‘Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge’ Judge Tiffany Brooks Describes Childhood Dream Come True [Exclusive]
Push a pink button and champagne is served. Or turn a purple crank handle on the plastic bedroom wall and voilà – here comes the handbag of your dreams.
What Barbie Dreamhouse fan didn’t wish that they too could actually live the Barbie life inside their pink plastic home? Well, now they can – sort of.
On July 16, Barbie lovers’ dreams will come to life on HGTV‘s Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge! Eight design teams tackle a specific room in a hand-selected home with the challenge of transforming it into a specific Barbie era.
Guided by a Barbie superfan and historian, the design teams are tasked with re-creating a Barbie Dreamhouse room. The design should include their signature flair, but also the iconic and often futuristic gadgetry found in most Barbie Dreamhomes.
Design star Tiffany Brooks and guest stars will judge the competition. And the winning team will be awarded a donation made in their name to Save the Children. The Barbie superfan who worked with the winning team gets to spend the night in the fabulously pink home.
“Being a judge on this show was a challenge within itself,” Brooks explained to Showbiz Cheat Sheet. “There are eight celebrity design teams and each one of those teams are assigned a different space and they’re supposed to represent a different decade of Barbie. So it’s like each space is walking into a different era of Barbie.”
What is the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge’?
Design teams are comprised of HGTV stars like power design couple Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson (Married to Real Estate), Ty Pennington (Rock the Block), Christina Hall (Christina on the Coast), and more. In addition to HGTV design stars, a few culinary experts from The Food Network joined the challenge.
“We had one Food Network star and she was teamed up with Jasmine (Roth),” Brooks shared. “Jasmine is from the network. However, Antonia (Lofaso), who is from Food Network has a background in design. She has designed her own restaurant so she wasn’t too far off-kilter from this challenge herself.”
Teams were given a room, an era, and a truckload of pink paint. Each team was supervised by the Barbie superfan too. “Each team was being guided by somebody who was basically a Barbie expert, a superfan of that era, of that decade,” Brooks said.
Teams also had to nail many of the cool features displayed inside the usual Barbie Dreamhouse. “They had to also have those toyetic features just like in the Barbie Dreamhouse,” she added. “So you’ll push a button and a wall will turn into something else or something will lift up and the closet will appear. So the teams also were charged with bringing toyetics in their respective rooms as well, which was really, really cool to see how they use their imaginations to bring that about.”
How did Tiffany Brooks approach her job as a judge?
Designing Barbie rooms may be the challenge, but the real challenge was trying to judge this dream come true.
“To me personally, I really, really wanted to see how each team gave a nod to the Barbie Dreamhouse that was relevant to their perspective decades,” Brooks said. “For example, the era could be representing the 60s or the 80s but are you just giving us a design that was relevant at that time, or were you giving us a design that was relevant to Barbie and how Barbie lived at that time? So that’s what I was looking for personally as a judge.”
But in the end, being part of this project was really a dream come true for Brooks. “I’m a huge Barbie fan,” she admitted. “I have been ever since I got my first Barbie at the age of five. I have my own space in my house dedicated to Barbie. The experience was like none other.”
HGTV’s Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge will premiere July 16 at 8|7c.
