Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Happy To Be Home With The Benkos’ on Discovery+ and HBO Max, A Maximalist Home Design Show With A Southern Flair

The new home renovation show Happy To Be Home With The Benkos is a part of Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia Network, which means it’s a comforting, design-y, family-friendly show. Led by photographer-turned-designer Gray Benko, the show’s focus is renovating old Southern homes by respecting the classic architecture and adding pops – nay, BLASTS – of color. Now streaming on Discovery+ and HBO Max, the show is like all of your Instagram bookmarks come to life.

HAPPY TO BE HOME WITH THE BENKOS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man and a woman hop on a motorcycle. He revs the engine, she laughs a good-natured laugh and they zoom off.

The Gist: Gray Benko was a lot of things before she became a sought-after home designer (and, she’s quick to point out, one with no formal training in the field, she simply has an eye for aesthetics and color). A former model and photographer, Benko has turned her passion for beauty into a career. Along with her husband Mike and her dad, Grumpy, she working in and around her South Carolina town of Summerville to renovate older homes, restoring their historical details while putting her very color-and-pattern forward fingerprints on every room. As someone who has watched home design shows and dreams of doing renovations some day, I find myself often unable to imagine how certain materials or colors will look in a space. Gray’s whole thing is that she has an instinct for what works, seeing both the forest and the trees together, and she executes her vision harmoniously.

The setup of the show is similar to every other design show: Gray and Mike drive to a new client’s home, she outlines what they want out of their project, and as the show progresses, we see mockups of what the space looks like now, and how it will eventually look, leading to the big reveal at the end. The formula is HGTV 101. Gray brings in craftspeople she knows to put a personal touch on her vision, Mike constructs cabinetry and other projects to enhance the designs, Grumpy weighs in on whether that beam is structurally sound or not. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but Gray and co. are fun to watch (her bangs are as aspirational as her design skills) and the reveals go beyond the shiplap and painted brick.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The obvious comparisons can be made to Chip and Jo’s flagship series Fixer Upper and HGTV’s Home Town, two similar shows where a married couple renovates and decorates homes (usually in the South) in an updated, occasionally quirky way. But being the home renovation show that I am, I feel like the Benkos provide a Southern twist on HGTV’s Houses With History, where a Massachusetts couple restores and preserves historic homes in New England, often with modern touches.

Our Take: The log line for Happy To Be Home With The Benkos focuses on Gray’s “whimsical” visions and her “eccentric” father’s work as a contractor, so I was braced for something more outlandish, something like the Hildi episodes from Trading Spaces, with her often gasp-worthy, questionable tastes often leaving clients disappointed by her extreme design choices. Happily, this show is not about shock value or testing clients’ tolerances for weird choices. Gray proposes things that are unconventional – monochromatic rooms painted in the same color from floor to ceiling, or patterns on patterns on patterns – but she stands behind her choices, despite telling us that she fears she has imposter syndrome. Her ideas are definitely bold, but they work. Her father, Grumpy, is not actually as gruff as his name suggests, but he does stand in for the audience when she proposes things like an all-black bathroom for her clients. He questions the idea, but trusts in her vision, and ultimately the idea works better than he (or we, the audience) would have imagined.

Though Gray accumulated followers on social media for her designs, she, Mike, Grumpy, and their kids don’t seem like made-for-TV personalities in an influencer kind of way. They respect one another’s ideas and trust each others’ judgement in a way that leaves the show relatively free of conflict, a good thing, in my opinion. (When Gray walks into her clients’ home and notices that her father has framed out a laundry room where she initially designed a bathroom to be, she calls Grumpy up and he explains that he felt it would be more practical that way.Iinstead of manufacturing drama, she sees his point and they move on.)

Parting Shot: “We wish you many, many years of being happy in your home,” Grumpy says as the Benkos toast their clients, the Webbs, after they’ve done a walk-through of their home.

Sleeper Star: As I mentioned, Grumpy is not quite the grump his name purports him to be, but he does question some of Gray’s choices and I can appreciate the contrast between his conventionality and her risk-taking.

Most Pilot-y Line: “The whole charm with old houses is everything is a little bit wonky,” Gray says, describing their first client’s century-old home. The Benkos embrace the wonk of life, and their schtick is taking already charming places and turning them even charming-er.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Happy To Be Home With The Benkos is a modern design show geared toward us homebodies who want to put our own unique mark on our personal spaces and need a little nudge, a little confidence, to do so. It’s fun to see how Gray’s designs come to life, she embraces an ethos of “Go big and go home.”

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.