What To Know About HGTV Barbie Dreamhouse Judge Tiffany Brooks
HGTV's "Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge" is a new competition show where pairs of HGTV experts (and one Food Network expert) go head-to-head to create the dreamiest home designs worthy of Barbie's mansion. Each of the four episodes shows two teams competing to win the week, and at the end of the show, the winning teams will walk the pink carpet. A group of Barbie enthusiasts will crown one design the "Dreamiest," and a donation will be made in the winning team's honor to the Save the Children charity.
"The pressure is on for the teams to unleash their creativity far beyond their usual design parameters to dream up a place that Barbie would be proud to call home," said host Ashley Graham when talking to HGTV. The judges on the show are designers Jonathan Adler and Tiffany Brooks, and in each episode, a new surprise celebrity guest will join them in the judging.
Brooks is no stranger to HGTV competition shows. She has been on both "HGTV Design Star" and "Rock the Block" and won her season of "HGTV Design Star." She also hosts "HGTV Smart Home" and designs the home in question for the Smart Home contest.
Tiffany Brooks was 30 when she began pursuing interior design as a career
While Tiffany Brooks divulged which HGTV star she'd pick to design her house, she is fully capable of taking on such a project on her own. After all, she owns and is the lead designer of her interior design company, Tiffany Brooks Interiors Inc. The company was founded in 2007. Plus, Brooks says she has over a decade of design experience and lists some accolades, including being named, "...one of the top 20 African-American designers in the nation," according to her website.
Although she dreamed of being a designer and was an HGTV fan, it wasn't until Brooks was 30 years old that she made the move to make design her career. She started out in real estate. Her boss asked her to design a model home, and the two of them made a bet when her model home was entered into a contest. "I made a bet with him actually that if the model won the award," Brooks told HuffPost, "I would go into interior design full-time, and that's exactly how it happened! I lost a drunken bet. I guess I won now, huh?"
She's an avid Barbie fan
The role of the "Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge" host was made for Tiffany Brooks. Over the years, she has built and remodeled her own Dreamhouses, along with buying a few already ready for her Barbie collection. Her passion for Barbie stemmed from gifts from her father, who would buy her a new Barbie toy every time he got paid. He passed away when Brooks was an adult, and after that, she began collecting Barbies and Barbie toy sets again. "He'd come home and surprise me with it. I picked it back up after I lost him, and it grew until I had a Barbie village, with a grocery store, movie theater, restaurant," Brooks told the New York Post.
Each design team in the "Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge" was given a different decade to cater their design to. That being said, Brooks was impressed with how designers incorporated references to the Dreamhouses of their assigned eras in their designs. "Each team did it in such a crazy good way," she told Hollywood Life. "Each space is stylish, and I can't think of a space I would not actually live in."