renovated state and only the last 18 months in its remodeled gracefulness — only one person has had the guts to ask to sleep over, and spent the night on the dark leather Brunschwig & Fils couch that occupies the media room, where Jablin spends most of his time.
Here in this earth-toned cave of a room, he has a Sony 42-inch flat-screen, high-definition TV, and an enormous wall-mounted display of 20 out-of-date airline ticket jackets, which he began collecting when he was 5 years old. His upstairs bedroom looks like a fantastic treehouse with dark wooden plantation shutters, a Sisal seagrass rug and a tribal-looking piece from Rugs by Robinson in Atlanta just outside the door. There is a queen-size bed, custom made from PierceMartin, situated in the center of the main wall. Cater-corner to the bed with reading lamps on either side sits a cane chair from India, equipped with arm rests that unfold and extend to become foot rests.
And in the corner sits his grandfather’s Victorian roll-top desk. “He was a stockbroker who had been born into abject poverty in East St. Louis. He was so frugal,” Jablin said. The desk is now fully restored, and the tiny drawers glide in and out of their stations with ease.
The final stop in the house is Jablin’s walk-in closet, an actual room done in blond wood, with built-in sections for different pieces of clothing. “I had counted my clothes and measured my reach,” Jablin said, explaining how he described his dream closet to McDonough. “I think the attention to detail is unusual for anywhere these days.”
And considering Jablin represents the future of design for the masses, take note that plastic tufts of potted grass dot several shelves in the media room and in both bathrooms.
An apology follows quickly. “I know it’s a shame that the head of ‘Home & Garden TV’ has fake plants,” he said, “but I travel so much.”
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HGTV blueprint
1992: Idea for a 24-hour home improvement cable channel is born when Scripps Howard programming executive Kenneth Lowe (no relation to house supply retailer) pitches an idea by sketching a house in which every room has its own TV show.
1994: Launches in 44 markets reaching 6.5 million cable viewers.
1997: Jackson, Wyo., house becomes the first of annual “dream home” giveaways.
1998: Scripps declares HGTV profitable after four years and launches do-it-yourself network, DIY.
2002: Adds live commercial-free coverage of Tournament of Roses Parade, with HGTV gardening experts as hosts.
2004: Available to 86 million cable subscribers.
