Faking It? Hot Home Decor Show Turns Pretty Ugly…

It’s what you might call a Home & Garden TV (HGTV) nightmare. Instead of redecorating the homes of members of the public, a South African show’s decorators have reportedly been spending all their time (and the free home decor donations) on the co-producer’s own house!

These are the allegations being made in recent news reports against Francois van Wyk, one of the producers of the Afrikaans show ‘Oulap se Rooi’ on DSTV’s Kyknet channel, where the South African model twins Alex and Charlie Kotze, also known as K2, go on air with tools in hand to fix up rooms that have become a bit dowdy.

The programme, now in its fourth season, touts itself as a fixer-upper show for the public. People write in with pictures of rooms they think need a makeover, and, once the lucky homeowner gets selected, the twins step in.

Except, according to reports over the weekend, co-producer Van Wyk used the twins and donations from sponsor Builders Warehouse to redo six rooms in his own house in Emmarentia, Johannesburg. These apparently included the main bedroom, the study and the kitchen. In this week’s episode Van Wyk’s garden gets a redo.

The latest season, where the Kotze twins are now presenters, is produced by a new company, Seven20, according to one news report.

Top Billing presenter Ursula Chikane is a co-producer of the show and told Rapport newspaper that shooting fell behind schedule and the producers took a “production decision” to film and redo rooms at the producer’s house instead of improving rooms of viewers.

“We did what we could to keep the show on the air,” she told Netwerk24.

Watch a video promo for the 2015 season of the show:

https://youtu.be/yCuTdj_migc