Designer of HGTV giveaway home melds modern style with Scandinavian touches

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Memphis interior designer Carmeon Hamilton had never been to Kansas City before HGTV tapped her to work on a project here. Her assignment: Design the living spaces for HGTV’s 2024 Urban Oasis house.

The home and garden channel gives away a fully decorated home in the heart of a different city each year. This year’s Urban Oasis is in an undisclosed Kansas City neighborhood.

HGTV chose the house in late 2023. Then work on a massive, dramatic transformation began over the winter and wrapped up in July. The builder and architect was Astoria Design Build LLC, a woman-owned company in Johnson County.

The home will be revealed in a one-hour special, “HGTV Urban Oasis 2024,” at 6 p.m. Central on Oct. 4 on HGTV and HGTV Go and will stream on Max and Discovery+ the same day. People can enter the giveaway online at HGTV.com and FoodNetwork.com beginning at 8 a.m. Central Oct. 2. Entries will be accepted until 4 p.m. Central Nov. 21.

The house, all the furnishings and $50,000 add up to a prize worth more than $700,000, HGTV says.

The two-story, three-bedroom home with 2½ baths is about 2,200 square feet, with a home office on the first floor, a music lounge on the second floor, a wellness center in the basement and an expansive entertaining area in the backyard.

Hamilton melded modern style with Scandinavian touches, guided by her personal design aesthetic and what she learned about life in Kansas City — its music, culture, even its fountains. Whimsical nods to the city are sprinkled throughout the home.

Kansas City seems almost like “a sister city” to Memphis, where she lives and works, Hamilton recently told the Star. “So it was so much fun getting to know Kansas City. It feels more Southern than Midwest, funny enough.”

Hamilton is a past winner of HGTV’s “Design Star” competition, described by Architectural Digest as a “rising star taking the design world by storm.”

“The city is actually what inspired a lot of what went into the house, and also past Urban Oasis homes,” Hamilton said. “They’re always very modern but reminiscent of the cities that they’re in, so we’re always looking for ways that incorporate special elements of the city into the home. So my job is to translate that in some way, form or fashion.”

HGTV has given away homes in Minneapolis (in 2019) and other metro areas since 2010.

“Kansas City is such a lively, entertaining city,” she said, pointing to the “huge art scene, the jazz culture” and sports teams. “So the house is very much geared around entertaining as well.”

She said, “I’m a huge proponent of adding warmth and texture to a space, so that’s why you see so many wood elements there, and then of course all the various textures in the furniture and fabrics that are throughout the house, too.”

The living room is a prime example, with ash beams overhead reflecting the warmth of white oak floors below. All the floors on the first and second levels are oak. She chose a chenille sofa, bouclé chairs and other seating in velvet to add cozy texture.

She didn’t miss a chance to add texture around the house, seen in fluted wall paneling leading to the wellness lounge in the basement. “That room, I am jealous of the winner,” she said.

The house, built in 1939, “had a basement that was unfinished, actually really dark and damp and wet and gross,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to go down there until there was plenty of construction and finishing done. There weren’t stairs for a long time.”

A once-forlorn space now has comfy seating, a large projection screen on one wall and a “tea bar” on another wall that can be converted into a desk for a second home office. There’s a dry sauna, too. The flooring is cork — softer on the knees during workouts.

What went into this project?

“A lot of love and brains and hands,” Hamilton said. “I am so grateful for the team that surrounded me to make this space as beautiful as it is. It’s kind of crazy to think about designing a house from Memphis and having it turn out as beautiful as it did.”

She paid homage to Kansas City throughout the house, beginning outside the front door, where limestone fence posts, a nod to the abundance of the stone in the area, were repurposed into exterior lighting.

A custom piece of art on the living room wall mimics the fountain design of Kansas City’s logo.

A little treat in the upstairs laundry room: shuttlecocks on the orange wallpaper, just like the giant one on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Hamilton jokes that she didn’t know what shuttlecocks were before she worked on this project.

She honored the city’s jazz history by creating a music lounge on the second floor where she hung trombones on the wall as art — also a wink to her son, who plays trombone — and installed built-in shelves tall enough to hold albums. A massive corduroy sectional — more texture — has plenty of room for lounging, listening to music or simply relaxing.

All three bedrooms are on the second floor, including the main suite, decorated with a retro wallpaper reminiscent of the ‘70s, a balcony overlooking the backyard and its own bathroom with a freestanding soaking tub inside a wet room. The room is all about color and pattern, Hamilton said. A design hack to borrow: Push two smaller pieces of furniture together to mimic one large piece, as Hamilton did to create a dresser and two bedside tables.

She turned a second bedroom into a colorful “bunk room” featuring full-size bunk beds.

She created a moody guest bedroom with padded wainscoting behind the bed — which doubles as a cushy headboard — made from foam core panels wrapped with wine-colored fabric.

Hamilton hopes projects like the DIY wall covering and her use of boldly patterned wallpapers inspire people

“to think outside the box about their own homes,”

Her fearless use of color is on full display in the contemporary blue kitchen at the back of the house, which in its previous life was much smaller and awkwardly placed. Now it’s roomy enough for entertaining, wide open to an adjacent dining room with a built-in bar.

The blue of the custom flat-panel cabinetry and the range hood was inspired by the tile on the living room fireplace. But “once we realized how many sports teams in Kansas City were blue, we knew it would go over very well with the citizens in town,” Hamilton said.

An expansive island big enough to seat four people “is just pure real estate for setting up for game day, Thanksgiving,” she said.

A pass-through window near the sink helps connect anyone working in the kitchen to one of the home’s most dramatic features, an expansive backyard designed for hosting company.

A large, grassy backyard “was a lot of the reason that the house was selected, because we wanted a house where outdoor living was a selling point,” Hamilton said.

She created dining space off the kitchen and placed comfortable seating around a fire pit on a lower level

Because she wasn’t designing for a specific client, Hamilton kept her own family in mind while creating these spaces, making sure there was welcoming, functional room for everyone.

“You’re in the heartland in Kansas City,” she said. “So you want this home to feel instantly like home when you walk in.”