Now, Stout says, “I owe everything to RISD. I wouldn’t even know what furniture design was if I hadn’t gone there. RISD really pushed me to my limits in such a positive way. I love how involved everyone was and how they weren’t afraid to hold anything back—which is very different from how it was on the show.”
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But then it got even more surreal. Within a week of the original taping of the final episode, producers discovered that McLellan’s design—a clever sliding/hideaway table—wasn’t a truly “original piece,” as the competition rules stipulate. Once they surfaced a similar table by European designer Simon Shack, McLellan was disqualified. Stout says she never once questioned her own originality since she went into the whole thing knowing she’d just have to stay loose and design fast and draw from her own gut instincts. In an epilogue that ran at the end of the final episode, DeGeneres invited Stout back to the set—purportedly to help plug future seasons of Ellen’s Design Challenge. As the
photos courtesy of HGTV
WINNING THE LOTTERY
Out in Hollywood, Stout sensed that the other designers on the DeGeneres show were playing it safe, sticking with what they knew—which is understandable under the circumstances. “We’d be given a new challenge and had to come up with our initial ideas in like under a half hour,” she says. “One time I swear we had 15 minutes.” Working with an assigned carpenter/ partner, each designer then produced a full-scale, finished piece of furniture in three days—without the option of working in the studio beyond set hours or pulling the tried-and-true all-nighters so common at RISD. While both Stout and Eisenberg (the other RISD grad competing) did well in the first challenge, neither one won it outright. But the judges agreed that Stout “took the most risks” and was “the most creative” in taking the challenge “to another level,” which ended up being something of a leitmotif throughout the subsequent challenges (except for when she made her infamous “cow table,” a mistake she dismisses as “an experiment in marbling gone wrong”). Once four of the six competitors had been sent home, Stout faced off against Tim McLellan, an older, self-taught furniture maker who wears a cowboy hat as part of his Texas persona. Both produced quality pieces for the final challenge, but after the requisite amount of reality show build-up, the judges proclaimed him the winner of the $100,000 prize and a spread in HGTV Magazine. Stout says she was disappointed but not devastated, especially since the entire experience had been more fun and invigorating than tense and cutthroat.