Rachel Brandt
John ("Johnny" to the crew) Littlefield was comfortably sprawled out in his trailer — several hundred yards from the site where a swarm of builders was putting up a new house for the Martinez family — and the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Sure, the show's host, a terribly tan Ty Pennington, is Nick Lachey handsome, and yeah, Mr. Littlefield has probably smashed a few adoring hearts. But the spotlight glares not on the stars but on the hastily built and decorated home — and the family who will be living there.
On the Martinezes: Dawn and Emmanuel have three children: a daughter, Elle, and twins Evan, who has a rare genetic condition called 9p-minus (which results in physical disabilities and mental retardation), and Alec, who is hearing-impaired and has another genetic disorder known as Crouzon Syndrome.
Working with local home-builders Callier Thompson Shea Construction & Design and Consolidated Construction Group, plus hundreds of volunteers and supplies donated by a slew of local vendors, the Extreme Makeover team designed a home that could accommodate the twins' special needs. Mr. Littlefield pulled the plum assignment of the bunch — the twins' rooms. Although the décor is a tightly held secret unveiled only when the episode airs, he did say that the twins were very interested in "animals and animals' sounds."
Get prepared for a zoo.
The designers work for two weeks prior to the mad-dash 1½ days of taking the room from barely there to fully finished.
"I wrote my best papers in college the night before," Mr. Littlefield says. "You have no time to question so you go with your visceral response."
The Martinez house was torn down on Friday, September 5, and completed on September 10.
The show's designs, especially for the children, are always way, way over the top. Take Mr. Littlefield's personal favorite from an earlier episode, the Star Wars room, which included a replica of one of the spaceships from the movies. Yet he insists the rooms will survive those years from kid to teen. "It's a cool color table, and I put the glitz on in layers," he says. "When you strip it down, you have a cool room with clean lines."
The typical reaction of the family — and viewers — is tears. Ditto for Mr. Littlefield.
"As a kid, I was a brown pair of shoes with a tuxedo," he says. "Nobody got me.
"But when the kid sees the room, he sees that somebody gets him."
