Designers and carpenters hopeful to join the reboot of Trading Spaces will have to prove their crown molding and backsplash chops on a new competition series aptly titled Training Spaces.
TLC announced Thursday that the original Trading Spaces team – Doug Wilson, Carter Oosterhouse, Frank Bielec, Genevieve Gorder, Hildi Santo-Tomas, Laurie Smith, Ty Pennington, and Vern Yip – are all returning for the reboot and joining previously announced host Paige Davis. Now, five contestants will have to complete challenges to join their ranks in the six-part digital series.
“I think there’s a tremendous wave of nostalgia happening right now,” Davis told EW in an interview. “And I believe that if we deliver excellent episodes in the format that fans knew and loved, it will reach into people’s hearts and memories and tap into something that’s bigger than just design, and bigger than home improvement.”
Davis is also set to host the spin-off series, which premieres in spring 2018 and will only be available on the company’s streaming site TLC GO,. Designers John Gidding, Kahi Lee, and Sabrina Soto will compete in five design challenges that will test “how well they can work under extreme time constraints while flexing their creative muscles,” according to the TLC release. Carpenter contestants Brett Tutor and Joanie Dodd are tasked with building “something unexpected in a short amount of time.”
Trading Spaces, which is currently casting in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Atlanta, returns to TLC for the first time in a decade in 2018.
By Eric King
