After a hectic holiday season, extra money to hire an interior designer may be last on your list of resolutions. But coming to Chicago’s WGN-TV on Feb. 13, the new and improved weekly home design show Bring It Home will allow local viewers to gain insight on creative ideas and advice to try in their own homes.
Rochelle Vayo Adkinson, host and producer of the show, has teamed up with Chicago Home + Garden magazine to create a program that is uniquely different than the typical “before and after” home makeover shows seen time and time again.
“Bring It Home is about making really great home design accessible to everyone,” Vayo Adkinson said. “It’s really just a simplified guide on how to make the most out of your home, where you can shop and what you can do about it around Chicago.”
The inspiration for the show stemmed from Chicago Home + Garden’s regular editorial section called Bring It Home, which features high-design looks that can be imitated with the average consumer’s time and budget in mind.
Each episode focuses on a different inspiration room, many times that same room has been featured in the magazine, but the show will allow for a closer look. “It’s an even more in-depth glimpse into that room,” Vayo Adkinson explained. “You may see a few shots of it in the magazine and they’re beautiful. But then on the show, you’ll actually get to hear from the designer and why they made certain decisions and choices.”
After the initial tour, Vayo Adkinson hits the Chicago streets to shop and find out where viewers can purchase similar items used on the show. At the end of the 30-minute show, she brings her choices back to the designer to receive a critique on how she did, if she hit or missed with the inspiration.
“Now, I am by no means a designer. But I think that’s what’s really fun about the show,” she said. “Fact of the matter is, we don’t all have the most creative eye, but with a few simple guidelines and some inspiration, you can fall back in love with your home.”
Before Bring It Home, Vayo Adkinson hosted a different home show on WGN-TV called HomesPlus for three years. It featured tours of multi-million dollar homes around the Chicagoland area, and viewers could take a peek inside some of the most glamorous designs out there.
Inspired by her experiences at HomesPlus, Vayo Adkinson looked to find solutions for her own home as well. “I would walk away from that thinking to myself, ‘I wonder how I can find something similar to that for my little dining room that I have at home.’ It was more on a personal level then and it was a great preparation for me,” she said.
Many home design programs on TV feature a lucky viewer who receives a makeover from professionals, many times without instruction for the audience to truly utilize. Bring It Home aims to be different.
“It’s fun to see the before and after, but how does that help me?” Vayo Adkinson said. “Hopefully with Bring It Home, every viewer can take something away from it with gaining lessons from the pros on how we can do it ourselves.”
The new program will also interact with the audience through social media as well as the show’s website. Over the next month, the website will feature a blog, videos and lists of design locations visited for the items featured in each episode. The Facebook and Twitter pages have already launched with behind-the-scenes pictures, updates and videos from the shoots.
Vayo Adkinson also reaches out to her fans on Facebook for advice on finding specific items for the show; she wants to keep them involved throughout the whole process of the broadcast. “We’ll put out there ‘We’re looking for a modern leather couch, where can we go?’ We want to hear back from people on where they go and about hidden gems that we might never have heard of,” she said. “The shopping is the most fun, the most exciting part and also the most difficult sometimes,” Vayo Adkinson said.
Having worked as a producer for the last nine years Vayo Adkinson is thrilled to continue producing this time with Bring It Home and Oakbrook Productions. Even though she initially had her sight on doing broadcast news, she quickly discovered her passion for programming while researching for a local TV station internship assignment during her senior year at University of Miami.
“I loved doing the research and interviewing people and I realized that going into programming would be a much better fit for me then going into news,” she said. “I found so much of the [news] depressing and it did not match with my personality.”
And now she brings that passion to the new show. She knows that with a little inspiration, viewers can make positive changes in their homes and feel better about where they live.
“We are in a time where a lot of people are kind of stuck in their homes. They were maybe hoping to have sold their home and moved on to a bigger or different place by now, and for a lot of us that’s not possible right now in this real estate market,” she said.
“I hope that this show can help people fall back in love with their home even if it’s not the home they really wished they were in at this point in their lives. It’s important to love where you live.”
Pitching Tips
Vayo Adkinson prefers to receive press materials via email, which she can access immediately.
She is open to receiving communication from anyone that has a local store and would like to be featured, or designers who have projects that they think would be good for the show.
Designers and their reps should send a few photos of rooms they have done recently, so that she can decipher if it will be a good fit for the show.
“For anyone else, keep it short and to the point. We do get a lot of emails and I do try to go through each and every one of them,” she said.
The only pet peeve that Vayo Adkinson has is when PR professional will continue to push their ideas after she has already told them that she is not interested at that time. “If I tell you it’s not a good fit, don’t try to badger me. I’ve had this happen a lot and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth about what that person has to offer,” she said.
The show can be reached at bringithome@chicagomag.com.
Beginning on Feb. 13, Bring It Home will air on Sundays at 11 a.m. CT on WGN-TV with encore presentations throughout the week on CLTV.
