"Do you like that color?" Doug Wilson asks me as we stand near a kaleidoscopic wall of paint swatches at a Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse northeast of Houston. The designer presents a colored card and holds it up next to the fabric samples he has in his other hand. As far as I can tell, it matches well, but what do I know? I nod. "That'll do; an icy blue," Doug says, handing the sample to the guy at the paint desk. Tomorrow he'll reveal this color to Mendi and Boyd Lunsford as the three of them kneel in the corner of Erik and Kim Estrada's bedroom.

As Doug -- and everybody on "Trading Spaces" uses first names exclusively -- searches for mirrors he asks me, "Have you seen the show?" I almost choke. "Oh yeah. I'm pretty much a die-hard fan," I say, instantly blowing my cover as an objective journalist type. Ever since I was introduced to "Trading Spaces," I've watched it compulsively.

"Every show has to have a villain," Doug has said, and it's a role he plays well. Once he transformed a bedroom into a replica of a Pullman car, complete with a curved ceiling and a fake window; another time, he converted a rec room adorned with racks of antlers into a sleek home theater with stadium seating. At the height of his villainy a homeowner burst into tears when she saw that he'd covered her ugly fireplace with a wood facade.

Considering his earlier escapades, Doug's plans for this room are surprising, and he knows it. "I'm going to shock people," he says. The rather ordinary room will have a padded headboard, a rug and pillows, mostly blue with white accents. He says it will be called "A pretty room, by Doug," and then adds: "In italics." As he repeats this title throughout the shoot, sometimes in front of the camera, he'll act it out, tilting himself to the right, italics-like, as he says it.

For some of the room's furnishings, we wander around Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings superstore that supplies inexpensive yet trendy pieces for "Trading Spaces" rooms. "I'm sorry this wasn't more exciting for you," he says to me as we head toward the checkout.

Suddenly a stout woman with a thick Texas accent screeches, "Time out!" I back away as she stops and yells, "Slow down!" Her arms are a blur. Then she freezes, looking at Doug inquisitively for a second. Quieter, she says "'Trading Spaces'?"

Doug smiles and reaches out his right hand. "Hi, I'm Doug." The woman's voice seemingly climbs three octaves. "Oh, I watch you all the time." Gesturing to her seemingly mortified friend, she says, "I'm trying to get her to go on it with me. My husband will be shocked when I tell him!"

"Well, too bad he isn't here," Doug says, a perfect smile on his face.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

This is not the Doug we see on the show. It's not that he undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when the camera starts to record. But there's an obvious disconnect between the bitchy drama queen Doug whom a fan of the show called "an asshole ... [and a] cocky son of a bitch," and the Doug who will say, "Hi, it's nice to meet you, too," to a small redheaded girl who walks up to him while he's signing autographs.

Watch any episode and you can see that Doug, who started acting in theater productions when he was 15, relishes playing up his "evil" side, generally doing so with a sort of sly grin. During an infamous episode last season, he sat in a lounge chair, sipping a drink while he directed the homeowners to work. As much as I suspected that to be somewhat of a for-the-camera act, some part of me still expects to see that Doug in Texas. Instead, he's been nothing but friendly and even fun. And on Day 1 -- the first day of official taping but the second of three days that the crew spends at a location -- I find Doug painting in the bedroom alongside a production assistant. The cameras and the homeowners are nowhere to be found.

"I'm impressed by how much you're doing," I say.

"We don't lounge around." Doug watches his paintbrush as he talks; it slides up and down the trim, turning it a brighter white. "But it made for fun TV."

Since I'm being as confrontational as I get, I ask Doug whether he tries to create "fun TV" by designing rooms that are the exact opposite of what the homeowner wants. It often appears this way on the show. The homeowners will say during their pre-interview, for example, "Anything but country," and Frank Bielec, the designer assigned to their room, fills it with arts and crafts and paints curlicues on every damn surface.

Doug doesn't flinch. "If you give them exactly what they want, then what's the risk? And no, I don't try to do things exactly opposite by any means. Most often, my homeowners have liked my rooms." Of the lack of monumental changes in this particular room, he says, "I wasn't going to just change it for the sake of change."

He steps back. "The crisp white does look very good. It's very Martha."

Producer Aimee Kramer calls to him from downstairs. "I'm finishing this door trim side, and then I'll be down. Let me know when you're set up, Aimee." He leans toward me and says, in a much lower voice, "It'll be 20 minutes. You just gotta keep working until they pull you away."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Aimee is the person responsible for pulling Doug away. As one of two producers on the shoot, she works closely with Doug to plan the room, and then directs him and his team during each scene, from outlining what will happen to shooting retakes if something seems off to her. Her crew consists of a camera operator, a sound tech, a grip, a production assistant and the two homeowners. There's an identical team in the opposite house. For each shoot one of the two producers assumes the responsibility of overseeing the entire shoot and joint scenes like the opening Key Swap.

Most of the time, it's not obvious that Aimee and Doug are locked in a quiet battle of priorities. Between shots, Aimee is relaxed, casually chatting with me on the living room couches about what happened on MTV's "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" last week. She jokes with Doug and with Paige Davis, the host of the show, who effervescently moves between the two houses, often getting involved in the scenes. But when the camera rolls tape, Aimee is all business, focused on getting all of the footage the editors will need to construct the episode. She always watches a monitor, seeing what we, the audience, will eventually see. That's her priority.

Doug's priority, however, is to create a room. There's constant pressure on the entire crew to finish, and the second-day deadline looms over the shoot. Although there's not an actual hour by which the rooms must be finished on Day 2 (some of the shoots have gone late into the night), the rooms must eventually be finished. That pressure appeared to me to affect Doug the most. It would be a challenge to work that fast on your own, never mind having a couple of untrained homeowners helping out and a camera crew getting in your way. On Day 2 this tension finally broke.

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