Clinton Kelly might have made his mark as co-host of The Chew and What Not to Wear for a number of years, but now the fun-loving lifestyle expert helps wildly successful entrepreneurs find their dream homes on HGTV. In the series Self-Made Mansions, premiering Jan. 8, Clinton initiates his personal passion for real estate and a keen eye for design to show new millionaires what it means to live large. The six-episode series will follow clients behind inventions like The Cut Buddy, Kwik Hang and Sweetroots Hair Bar, among many others.
In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com ahead of the holiday season, Clinton shared how it was a real privilege to be able to share his advice and imagination with these self-made creators and their families looking to buy new homes. “It’s been really fascinating to meet these people because it’s like, ‘Wow, you were gutsy to do that!’” he said in our series PopCulture @ Home of the families who have thrown themselves into specific ideas. “I can’t even imagine having an idea and then saying, ‘This is the best idea and I’m gonna do everything in my power make it work.’”
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Helping families to “see potential” in every house they see, Kelly admits each one of these entrepreneurs has a “vision,” whether it be for their likely new abode or a business endeavor. “They could see their business go from nothing to something multi-million dollar business [and] they were basically able to walk into a space and see potential,” he said. “On those HGTV shows where the couple walks in and they’re like, ‘I can never live here with that wallpaper it’s terrible!’ And you’re like, ‘We can tear that down. That’s literally gonna take two hours!’ But [these homeowners] were always like, ‘Oh yeah, I can totally see I got to rip this whole kitchen up for a new one.’”
While million-dollar homes have become commonplace in the U.S. real estate market, they oftentimes range across the country when comparing the cost-per-square-foot, something Kelly admits was and wasn’t a challenge when finding the best homes.
“What I realized about these people is they wanted to stay close to home, so whatever town they were living in, while they were scraping by and scratching their way up to the top, they wanted to stay there. These people weren’t like Beverly Hillbillies, he said. “It was more like, ‘We love this town, so we wanna stay in this town.’ There’s just a nice big house down there that we’d like to look at. So in that regard, it all felt relative. It wasn’t difficult for them to wrap their heads around it because if you live in a town, you know what a $200,000 house is like — and you know what a million-dollar house is like, so there’s that scale.”
He adds that the difference in homes within that value wasn’t without its fair bit of shock. “I did an episode in Long Beach, which is on Long Island. For a million dollars, we’re looking at houses that were complete gut renovations, not a ton of square footage,” Kelly said. “For a million dollars in Pittsboro, North Carolina, we were looking at like seven-bedroom houses that were turnkey, move-in ready, perfectly done. So it was like, ‘Wow. You could if you wanted to make your money in one place and moved to another place and really live large. But these people didn’t want to do that.”
Self-Made Mansions premieres Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. ET on HGTV. For more with Clinton and all your favorite HGTV shows, keep it locked to PopCulture.com for the latest!
