Design Star 3: A Divided Team Gay Survives

Hmmmm, was it really a "divide and conquer" strategy last Sunday night, when Design Star's tiny Season Three Team Gay — Michael Stribling and Matt Locke — got split up and forced to work against each other?

Michael Stribling and Matt Locke

If so, it didn't work, because the two teams that contained our design-tastic heroes both triumphed (or at least, survived). It was Scottie Miller who got himself eliminated, after creating a boys' dormitory straight out of the 70s.

Scottie's bedroom before

Scottie's bedroom after

I cannot deny that his effort burned my eyes, and I'd have booted the dude, too. But I did think the judges were a tiny bit nasty about it, from Vern Yip, who said, "That room is a major disaster" to Martha McCully's "I hate it."

Wait, you say.... bedroom? What happened to last week's challenge, where they were all going to be sleeping on cots while they constructed their own house from the ground up? In the rain? While wearing Jimmy Choo pumps?

It turns out it was a fake-out or, as my grade school nuns would have said, a lie. The contestants are actually living in a huge, gorgeous house in the Nashville countryside, and just like last season, they have to design it before they can live in it.

The HGTV Design Star house

Team Gay's junior member, the blond and perky (and single) Michael Stribling, was part of the creative effort responsible for the living room and sunroom of their home away from home, along with Tracee Dore, Trish Beaudet, and D. Paul DeRouen (who ushered Michael through a doorway by saying "Ladies first." Not sure how I feel about that).

Michael Stribling