WELL Designed
John Gidding is smart, disarmingly humble, and passionate. If you don’t love the Trading Spaces designer, chances are your cats will.
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OHN GIDDING HAD BEEN ON TRACK TO becoming the architect he’d always told people he wanted to be. But a funny thing happened on his way to Harvard. “Somebody came up to me on the street and said, ‘Hey, we’re doing a [modeling] shoot. We’re looking for college-age kids,’” says Gidding, who didn’t let his real age at the time — mid-twenties — stop him. “I went to it and the photographer gave me the number of an agency. That’s what led to the TV stuff, because I did a bunch of castings and one of them ended up being for a TV show that I got.” That show — 2003’s Knock First on ABC Family — quickly led to others, snapping into action Gidding’s unexpected career as a go-to designer and style guru on the small screen. You’ve likely seen Gidding if you’ve watched a home-design or howto reality TV show in the past dozen years or so, from HGTV’s Curb Appeal to Logo’s Secret Guide to Fabulous to Fox’s Home Free. He’s also a regular design guest on Rachael Ray’s syndicated talk show. Last year, Gidding joined the revamp of a show that essentially pioneered the genre nearly two decades ago. The 42-year-old is one of three new faces rotating with a half-dozen “legacy” designers featured on Trading Spaces, whose next season will air on TLC in “early 2019” — likely in April, or a full year after the reboot’s premiere. It’s not hard to see why Gidding, who stands at 6 feet 2 inches, was scouted for modeling. He fits the classic description: tall, dark, and handsome. What made him even better suited for design TV, though, is the fact that he’s also smart, sharp, and sophisticated, as well as multilingual, multicultural, and 28
JANUARY 10, 2019 • METROWEEKLY
open-minded. On top of all that, he comes off — on screen and in interviews — as polite, genial, and disarmingly humble, with charm to spare. An American of Turkish and Greek descent, Gidding’s British surname was “picked off a list at Ellis Island” by a paternal Jewish ancestor believed to have immigrated from Poland. Gidding is conversant in French and German and fluent in English and Turkish, which was his first language. “I grew up in Turkey until I was 15, and then I went to Switzerland for boarding school — as you do,” Gidding says. “Then I came to the states for college and never left.” He went on to earn degrees from both Yale and Harvard — though the ever-humble Gidding mentioned neither during an hour-long phone interview, simply referring to “architecture school” and “grad school” instead. In the U.S., Gidding has mainly rooted himself in New York, with multiyear sojourns to Atlanta, while he worked on HGTV’s Designed to Sell, and to San Francisco, where he’s currently overseeing a major, non-televised renovation of a client’s home. Gidding also travels extensively to take part in home shows, such as next weekend’s Home + Remodelling Show at the Dulles Expo Center. There, he will lead several discussions focused on “how art can work inside the home,” and more broadly to inspire people to “think about their interior space as an artistic expression of their own personality.” “These home shows are a great opportunity for me to see what people are thinking about for their own spaces,” he says. “They are also a great way of seeing what new products come out, which definitely helps my day-to-day job as well.” Gidding is hoping to find insight and inspiration in other
JOSHUA THOMAS
Interview by Doug Rule