Design on a Dream W
By Kent Anderson Photos by K.O. Rinearson
taken to present my design to the executive producer of ‘Design Star’ and the head of the network.” After this audition, Kellie was taken immediately from the studio to a waiting car and driven to the airport. Two days later, she received the call. She had been cast as a finalist. “The emotions were so strong,” Kellie remembers. “In 18 months I went from not knowing if I would ever walk again to being cast on a TV show.”
“So I told myself, ‘I have nothing to lose. I’m going to do this,’” she recalls. A fan of the HGTV series since its first season, she kept watch for open casting calls. When one was announced in Dallas, Kellie hit the road. After two rounds in Dallas, submitting a video and other materials to the program’s producers, she was summoned to New York as one of 38 semi-finalists. “They didn’t tell us anything about how to prepare,” Kellie says. “That was intentional; they wanted to see how we would work on the fly. I was shown a photo of a disheveled room and was told I had 15 minutes to design this room. Then I would be
The drama – of both design challenges and human relationships – unfolds in front of viewers each Monday night at 8pm Central. The final episode is September 12, when the world will find out which of the 12 finalists is the season’s winner… and will go on to host his or her own show on HGTV. In the interim, Kellie calls the experience exhilarating, exhausting and ultimately uplifting. “We weren’t notified of what was going to be happening until 30 minutes before it happened,” Kellie says. “They controlled everything – even our cell phones and debit cards were taken.” She laughs and adds, “We were property of HGTV.”
©2011, HGTV, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
hile fans of HGTV’s reality series “Design Star” watch this month to see who wins the all-out interior design competition, they are seeing the talent, charm and inherently uplifting personality of Edmond resident Kellie Clements, one of the 12 designers chosen as finalists. But they are also watching a dream, a dream that began not with the typical “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” sort of thought. Kellie’s dream began, and was nurtured, in the wake of a horrific tragedy. In 2009, the mother of two was on vacation with her family – including her husband, four-year-old and six-week-old baby – when a four-wheeling adventure turned into a nightmare. The four-wheeler rolled on top of Kellie, breaking her pelvis. It was a devastating injury, especially for a woman with a newborn. There was doubt as to whether she would walk again. Months of recovery and rehab followed. But Kellie Clements is a relentlessly positive woman, and she began to wonder what she could take away from the tragedy. “It was a horrible injury,” she says, “but it could have been so much worse, and I was able to recover. I have very strong faith, and I started to ask, ‘Why did this happen and what is the lesson I am supposed to learn from it?’ A friend told me that the lesson may not have been for me, which caught me totally off guard. She said that sometimes people watch how you react to a situation, and the lesson is for them. I thought about that, and considered a few things I had always wanted to do, but hadn’t really pursued before the accident.” One of those things she hadn’t pursued was being one of the participating designers in the Oklahoma City Orchestra League’s Symphony Show House. The other was auditioning for “Design Star.”
Kellie (left) with fellow HGTV Design Star finalists Karl Sponholtz and Leslie Ezelle Kellie was told to prepare for eight weeks of filming. She hired an assistant to work with her ongoing design projects here in Oklahoma, said goodbye to her family and headed back to New York.
september 2011 | slice
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