Andy DehnartBeing fired as host of Trading Spaces almost exactly three years ago was not easy for Paige Davis, who calls the experience “very bad,” “brutal, and “harsh.”
“It’s not something I ever would have considered. My departure was very bad; it was a decision I didn’t understand, why it had been made. I didn’t understand why it was done in a harsh manner. I was pretty hurt by the people who were running TLC at the time,” she told the New York Daily News. “It took me a few months to come to terms with it. I’d like to say it was just another career blip, but it wasn’t. I had dedicated so much of myself that wasn’t in my job description. I took it a little harder than warranted. But it came out of left field and was done in a relatively brutal way.”
Paige decided to return to the series when new executives came in at TLC. “They said, ‘We want to give you the opportunity to make that show gain, to bring it back. They don’t feel ‘Trading Spaces’ had run its course. They feel it was run into the ground,” she said. “After shooting the first episode of the new season that hit me very strongly: how healthy it was to come back and do it again,” she said.
The paper reports that part of that is because “all involved were determined to return the show to its original format: a couple of designers redoing one room in homes of friends, with Davis as the host,” and producers have “returned to some of the staples of the original, such as the music and use of overhead cameras to document the changes.”