Have you always been interested in setting up homes and presentation, what ignited your interest in interior design?
Any work I have done in my entire life has had to do with the home. Even before I was first married I bought a house on a shoestring, aged 22. We were looking in a leafy university town in Michigan, US and an old house came on the market listed for $22,000 in a neighbourhood where prices were usually around $35-40,000. The house was a disaster; it had all the flaws that I now condemn on House Doctor – peeling wallpaper, leaking roof, bad carpet and so on, but I could see the potential. I had no experience of real estate or property at that time and I said well if they’re asking $22,000 let’s offer $22,250 to make sure we win the bidding. So for $250 I secured my first house.

Did you enjoy doing it up?
I loved it. I think that was where I learned the most about how to do things. I was making my own curtains, hanging my own wallpaper, doing my own painting and decorating, staining floors and refinishing furniture. It wasn’t too long after that that I moved to California and sold that house for about $65,000, which was a good profit at that time. Then I bought another house in California, kept it for a year and made $40,000. The funny thing is, when I went to put that house on the market it was referred to an estate agent and when she listed the house she said to me ‘You should go into real estate, I think you’d be really good at it’, but at the time I was busy working and moving so I didn’t think much about it.
Then while I was at my house a couple were drove by and stopped and looked at the sign, so I asked them if they wanted to come in and look around, and gave them my best sales spiel and on the spot they decided to buy it! When we went back to the agent to write up the offer, I saw the commission she was making – in California you make six per cent, not the normal two, then it goes to the broker and you get whatever your split is with you broker – so I was like ‘Wait a minute, that’s not bad for a few days work!’ After that I decided to study for the real estate exam and began a career selling real estate, which I did for about 13 years.

How did you transfer your skills from selling houses to staging them for sale?
After those years my interest was started to wane – we were working Saturdays, Sundays and evenings and I was a single mum at the time – and I had a friend who did the staging for me, it’s very common in the US. So I asked her to let me work with her as her assistant, just for free, and I realised I preferred it to selling real estate. So I sold my house, moved in with my partner, changed careers and decided to study interior design. I was lucky because people I knew in real estate and past clients of mine were ringing me saying, ‘I hear you’re doing design, will you come and stage this house’.

Then you brought those skills to the UK with House Doctor. Were you looking to get into the media?
Oh no! I was actually happy in my fully-fledged interior design business for which I did less staging and more full on design for about ten years. During that time I became friends with Jo Cassidy, who was quite well known at that time because she had written a lot of books on decorative art and decoration, and she came to San Francisco and stayed at my house at the time I was staging a home. She was a brilliant and curious woman, and said ‘Ooh what is this you Americans do? Preparing a home for sale? You spend money on it you’re fixing it up before you sell it?’ And I said, ‘Well yes, it’s very common in San Francisco’. She thought it was very interesting and when she got back to London she told her daughter about it who had just taken on a BBC programme called Home Front. I got a call from their producer who wanted to know all about it and that was it, my first foray into UK TV. So they flew me over to London and we started filming in Reading. It was just after the recession in the 90s and we took a home that had been on the market for over a year and I did what I do. It was almost like a mini House Doctor programme and the house sold within a week for the full asking price. I heard at that time that they had a huge response to that programme because people wanted to know what I was doing.
It was a year later after I’d done another spot on Home Front that I got a call asking me to do a pilot for the ‘House Doctor’ programme and couldn’t believe it when they called me a few weeks on and said ‘They’ve commissioned it!’ It was odd at first, but really I was just doing what I do and saying what I say, while a camera followed me around. The editing was something I had to get used to though, but I got wise to it quite quickly.

You must enjoy new challenges then?
Absolutely. My partner calls me a hobo, he says that any train that goes by I don’t have to know where it’s going but I will jump on it if I’ve never ridden it before. So the series went on for seven or eight years. Channel Five was a new channel and they were doing really well, it was their top rated programme. I started to get bored and told them, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I could do this standing upside down’, but they said ‘Oh you have to, people love it’ so I started doing other challenges as well, like my teaching.

How did you find that British people reacted to this new star of home staging?
Well I think initially they were pretty shocked because no one had ever come in and said, ‘Number one; you need to do something to your house before you sell it. Number two; it’s going to cost you some money. Number three; it’s not about what you like any more.’ I think people were a bit shocked at first but as the programme became more popular and as the concept expanded people understood. It got easier as time went by.

You’re well known for being very frank and forthright in trying to teach people how to change their homes for the better – it must have been quite tricky at times?
Yes, well I have to say I think that the image that made it to the screen was a bit more severe than I was in real life. They didn’t have any of the parts where I was chatting to the people and being all friendly, they didn’t have any of that. Because that would be boring wouldn’t it? The kind of response I got from the general public was always very supportive. I think viewers took my position because they could see what was actually going on, whereas the participants were only seeing what they wanted to see.

Did you see a change in attitudes as you moved through the series’?
Oh definitely. When I first started doing the House Doctor programme things were pretty dire. There wasn’t much awareness, but now every time you pick up a magazine or turn on the television or listen to the news there’s always something about property, about how to increase the value of your property. People’s awareness is so much higher now.
I think the media has a lot to do with it, but I also think post the 1990s recession the property boom happened and when that started happening people began to see their homes not just as a place for them and their family to live in but also, if we do this and we sell it we can make X and then buy this. All of a sudden it became a game in how to maximise the investment. People were becoming very wealthy in property all of a sudden. I think simultaneously the awareness was raised but also the market and its expansion had a lot to do with it.

Do you have any advice for homeowners wanting to sell in the current volatile market, should they try and stay put for now?
It’s hard to say what the market is going to do. We’ve seen markets like this in California for years, where you will see five to seven years of extremely high inflation in property prices and increase in values then, just like the stock market, it takes a dive or levels off and you have to wait for it to recover. This is an extremely interesting time worldwide economically. It’s not just a small segment of a country itself because really you look at the economy all together and people aren’t really sure where it’s going. I would say if you are not forced to sell, then I wouldn’t sell today, unless you’ve got something to buy to replace it. It’s definitely worth seriously considering whether you can get what you want out of your current house with a little more money and attention.
But I think it doesn’t matter if it’s a bull or a bear market, if your home is properly prepared and staged then you’re going to be winning. If it’s a really fast market and everything is selling then yours will just sell for that much more and if nothing’s selling or things are selling very slowly, then you’ve got a leg up on the competition.