Deaf as a post, dumb as a stump!!!!!!

My final sentence last year, after skewering the 2018 Toronto Home Show was…..”and don’t get me started on that excuse for a Dream Home”

Last night, March 17, the 2019 edition of the National Home Show came to it’s predictable conclusion. Sadly, show organizers have again confirmed they have no concept of how pedestrian this annual effort has become. Again this Old Lady Home Show had to be supported by the lovely and talented Miss Bloom, for surely without the Canada Blooms Show, the National Home Show could have, should have closed early! How about right after opening night, just like a highly touted Broadway Show, which for good reason has been greeted by terrible reviews and by extension the prospect of no box office.

Now the jewel of the National Home Show is the Dream Home!

It is meant to inspire and by design encourage you by making visual suggestions that conform to the dream home you have been contemplating. Certainly, at the very least, give you some creative ideas that can be incorporated into the home you are living in today.

First, I don’t think the physical layout of Dream Home of 2019 should be a reprise of the Dream Home of 2018. It’s also important that the 2019 edition be completed (as in finished.) This year the designers/ workmen/ somebody forgot to hang a large, beautiful, silver backed mirror lying as it was on the floor in the middle of one of the shower stalls. Uncomprehending Dream Home visitors were puzzled by the mirror’s location, as they gingerly walked around it and contemplated the designers decision to just leave it there. After all, wouldn’t the designer want to show the entire Dream Home at its finished best? You might allow for a last minute faux pas if this was the first showing day BUT the unhung mirror was still lying abandoned on the sixth day of the show.

No doubt designers spend many hours working on the interior of a show home. There’s the placement of furniture, accessories, window coverings etc. to be considered. That’s why some Show Home visitors were amused and others were incredulous to find that any professional designer would inflict the living room with two over-sized sofas perpendicular to a large flat TV screen that could not be viewed comfortably by anyone sitting on the sofas!

There were other non-professional aspects that diminished the quality of the interior. For instance, the double island in the kitchen seemed awkward. But there’s no point in dwelling on the shortcomings detected in Dream Home 2019. Suffice it to say it projected the same banal lack of imagination one experienced in the rest of the National Home Show. Again you have to shudder when you consider how little thought went into this year’s edition and juxtapose the words, NATIONAL HOME SHOW.

Obviously the valid criticism leveled at the NHS last year was completely ignored by the planners of the 2019 edition.

Here’s what we said a year ago March about the HOME SHOW:

“…..what should we get excited about? The scores of hot tubs scattered in different sections of the huge Enercare centre, the unimaginative displays suggesting a warehouse of ordinary products supervised by the disinterested, a paucity of products that excite the future. Just no reason to think you‘re not at a your local hardware, lumber yard or kitchen renovation centre looking at products you seen a hundred times before! The dullness of it all reflects poorly on its proclamation as The National Home Show.

Except for the glorious Canada Blooms show featuring floral designs by national artists………. The National Home Show is a poor reflection of what a ‘World Class’ city should expect from major contributors to the health and wealth of the huge homebuilding, furnishing and lighting industry. This is a metropolis of 6 million people The NHS shows none of the imagination, showmanship and depth this city deserves.

Either fix it or close it.”

So how do things look a year later?

Well Holiday, it looks like you were speaking to the deaf and writing to the blind!