Style runs the gamut from white to beige

“I think that HGTV needs a designer with a lot of pop, lots of color and an infectious personality.” So proclaimed Lisa Millard, a commercial restaurant designer from Berwick, Penn., on last month’s introductory episode of Season 2 of “Design Star” (9 p.m. Sundays). Millard declared that her goal was to bring “the punk element” to the show, and in the first challenge, she gave it the CBGB’s try, using stencils and spray paint on the walls, and creating sculptures from distressed phone books.

She was, natch, the first to go. “What about function?” sighed Vern Yip, the saltiest of the show’s three judges. Millard suffered a speedier exit than even Florida “creative design specialist” Robb Mariani, who, in the same challenge -- which was to design different spaces in the Las Vegas penthouse the contestants live in -- accessorized a living room space with a car door attached to the wall. It was, he said, “a design metaphor, doors open and close in life.” Really?

Sanding down the margins is an HGTV hallmark -- the channel aims for what can only be described as an aggressive homogeneity. Across its various home-improvement offerings -- “Designed to Sell,” “Secrets That Sell,” “Mission: Organization” and more -- the central message is clear: Operating at the mean is preferable to idiosyncratic style. Last season’s winner, David Bromstad, now hosts “Color Splash,” a series on the network that fits the “neutrality rules” mandate neatly. “Design Star” host Clive Pearse’s other HGTV show, “Designed to Sell,” is fundamentally about stripping homes of their personalities so that they’ll appeal to a wide range of buyers looking for blank canvases upon which they can inscribe their personalities. It is, in some sense, anti-design.

That same tameness suffuses “Design Star,” though this season there are at least a few contestants resisting it. Best is Josh Johnson, who has feathered hair and shirts unbuttoned down to the sternum and describes his aesthetic as “the love child of Little Richard and Charo, kind of like a rhinestone soufflé.”

Challenges on “Design Star” are a bit less flashy than those on the similarly themed “Top Design,” on Bravo. (“Star” also has one of the cheesiest dismissals in all of reality competition TV: A huge metal door swings shut behind the eliminated contestant, after which an ON AIR light flickers off.) In tonight’s challenge, each designer must reshape a room using only elements purchased at a 99-cent store. There are some strokes of genius: using various food items as design elements in tabletops or on floors, an Easter basket turned lampshade, plates that become sconces.

And then there’s Todd Davis, a surfing and skateboarding contractor from San Francisco. In the first challenge, he built a quarter-pipe and was deemed playful. He speaks frequently of being in “fifth gear.” Tonight, he turns his room into a tidal wave -- “couch surfing,” he calls it. The walls are painted like an approaching ocean, and all furniture save the couch is tossed against one wall, as if water had carelessly sloshed it away. It’s the only room of the eight that doesn’t rely primarily on symmetry and space definition through paint and long lines.

“Every single design in there is the exact same,” Davis says of his competition. “They got two colors, they used tape, they bought knickknacks and they’re putting them on the wall. I’m here to push the level of design. Playing it safe and just going for the win, it’s just not going to cut it for me.”

Golden-boy bravado aside, what Davis created was not a livable design so much as an art piece, though admittedly, it was far better art than Millard’s. But will it last? It’s only a matter of time, one imagines, before Yip wonders: What about function?