HGTV's Chayse Dacoda on Interior Design

Actress, comedian and designer, Chayse Dacoda, is a master at merging décor styles and transforming interior spaces.

With pop culture comes the reemergence of television shows dedicated to flipping houses, room makeovers and hard and landscape design. As a newly married couple one of the most important things you can do is educate yourself on real estate and know when and where to invest your money.

And everyone knows that homes are all about the bathrooms and kitchens, but no one knows better than esteemed designer, Chayse Dacoda. No stranger to being in the limelight, Dacoda has made small appearances in movies, had stints doing standup comedy, and is one of the former hosts of TLC’s “While You Were Out.” Her latest role: host of HGTV’s “Get it Together.”

Whether she is in front of cameras filming her next episode or running her Los Angeles-based firm—Dacoda Design—Dacoda is consistently faced with design-centric dilemmas. For the couples on her show she is strapped to a tight $3,500 budget and only has a few days to complete each project; for clients through her business, budgets can soar upwards of half a million dollars and projects can go on for a year or more. “Sometimes they never end,” Dacoda quips, as she finds one room remodel often leads to another.

Regardless of who she is working with, Dacoda’s recurring challenge is to marry a couple’s taste. For those on her show, she has them take a style survey to help ease the time constraints, whereas in her firm she may survey the rest of the home, ask questions about their wants and needs, and make suggestions. In both her show and firm, she finds that couples are “willing to compromise when they see that there can be a merging of things.” For TV-show clients Sabrina and Larry Baltutis, who have opposite design styles (she likes clean and traditional, he likes rustic and antique), they came away from the experience commenting: “I really felt as though she listened to both of us; she accomplished what we considered a challenging task, effortlessly.”

Dacoda has always been grounded in design. “I was just always the kind of person that physically, I liked changing the world,” says Dacoda, who has a colorful back history in design that began with her rearranging furniture in her home when she was six. She proceeded to work with a friend of the family assisting with décor odds and ends at 11, did set design and art direction for a brief period of time while in college, and later moved to Los Angeles—where she still resides—to pursue a future in real estate where she eventually staged houses.

Finding joys in both of her roles, one of Dacoda’s passions is to travel, and it is amidst her globetrotting that she finds most of her inspiration. “Worldly cultures inspire me,” says Dacoda, noting that it can be somewhere as close-by as ABC Carpet & Home in New York or somewhere abroad like Asia.

Remarking that there is nothing like being home, Dacoda admittedly likes to “go out and be a sponge in the world.” One of her most religious clients, Sam and Toby Berkow, actually hired her to work on their Park Slope, Brooklyn apartment after candidly seeing her at a restaurant in New York on one of these excursions.

The job included all 2,100 square feet of their home, minus the bathrooms. “The space was totally transformed,” remark the Berkows. “Chayse was helpful in making the space work both as a warm home and fun/chic entertaining space.”

In the end they found: “We feel we ended up with a space that did not favor the design preference of either of us, but used the best of both of our ideas.” While Dacoda guided them through the process, it required “us to work together as a couple and with Chayse to achieve a result that would work well for both of us.”

Written by Jessica Latimer