White Room Challenge

Have you ever seen the HGTV Design Star? It is a show sort of like American Idol, but it has interior designers competing for their own show on HGTV. It is one of my favorite HGTV shows. I teach a Housing and Interior Design class at CSHS and it is by far my favorite class to teach. I am learning a lot about it as I go. I was talking to our librarian at the beginning of the semester and she brought up the idea of the white room challenge (WRC). The WRC is one of the episodes where contestants are given a blank slate of a white room and are to design it any way they see fit. After lots of preparation, approvals, and decisions to make...my class is creating the white room challenge (a model version)!

Leslie (my resident interior designer friend), has helped us so much with this project. She even used her hi-tech foam core cutter and cut all of our boards to form our "white rooms." Without Leslie I don't know where I'd be with this project! Thanks Leslie and Somdal!

I wanted to show a few of the "before" things they have created so far. My students have really come up with some creative ideas. Their challenge was to an empty room at school that we toured and turn it in to something they think they school needs. We have 5 groups. One is an ice cream parlor, one is a theater and the other 3 are teen lounges. I will be sure to post pictures of the finished products!

Here is the white room made out of foam core board. It isn't glued yet so that's why it isn't straight.

Leslie gave me a TON of Interior Design supplies that they were throwing away. I have used all of the tile samples, fabric, and paint chips a lot. They need tiles in certain color so they painted them to match. This is going to be the floor of the "ice cream parlor."

Since we don't have a lot of money to buy supplies...we have to be very creative. Here is a close-up of a chair made from paper clips and matte board. After I created this one everyone started coming up tons of great ideas. One of their requirements is that they have to have seating for 8 people.

More chairs. I can't wait to see them painted and upholstered!

Here is the "Gator Theater" room. They got really creative and made 2 bay windows out of pop-sicle sticks and a zip-loc bag.

This is the back of the window.

I am so proud of my kids because they are really getting into this assignment. I can't wait to see the finished products!