A Reality Show Whose Star Is the House

Families' hard-luck stories, their run-down houses and the designers' ingenuity add up to a sure-fire ratings formula.

In early August, a post titled "A 12-Square-Meter Shoebox on Shanghai's North Sichuan Road Gets an Extreme Makeover: The Hardest Floor Plan Ever" went viral on WeChat Moments, and many people discovered a show called Dream Home Makers (《梦想改造家》) because of it. The show's team later issued a statement through its official account pointing out that the post mixed up details from different episodes and gave no copyright credit. The statement drew far fewer readers: under 40,000.

The post spread because of the gap between the misery of living in a "shoebox" and the ingenuity behind the "extreme makeover." It was plainly untrue, but it worked as a concentrated extract of what makes the show succeed. Watch a few episodes of Dream Home Makers and you will find that every detail plays on the same contrast.

The show, produced by Dragon TV, now rivals hit TV dramas in the ratings. In Corx's August ranking of special programs on provincial satellite channels across 34 cities, it came first two weeks running. Its competitors in the same time slot include Jiangsu TV's quiz show Open Sesame and Hunan TV's youth reality show Metamorphosis.

Dream Home Makers grew out of Very Beneficial Life (《非常惠生活》), a home renovation show on a local Shanghai channel that had been on the air for three years. That show was a public-service program: it renovated homes for families in poor housing for free. The revamp brought two important changes. First, renovations were no longer free, and the budget grew. Second, the show began filming each renovation from start to finish as a reality show. That shifted the focus from the house to the people: the families' hardships went in front of the camera along with their run-down homes. The original aim, "guiding home renovation," became "revealing what home means to people, and witnessing the happiness a renovation brings."

After this change, the show's ratings climbed steadily.

Finding subjects is a long search, the proverbial needle in a haystack. A house must meet three conditions to be chosen. First, it must be a real challenge to renovate, which usually means a rare, bizarre layout, such as a home converted from a water tower or one wedged into a gap between buildings. Second, the family must have a story that makes viewers want to help, such as the disabled man who persevered for 30 years and translated How the Steel Was Tempered from his bed. Third, the family's need must be more urgent than that of other candidates: "A family of four is crammed into less than 15 square meters, and the 3-year-old wants somewhere to play."

As with the so-called 12-square-meter shoebox (it is real; the viral post simply grafted on details from another family's renovation), each case's peculiarity is spelled out. On Youku's episode list, the subtitles read:

Living in a tiny attic for 50 years, an aging bachelor struggles to find a wife

A dark little room with no daylight: turn off the light and you can't see your hand

A translator with spondylitis finds going to the toilet like "working at height"

...

A dark little room with no daylight

After the renovation

To make the show rate well in other provinces too, eight directors fan out across the country at once, picking houses with strong regional character to give episodes local flavor. "In Beijing, for example, we always do a siheyuan courtyard house; in Guangzhou, a Xiguan mansion. In Xi'an we did an old Qing dynasty house, a big one, 200 square meters, with seven households living in it," says the show's director Zhou Yu.

Home makeover shows have long been ratings hits abroad. Britain's Changing Rooms, America's Trading Spaces and Germany's The Ideal House all mix practical advice with entertainment, and their ratings rose steadily through the 1990s. Trading Spaces became one of the flagship programs of the American cable channel TLC.

The production team has said publicly that Dream Home Makers is modeled on a similar Japanese show, Before After, which turns cramped old houses into comfortable homes at relatively low cost. That show mostly commissions talented designers, several of them first-class registered architects.

By the end of its first season, Dream Home Makers had worked with 14 architects, including the Japanese architect Shuhei Aoyama. Shi Nanqiao and Wang Pingzhong had already worked with the team in the Very Beneficial Life days and are now the show's stars. Wang is the one who renovated the 12-square-meter shoebox; its owner calls him a "little angel."

Design skill naturally comes first when the show picks designers. But unlike ordinary renovation shows, which focus on color schemes and furnishings, Dream Home Makers needs designers with architectural experience. They must be able to rework space on a large scale and understand structure and function, yet also know materials and decorative details and have a feel for human scale. On top of that, a designer who takes the job must accept at least 10 on-site shoots per episode. In other words, ordinary interior designers can't do it, and the designers who can are too busy. Starring in a renovation reality show is not easy.

A home magazine editor who has recommended a number of designers to the show told QDaily that one well-known designer postponed a contract worth several million yuan to take part. Many designers will never see a house this bizarre in their whole careers, and that is before counting the exposure of appearing on a national reality show. Plenty still want to take on the challenge and test what they can do.

Aoyama, who renovated an old courtyard house in Beijing, told QDaily: "On an ordinary project the design doesn't change much, and being a few centimeters off is no big deal. But in a house like this, the scale is measured in centimeters and millimeters. In a 3-square-meter design, you can't be off by even one centimeter. The house demands real precision, so the design work is tense and the pressure is high."

The "Fat Auntie" home renovated by Aoyama

Floor plan

The courtyard before the renovation

The architect Yu Ting renovated the "Water Tower Home." He says he took the job because the owner moved him. "It was still a miserable environment. Some people rot in an environment like that and give off the same repellent smell it does. But he [the owner] stayed optimistic in those cramped conditions and was willing to change them. I thought, for us designers this isn't hard, and it could improve his quality of life, so why not do it?"

Yu Ting's hand-drawn concept sketch

Section drawing after the renovation

The Water Tower Home is, as the name suggests, a water tower turned into a house. From outside it looks extremely narrow, so stepping into the finished house later felt almost unbelievable. The episode left a deep impression on many viewers, but looking back on how it was made, Yu Ting feels the production team does "sacrifice" some things for the sake of the show.

The show wanted to portray the designers racking their brains over thorny problems, for example, but Yu Ting says what he thought about most was "relations with the government and the neighbors." The TV station wanted more Transformers-style tricks of hidden, shape-shifting furniture, but Yu Ting believes "all movable furniture wears out." Most important, architects care most about design and the study of space, which does not always make good television.

Yu Ting is known for public buildings. He says the show went beyond what he had imagined, because before it, "I had built a lot of buildings, but not necessarily changed how anyone lives."

Dream Home Makers starts shooting each season in March or April and airs in July. Filming follows a fixed sequence: the family's story, the designer's visit, a tour of the house's problems, moving out, construction, structural finishing, furnishing, and the return home. In each episode, the family's story gets 6 minutes, the designer's visit and the move 10 minutes, and the designer's introduction 5 minutes. Most of the remaining time goes to the most important part of the show, construction, which takes up a full 30 minutes.

"Nobody wants to watch a dull renovation of a dull, ordinary family's home," says Zhou Yu. In her view, shooting everything on real locations and editing it like a blockbuster or an American TV drama is meant to pack the show with conflict and contrast. But unlike a big-budget American series, Dream Home Makers has no stars and no lavish production values. To hold viewers, it has to make the renovation play like a video game: hit an obstacle, overcome it, hit another, overcome that, until at last the impossible becomes possible and a miracle happens.

What the team never expected was how much viewers like watching construction.

"As soon as construction starts, ratings go up, no matter what the workers are doing. Viewers say, I just want to see how this house turned into that. Our original plan was to explain the house's problems first, build a model and walk through every detail, and then renovate. But we found viewers just want to see how it's done."

As the team predicted, viewers prefer houses that change dramatically and end up beyond anything they imagined. "Viewers tell us they love that 'Whoa, you can do that?!' feeling!"

When the itemized bill appears at the end of an episode and a house that has been utterly transformed turns out to have cost a mere 200,000 or 300,000 yuan, you probably mutter to yourself, "How did they do that?" To make sure of that reaction, the directors keep a tight grip on every cent they give the designers. "Almost no designer thinks the budget is enough, and I tell them, 'It's because it isn't enough that we need you!' If you spend a lot, viewers will grumble that you just threw money at it, and that with 1 million yuan they could get the same result," Zhou Yu told QDaily.

The show looks flush, with the vast home renovation market supplying its advertising and a long list of sponsors such as Nippon Paint, Tmall Home Improvement and Red Star Macalline. Yet because of what the show sets out to be, its production budget is smaller than you might think. "Each episode's budget is fixed. The producer assesses what the renovation actually needs and how much it should cost. If you go over, you pay the difference yourself, because the total never changes. If one designer overspends, the others have to spend less."

Rework is the biggest cause of overspending. Taiwanese designer Wang Pingzhong's episode on a home wedged into a gap between buildings went through 16 drafts; things were built, torn down and built again. Designers' own high standards also cause rework: "Sometimes they say, I see a better way to do this spot, come on, let's change it."

"The Home in the Crevice," renovated by Wang Pingzhong

Most changes, though, are made for the sake of the show and to suit viewers' tastes.

"We have requirements for color and lighting, for instance. The picture has to be bright. Some designers like understated, muted looks, which come out beautifully in photos but just don't work on TV," says Zhou Yu.

To get surprises everywhere and a highlight every minute, the team tells designers from the proposal stage onward how different a TV show is from an ordinary project. "We usually ask designers for lots of proposals, pull out the highlights of each, mix them together and tell them, change it. The designers go crazy, but that's what television demands. I want suspense. I want secrets."

Though the show has been filming for several years, working with designers still baffles her. "Whether an episode is good depends a lot on whether the designer is committed and works hard." Clashes between directors and designers are inevitable. "Most designers don't understand how TV works. You tell one, 'You have to come to the shoot today,' and he says he has no time. But it's a TV show, isn't it? If you don't come, what am I supposed to film?"

Like other reality shows, Dream Home Makers plans its filming challenges in advance, but they shift constantly, like a game in progress. In post-production, the editors usually distill a new storyline from a mass of footage. In other words, much of the renovation you think you are watching as it happened did not happen that way at that moment.

"In Wang Pingzhong's episode on the home in the crevice, there's a reversal practically every minute. The biggest problem with that episode was how to explain 16 drafts of the design in one show. Many of those moments didn't actually happen at that point; we picked the highlights from all 16 drafts and blended them into one story."

The exterior after the renovation

The result fits exactly what the show set out to do. When the client, Zhou Yuan, and his family of five across three generations walked into their home, they all wept for joy. In every room they entered, they kept shrieking and marveling.

Client Zhou Yuan's work rocking chair

"Viewers support the designers more than we expected. They're now completely on the designers' side. If a homeowner or a neighbor makes an extra demand, viewers think you're giving the designer a hard time, and you get savaged." One example is the episode in which the designer Shi Nanqiao renovated a wonton shop on Menghua Street. Because the owners at first did not choose the commercial design, the family was attacked again and again on Weibo. Viewers did not seem to realize that the homeowner is the client and the designer is the one hired.

"There's no shortage of designers wanting to take part, but what you can turn a house into depends on your own skill," says Zhou Yu. "Whether you can make your homeowners come home and weep for joy is one of our criteria." She pauses. "It's also the best guarantee of ratings."

Images from the official Weibo account of Dream Home Makers