In the upcoming fifth season of HGTV’s “Windy City Rehab,” interior designer and host Alison Victoria Gramenos will take on gut rehabs for 12 new clients as she figures out how to get back into the flipping game.
“I am not buying and selling right now, that’s not where I am,” she told the Sun-Times in an interview ahead of the season opener, which airs Tuesday on HGTV.
“I mean, I’m getting there, I’m getting back into that, but in this season you’ll get to see how I get back into that. You’ll see what I am dealing with with freeing up funds to be able to do what I really want,” she said.
Don’t expect the sort of drama that surely affected her bottom line and marked some of her low points on the show in its first three seasons — like a messy rift with a business partner, city citations on construction sites and lawsuits from buyers.
“I’m leading a much less dramatic life, which is good, but the drama [this season] is really the drama of the business and where it’s going and kind of doubling down on the client game,” she said.
Following the strife-filled stretch, she steered away from flipping homes in favor of designing them for clients in season four.
The upcoming 12-show season will feature the redesign of clients’ homes in her usual North Side stomping grounds, and one in Oak Park.
“This season is my best one yet and I just feel like it’s getting better and better and better. I don’t know, it’s crazy, because every season, except of course one, you go: ‘God, this is just great!’ But you know you have to go through things to evolve and get back on your feet and then be able to mentor other people,” she said of helping clients steer clear of rehabbing landmines.
“These clients are going through hell and you’re on that ride with them. I’m on that ride with them. This business is just as much about the psychology of it because you are becoming not just part of their home history, creating a dream home, changing their lives, but you’re kind of like their therapist, so it’s a lot, you’re trying coach them through this process because most of them have never been through it before and I have been through all of it, the good the bad, the ugly.”
Selecting clients is a two-way street.
“For me it’s just as important on the interview side for me to interview them as it is for them to interview me, like I’m not just saying yes to people, I have to connect with them, I’m not looking to be micromanaged,” she said.
“I am absolutely looking to take what I do and implement it without much, I don’t want to say interference, but, kind of. I want it to be that they’re hiring me because they love what I do and they know what I do.
“These people become family, you know you’re changing their lives, you’ve got to make sure that you mesh from the get-go before you even say yes to doing the job.”
One other requirement: An ample budget.
“I’m not like a design-on-the-dime kind of girl,” she said, while noting that she works with clients on creative angles to keep budgets in check by using antiques or salvaging elements of the existing structure.
She has found clients in ways ranging from word of mouth to social media to a lady sitting next to her lawyer at a restaurant in Florida and mentioning she was a fan of the show.
Gramenos said she is currently living in Chicago in the “Dream House” she built (the process was covered by HGTV) near Pulaski Road and Diversey Avenue.
She listed it this spring for $3.5 million before taking it off the market.
“I am very much living [in it] and loving it. It’s so funny because I put it up on the market just to test it and see and then the more I hung out in it and had friends and family, it’s like: Oh my God, this place is so sick, it’s like why would you get rid of it? …And that area is still really growing, so I want to enjoy it a little longer because it is so special.”
This season will also feature her quest to find new artisans and carpenters after her go-to guy, Ari Smejkal, left the show last year.
“I look at my life and it was a year and a half of so much stress and hearache and reward and then it goes by so fast in three months because we’re airing one every week,” she said.