Imagine a marginally more relaxed Martha Stewart with a beard. Is America ready for that?
Bob Vila is moving around a huge and impressive kitchen of one of his four houses, dressed in sandals, khaki shorts and a tan Lacoste shirt, supervising preparations for a summer seashore cookout. The kitchen contains polished granite counter tops and industrial-strength cook tops. Diana Barrett, an adjunct professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health and Vila’s wife of 22 years (they have three children), is vying with him for control over the proceedings.
They have short, cheerful arguments about preparing clams and swordfish steaks that sometimes end with Vila, a Florida native of Cuban heritage, exclaiming something in Spanish.
“If you had told me 20 years ago that my husband would be cutting a cheesecake in half with a reciprocating saw–I don’t know what I would have thought,” Barrett said, in reference to one of his recent promotional appearances for Sears, Roebuck & Co.
In a world where ubiquity begets authority, Bob Vila is established as America’s Handyman. Now, he is poised to become America’s Tastemaker. There’s the obligatory Web site (www.bobvila.com).
And perhaps most significant, last month Hearst Magazines shipped the third test issue of “Bob Vila’s American Home,” which tries to meld the gritty advice of a men’s how-to magazine with the highly styled dream-house pictures that have long been the staple of women’s decorating magazines.
From the title to the cover picture of Vila to cover lines that include “Bob’s Perfect Patio” and “How We Got Our House on Bob’s TV Show,” it is a magazine that is selling celebrity as much as home repair advice.
“It’s wonderful that I can follow my enthusiasms, and turn a profit,” Vila says.
He built this house on Cape Cod as a vacation home. Its two two-story octagons are linked by an indoor bridge that crosses a cathedral-ceilinged great room. The back of the house communes with the water. In front is a sunken garden in a conservatory built with the “Home Again” cameras rolling.
Vila made this his full-time residence shortly after he was forced to leave “This Old House,” after a dispute that centered on his lucrative side career endorsing various home-repair products, which, in that more innocent time, seemed to violate the spirit of public television.
“I figured it would be a good time to get out of Boston,” he says.
This house was demoted to a summer place again (he’s got two cottages on Martha’s Vineyard, too) when the Vila family moved back to Boston, to an extensively and expensively renovated shingle-style house in Cambridge where his neighbors include Alan Dershowitz and Yo-Yo Ma. The renovation was featured on “Home Again” last season and in issues of his magazine.
The house on Cape Cod is part of a compound, complete with a guard’s gate, and Vila owns a 32-foot gentleman’s version of a Maine lobster boat. He seems a little sensitive about the image. But while he may be a celebrity, Vila says, his neighbors are at least as rich and much more private.
Earlier in the day, on this visit to America’s tastemaker that I made with my father, John, Vila guided his lobster boat past a barrier island.
He pointed to one of those expensive new waterfront homes, a rambling “cottage” with a melange of dormers, turrets and roof lines.
“That architect has designed a number of the new houses around here,” he said. “If it was up to me I’d get her banned from the profession.”
Though Vila did not name the architect, calls to local building officials led to Doreve Nicholaeff, who said she has designed several very large houses in that area.
“I have some very prominent clients, who obviously like what I do,” Nicholaeff said. “My houses are designed to be very site-specific and sensitive to the environment.” She added that those were qualities she did not find in Vila’s home.
Vila went into home renovation with a degree in communications, two years in the Peace Corps and a short stint studying architecture. After doing a handful of restorations around Boston in the early 1970s, he was cited by House Beautiful for renovating his home.
The article caught the attention of public television producer Russell Morash, who virtually invented the televised how-to program in the ’60s with Julia Child’s “French Chef” series.
Morash recently told The Los Angeles Times: “He had a glib way about him. Didn’t know anything about building or contracting or anything else. But he was certainly a talker.”
Vila, who says he was paid $250 an episode when he signed on with “This Old House,” quickly learned that the real money was in endorsements. And the popularity and critical success of the show–it won 14 Emmys–gave him a high level of authority and recognition.
It is true that Vila is certainly a talker. He brags that in 20 years he has never used a script.
During the evening, Vila might describe himself several different ways. “I’m 80 percent a real estate developer,” or, “I’m an entrepreneur at heart.” Or even, “I’m a pop figure.”
The latter seems most accurate. Vila may have several related occupations, but his most important is playing Bob Vila, the persona he created that the people around him call “the Franchise.”
The swordfish is sizzling on a high-end outdoor gas grill as the sky over Oyster Harbor begins its polychromatic descent to darkness.
“What you and your father are doing reminds me of me and my dad,” Vila says. “He built a house himself out of concrete blocks in Miami when he needed a place for his family. My earliest memories are of him working on that house–it was always being added to. When I was 13 I helped him put on a new roof.”
Vila points to a bridge in the backyard of his summer home that he and his father built together not long before he died.
With his many commitments, Vila seems these days to have little time for anything but being Bob Vila. Even his how-to television show has been weighted heavily toward how he’s improved his own rarefied lifestyle. Last year’s programs focused on the Cambridge renovation.
This season, viewers of “Home Again” will see 13 episodes devoted to the 80-foot car-and-boat barn Vila is building for himself on the Cape Cod cul-de-sac where he built his office building and a home for his housekeeper.
