Paige Davis Reveals What Really Happened After the Worst “Trading Spaces ”Room Reveal (Yes, the One People Will Never Forget)

Sometimes well-meaning plans go awry.

Paige Davis — who was the host of TLC’s Trading Spaces from 2001 to 2008 — opened up on a recent episode of The Jason Show about one of the series’ most infamous episodes. In the episode, a couple, Pam and John Herrick, agreed to have their neighbors and designer Doug Wilson redo one of their home’s rooms with a $1,000 budget, as long as they didn’t touch the fireplace. They, in turn, renovated a room in their neighbor’s house.

When the Herricks finally saw their room — with Davis guiding them through it — they learned the fireplace had been covered by wood. They were both upset, with John calling it “firewood.” Pam, meanwhile, left the room to cry, which was fully audible to viewers watching at home.

But Davis, 55, defended the controversial redesign on The Jason Show. “He says, ‘I don’t see anything remotely the way I left it.’ And it was really hard for me not to say, ‘Well, duh,’ ” she told host Jason Matheson. “Like that was kind of the point, for it to change. It was kind of offensive to say, ‘All I see is a lot of firewood.’ ”

Davis continued, “People at home were looking at that room and thinking, ‘This is a beautiful room.’ It was gorgeous, especially for the amount of money. And that fireplace — I don’t think it was sentimental to her, I think they just thought it was beautiful.”

“What Doug did to that fireplace was so much more special and rich and elevated that room in a casual way. It still flowed with the rest of the house,” she said.

Davis noted that in contracts for the show, contestants could “protect” certain things. Wilson, she said, followed the letter of the contract — since he didn’t touch any fireplace bricks — but not the spirit, since he transformed it. Davis defended him, noting the fireplace was the “main thing in the room.”

Pam, she said, was “not prepared for any change,” but she noted that the show “never redid” a room because someone didn’t like it. “She felt that she had protected the fireplace, and so she felt we had violated the contracts she had signed, which we had not, technically,” she said.

Pam spoke to Entertainment Weekly in 2002 about how she felt “violated” by the redesign.

”I realized I just spent two days doing what the show told me to do and they couldn’t do the one thing I asked them,” she explained. Once the show was over, they redid the room and got rid of the fireplace facade — in part, EW said, because the redesign violated city code by obstructing the gas-shutoff valve.

Speaking to PEOPLE in 2018, Davis defended the show’s work as a whole. “So much of the time people loved it. But sometimes they hated it!"

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“We remember those episodes because they were so rare,” she said. “They stand out. It was always tears of joy and happiness. I think if it were always that they hated it, we would have never had a successful show because people wouldn’t have signed up for it. People might have liked watching it, but there wouldn’t be anybody willing to do it.”

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