Chances are, your face will never grace the pages of People magazine.
But your new kitchen, on the other hand . . . Maybe your new, break-the-bank kitchen is so swell that it could earn 15 minutes of fame by landing on the cover of, say, Metropolitan Home magazine.
Or your daughter’s bedroom — it’s just so darned cute, now that it’s been made over. Like they say on those decorating TV shows: The bedspread just pulls the room together.
But to get there, what does it take, an agent?
In essence, yes. It takes a scout — or field editor or a regional editor or a freelance producer, by other names — to “audition” the place, to see if it has good bones, to put it on the desk of an editor who then can put it on the road to design fame.
Scouts are, essentially, visual reporters, sometimes competing for houses the way traditional journalists compete for stories. Chicago has a dozen or so folks who earn at least a part of their incomes by ferreting out the master suites and family rooms and pantries that fill the glossy pages of the so-called “shelter magazines.”
Add in the emergence of cable television programs that are devoted to interior design, architecture and building, and you have a huge media appetite for beautiful rooms.
“Last year we did in excess of 100 stories” for two television programs alone, explains Peter Finn, whose company produces the “Kitchen Design” and “Bed and Bath Design” weekly series for Home and & Garden Television, the cable channel devoted to all things domestic. In his terms, a “story” is the equivalent of a featured house.
Fortunately for the Peter Finns and the shelter magazines of the world, the economy is booming, which in turn means booming times for the building, remodeling and interior design industries. Plenty of nests are being feathered.
But finding these homes — that is, finding the right homes — is not necessarily so straightforward, as publications’ tastes and requirements vary widely. This is where the scouts come in.
“We probably work with upwards of 40 to 50 of them” around the country, says Steven Mumford, building editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Mumford says some of them are specialists:
“Some tend to scout more upscale homes. Some tend to be plugged into homes in regions where the style is less nationally appealing, so they tend to scout for our special-interest publications. Some scouts do almost exclusively kitchens.
“It’s very competitive. They’re fairly coveted jobs,” Mumford says, declining to discuss salaries because they vary so widely, other than to explain that his company’s scouts get paid according to the number of photographs that the publications commission for likely publication.
Other editors and the scouts themselves are also reluctant to discuss money.
As one put it, “Let’s just say that a relatively inactive scout might make as little as $5,000 to $10,000 a year. A top-notch, professional, active scout could probably clear $100,000, though that isn’t the norm.”
Mumford says that this freelance profession requires far more than having an eye for a pretty room:
“You have to be a sales person — selling to us. You have to be able to say, `I’ve found something great, you’re going to love it, love it, love it.”‘
He adds that, of course, magazine editors have heard every possible pitch, and in all likelihood might not love it, love it, love it, at all.
But long before they reach the pitch stage, scouts have to gain the favor of architects and builders who will let them know when a “good” house is coming up, says Mumford: “And they have to be diplomatic with the homeowners. Many homeowners don’t want their homes in a magazine, though some are absolutely thrilled.”
Mumford says scouts for his publication and other Meredith Corp. shelter magazines also usually function as “stylists,” meaning they work alongside the photographers, supplying some props, and possibly adding and subtracting furnishings in order to improve the composition of a photograph,
The bottom line, though, for most publications and design shows, is that the scout has to be able to find places that have stories to tell. Editors and producers say that scouts who only understand the “pretty” aspect of a room have fairly short-lived careers.
“It’s not that `pretty’ is bad,” explains Hilary Rose , who has been scouting for about nine years, and now principally supplies locations for Meredith publications and for television commercials. “It just has to be something beyond that. It either has to have something special about it or some different approach to the design or to the way that people use it.
“If I just wanted a beautiful interior, I could go into any number of interior-design showrooms or model homes. But we’re looking for a story. The house has to talk about the people who live there.”
Rose says she finds most locations through designers, architects and builders she has come to know through the years, but other sources can yield pleasant surprises.
“If I go into an interesting store, I may want to ask the owners about their house. An artist in another field might translate into a great home. Sometimes people just call me.”
If Rose’s modus operandi is the traditional method, it isn’t the only one. As a freelance producer for a wide range of general-interest television programs, Patricia Lofthouse considers herself an “information specialist.” So a couple of years ago, when she was asked to find locations for HGTV shows in Chicago, she sat down first at her computer.
“I used a lot of on-line services. I checked all the magazine articles that referenced a particular house or architect or kitchen designer or bath designer. I also researched the house walks. I would call up the organizers of those particular house walks and had them recommend owners who might have a fitting house on a walk.
“From there, it’s a matter of contacting them and establishing a rapport, explaining the mission and concept and actually going out and looking at the house.”
To this point, the process is fairly consistent throughout the industry. But depending on the publication, its editorial mission, its lead time, the salesmanship of the scout, and just how special the house in question might be, a number of things could happen.
Rose says that the Meredith publications that she often works with may hold on to her scouting shots for three months to a year before deciding whether to feature a given home. It certainly could go longer.
“I placed one house where they sat on it for three years,” she recalls.
Sometimes the wait is long-term on the front end. She recently toured a partly furnished model home by Bannockburn builder Orren Pickell because she wanted to have a foot in the door, so to speak, when the new owners eventually moved in and decorated, a process that might require waiting more than a year just for another walk-through.
She and others in the business say that no matter how meticulously they scope a place out, their publications or producers might just say no.
Homes get rejected for any number of reasons, ranging from the house just not fitting the editorial tone of the publication or show, to it being too similar to other homes that had been featured. Or, to be blunt, the home could just be not that hot, in the eyes of the editors.
“The reality is that very few, statistically, actually get placed in a national magazine,” Rose says. “I go to four or five houses, and I probably can place one. (But before that), I hear about a lot (of other houses) and see a shots from other people that I am already nixing because I know they aren’t right (for certain publications).”
Factoring in the ones that she hears about but never goes to see, she estimates that “truly, it probably is one out of 50.”
But if the publication or show is interested, a number of scenarios might unfold.
Meredith gives its scouts “photo orders,” each of which usually amounts to an OK to do full-blown photography of a specific room or furniture vignette or detail that the scout has submitted. In a magazine shoot, a photo staff will come into the house for one to three days, depending on the publication’s needs.
Often, the scouts will bring in props, ranging from flower arrangements to whole suites of furniture.
But publications vary widely in how much they “adjust”‘ the picture in order to suit their own missions. Some magazines truck in a house full of furniture to showcase their advertisers’ products, right down to the paint on the walls. Sometimes carpets or artwork may be borrowed for a shoot, in exchange for a credit.
Rose says she regards the use of props, in many cases, as a form of editing that tells the room’s “story” better:
“I bring in fresh flowers, maybe some food (to dress up a kitchen counter), maybe a few accessories,” she says. She also sometimes borrows items from businesses in exchange for a credit.
“People don’t always live with things that are the right scale for photography. I will bring in picture frames and things that are more graphic, stronger, larger. Things that just fill in little places — in bookcases, here and there.
“I have about 50 vases in my basement. My basement is a prop room, actually,” Rose explains. “I just want the house to look like it should look on the best day of its life.”
Duncan Campbell wants that, too — eventually. His locally based HGTV series, “New Spaces,” follows the course of a remodeling project from start to finish. He and production coordinator Lauren Winger are looking for houses with problems.
“It needs to be outdated, it needs to be fixed,” Campbell says. “It can’t just be a decorating issue. We are a construction show. Lauren has to be able to imagine a dramatic transformation.”
And to Campbell and staff, taste is pretty much irrelevant, within some limits. His show is more interested in the remodeling process.
“Oftentimes (the show’s choices) have nothing to do with the appearance of the house. It’s scheduling,” he says, meaning the duration of the project has to fit the show’s time constraints. Winger estimates that the show ends up choosing 20 to 30 percent of the proposed remodeling projects.
Lofthouse freelanced her help to “New Spaces” when the show was getting under way a year or so ago, and has discussed working again for “Kitchen Design” and “Bed and Bath Design” when those HGTV shows return to Chicago in April for an extended round of taping.
Executive producer Finn says his production company would be looking for two kinds of stories: “One we call the `fantasy story’ for people who have spent a hundred grand on a kitchen. It’s spectactular, but out of the reach of most people.
“And then we do a whole other story, within the same episode, the `creative story.’ These are people, through their own ingenuity and creativity, who have taken a little bit of money and done wonderful things. Those can be hard to find.”
