Merete Noer: The Apartment Style Edition

Finally I can announce that the show I am on, The Apartment, Style edition is now airing on Star World across Asia!

It was the most craziest, funniest, stressful, crazy thing I have done so far but if they asked me, I would do it all over again. You can have a look at one of the TV commercials from Star World here, :

The beginning of Glue and Glam

It started off 3 months ago, when I called my friend Kishz Vin from Kuala Lumpur up and literally spent days trying to convince him and sell him the idea of going for the auditions in Singapore. I knew he was going to be a perfect fit for the show, and that it would be a great experience for us both. The last time we ever did anything like this together was 5 years ago filming CE1 by Azis S. Osman in Malaysia - and now we would be filming again but this time a reality show!

So he drove down to Singapore and as nervous as I always am for any auditions, I felt it went alright ...

Weeks went by without hearing anything and suddenly we got the call back from one of the producers saying we made the cut and we needed to pack our bags and leave in a week!

It was crazy, and how lucky am I - my company actually approved the trip and let me go! Leaving all the work hectic-ness in the hands of my former colleague, Kelvin I bought all the books and magazines I could get about interior design and jumped on the plane over to KL.

I was worried, scared, nervous all at the same time going there as I had no idea what to expect!

Seeing the judges for the first time certainly enhanced all these feelings, theres Jamie Durie which is a world known landscape designer and Laurence Bowen which has designed for the likes of the British royal family! And here we are, 8 couples of clueless people who are all clueless about anything to do with interior design!

All together, 8 couples, competing for a grand prize of a new home at the Veio in Malaysia...

And so it begins..

For the first episode, we were given a penthouse each - and would get one room for each week to decorate.

We started out by going to the empty apartments and measuring the whole house, as we don't know exactly what room we will be decorating first..

Shopping

The timeframes we were given were extremely short and we were running around in the mall thinking we should save as much money as possible - as we are both quite rational when it comes to money (I would like to convince myself). We both found out we are extremely indecisive too which came to our disadvantage of course. We decided that we both like the resort style of living and we wanted a lot of natural elements and brown tones to it - so basically we were shopping for these kind of items.

Carrying all the major items up 4 floors was crazy. I think my back is still aching from carrying up our 4 post bed!

And that bed..didn't even come with any instructions.

We wanted to have natural plants in the room which was impossible to find in the mall, so we actually went out and found things from outside, branches, leaves.. It is extremely hard to find plants in the malls in Malaysia..we literally went out and..stole some twigs from somewhere.

Kishz came up with a great idea to make curtainhangers from the branches - but we unluckily bought the wrong type of curtains and it ended up looking quite unfunctional but I think it still suited the room though!

Design Challenge Start

When we got back to the apartment we had all our Dulux Paint ready and started painting.

man, painting is tough ! the paint kept on getting everywhere because we didn't mask the place properly.

There was about ten thousands of issues I think the one that we were most bummed about was the bed - because we forgot to buy bedlinen and bedsheets! luckily nobody mentioned anything about it, i mean cmon - The Bros United didnt even have a mattress, hahahah!

We also didn't find a suitable artpiece to hang, but we had a frame. So i started painting this thing, spent quite a while on it - only to have it fall down the veranda when i put it out to dry. FLAT DOWN! Really unlucky! i scrambled down another painting but really didn't end up looking very good.

This is how it ended up looking, :

We were nervous about the judges coming up to see our apartment. Waiting for judging, nervously, ill give you some of the behind-the-scenes pictures, here goes:

Cynthia from Design Divas

Alex Phang of the opportunists

Agri and Clarissa from team black and blonde

WhopWhop we are all ready to go!

- to the judging room... Jamie Durie and Laurence..Always disagreeing.. ...We had a very ethnic theme and weren't sure if it would fall into the likes of Mr. Laurence, and it didn't either, Laurence totally ripped us apart! We ended up in the bottom 2..