Heavy/Getty HGTV star Alison Victoria
With a new season of “Windy City Rehab” on the horizon, longtime HGTV star Alison Victoria is doubling down on her commitment to “show people the truth” about what it’s really like to renovate an old home, calling out programs that are just “smoke and mirrors.”
On July 29, 2024, Victoria was in-studio at Los Angeles TV station KTLA for a live interview, during which she revealed that the fifth season of “Windy City Rehab” will premiere in September after a year-long hiatus.
Victoria, who launched her own production company in June, said she doesn’t sugarcoat anything in her series because her goal is for viewers to “learn from my mistakes,” be realistic about their expectations and understand all that goes into a major renovation. That’s not always the case with some shows, she said.
Alison Victoria Admits She’s Lost Lots of Money on Renovation Mistakes
Victoria’s first renovation show was “Kitchen Crashers,” which aired on the former DIY Network from 2011 to 2016, per IMDb. Before debuting “Windy City Rehab” in 2019, she hosted many HGTV specials including the network’s annual “White House Christmas” event. Victoria currently also co-stars on “Battle on the Beach,” which just wrapped its fourth season, and “Ugliest House in America,” which was just renewed for a sixth season.
After all that experience renovating and decorating for TV shows, Victoria has seen all the tricks of the trade and doesn’t want her fans to ever feel duped.
“I created ‘Windy City Rehab’ because I wanted to show people the truth in the business,” Victoria said on KTLA. “There’s so much smoke and mirrors in our industry.”
Though Victoria didn’t call out any specific TV shows, she’s irked by content that makes the renovation process look simple and easily doable by anyone.
If she does that with her shows, she told KTLA, “Then I get a lot of people in trouble (with their home projects) and a lot of people, you know, say, ‘Oh you you made it look like you could do it this way!’ But I really show people the truth and that’s what I really wanted to do with the show — to say, ‘Here’s the good, the bad, the ugly. Like, this isn’t easy.”
Victoria told the station she hopes viewers “learn from my mistakes” before tackling anything in their homes. When one of the KTLA hosts brought up an old episode of “Windy City Rehab” in which Victoria inaccurately measured a custom-built kitchen hood and it couldn’t fit in the new space, Victoria exclaimed, “That really happened!”
She continued, “Cost me a lot of money to fix it because I have to eat that cost, right? It’s not like the network (will) … these are real homes, real money and real risks. I don’t want to, like, have people watch my show and be like, ‘Oh, it’s so easy.’ And then, you know, curse me later.”
Alison Victoria Learned the Hard Way to Watch Over Every Aspect of Her Renovations
Victoria has learned from her own mistakes, too, after a lengthy and ugly legal battle with her former contractor, Donovan Eckhardt, per the Chicago Sun-Times. During the second season of “Windy City Rehab” in 2020, drama between them played out on-air, as Eckhardt had his general contractor and developer licenses pulled by the City of Chicago for violations, per People, and they faced multiple lawsuits from clients.
After cutting ties with Eckhardt and settling costly lawsuits, Victoria told People in 2023 that she was burnt out, explaining, “I was at a place where I didn’t know if I even wanted to do this anymore. I felt myself flipping and reevaluating things to say like, ‘Do I really even want to be in this business anymore?'”
Victoria took a month off to spend in her favorite city, Paris, and got her mojo back, eventually calling HGTV to say she was ready to start filming again. Though she could have glossed over or hidden all of the legal troubles, she told People that “Windy City Rehab” was always meant to be a “docuseries,” with everything shown.
“So as things unfold and happen, the cameras are there,” she said. “These aren’t set up scenes.”
After learning from her own missteps, she told People she’s much more careful about who she partners with and isn’t afraid to go after subcontractors she thinks are ripping her clients off.
“I’m going to make sure that I figure out what’s going down and hold these people accountable because that was done to me and I’m not going to watch something like that happen,” she said.
“Windy City Rehab” was nominated for its first Emmy Award in 2024 in the Instructional/How-To Program category, as did “Fixer to Fabulous.” Neither HGTV show won, though, as the prize went to Netflix’s “Hack My Home.”