alumni profiles

Larry Blase architect behind ‘Trading Spaces’

by Brent Williams, Tel 1973, MA 1985

Many people have had an occasional urge to temporarily swap houses, or get a complete makeover on a room in their home. Larry Blase, TEL 1981, provides people with an opportunity to do both of these things--and to do them on television.

Blase is producer of Trading Spaces, which airs on The Learning Channel (TLC).

The hour-long reality genre program features people who "swap" their homes with friends or neighbors for a two-day period, and work with a designer and carpenter to make significant changes on a room in the other person's home. It is a reciprocal arrangement, and makeovers take place simultaneously in both homes.

Trading Spaces is in its second year of production and has proved very successful. Blase and his colleagues at Banyan Productions are pleased with the show's success. It originally aired weekdays at 4 p.m., but has recently added Saturday and Sunday shows.

"There has been a growing buzz about Trading Spaces over the past few months," said Blase. "Perhaps that's due to the exposure it's getting in primetime on Saturday nights."
According to Blase, the program attracts an unusually wide demographic audience. One of the surprises is that it gets better ratings among teenaged girls than VH1.

As might be expected, homeowners are sometimes pleased with the results of the makeovers on their homes, and sometimes they are quite unhappy. "We had one woman in Seattle who was so upset with how her room turned out that she ran off, sobbing," said Blase. "Her husband said he now had lots of firewood. Sure enough, by lunchtime the day after we finished the episode, he had torn down the huge--and in my opinion, very attractive--wooden façade that was built over their existing fireplace."

Blase said there have been numerous challenges in editing the "reveals," the moment that homeowners first see their new rooms. "There have been a couple of instances when homeowners have yelled spontaneous expletives when expressing their excitement and pleasure upon seeing their 'new' rooms."

Blase spent 16 years with CNN, including time as producer of CNN Newsroom for schools. He is one of four producers for Trading Spaces and has produced episodes featuring homes in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

Editor's Note: In its first year of production, Trading Spaces was produced by Ross Television in Knoxville, where Leigh Davidson Seaman, TEL 1989, worked on the program as a supervising producer.