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by Lyndsey Matthews, HouseBeautiful
If you’ve already blown through all of Netflix’s new baking show Nailed It, we’ve found the next best thing to binge on while you eagerly await the premiere of season two. According to Decider, The Great Interior Design Challenge is the “catty, bright, addictive alternative to HGTV,” and you can watch the season one of the “scathingly brutal bitch fest” on Netflix right now.
Similar to the way Nailed It brings together hopelessly untalented amateur bakers who hope to win big on the competition, The Great Interior Design Challenge is an annual interior design competition that sends “Britain’s best amateur interior designers” to redecorate people’s homes with equally hilarious and cringeworthy results.
The show follows a simple format. First, the host Tom Dyckhoff shows you a beautiful house with a very specific style of architecture, like Victorian, Art Deco or Medieval.
Then you get to meet four inexperienced designers who plan on redecorating one roomeach inside the house. But before the competition starts, you get to learn more about their personal style by visiting their homes, which is basically the only experience they’ve had as decorators before being on the show.
After that, the designers share their plans for their room with the homeowner — which often doesn’t go that well — and then they get down to redecorating. Halfway through, each designer is tasked with the challenge of incorporating a surprise item, like a vintage tennis racket, into the redesign of the room. That often doesn’t go well, either.
In the end, you get to see the before and afters of each room — and the homeowner’s reactions — before judges Daniel Hopwood and Sophie Robinson step in and vote one of the designers off the show. Over the course of the next two episodes, two more contestants are voted off, and a semi-finalist is sent to a series of final challenges against three other semi-finalists.
So far, four seasons of the show have aired on BBC Two between 2014 and 2017, but only season one is available to watch on Netflix now.
But with 16 one-hour long episodes, that should be enough to hold you over until Netflix brings over the rest of the series (we hope!).
While the final episode of season four aired on BBC Two over a year ago in January 2017, there is still no news as to whether the network plans to renew the series for a fifth season.
