Cool design, hot show

Vern Yip (Economics, Chemistry ’90) didn’t initially set out to be an architect and interior designer — or a cable TV star, for that matter. When he graduated from the University in 1990, he had earned degrees in chemistry and economics and planned to be a doctor. Indeed, he went so far as to take his entrance exams to medical school. But he quit medicine just weeks before he started.

“It was really a defining moment of my life,” said Yip, 33, who over the past two years has become the hands-down audience favorite on “Trading Spaces,” The Learning Channel’s hit interior-design show. The audience sees two families switch homes for 48 hours and redesign one room for each other on a $1,000 budget with the help of Yip or one of his seven designer colleagues. “Going to medical school felt like I was swimming upstream, studying 24/7 to do something I wasn’t totally in love with.”

Yip did, however, love to design and build things — he obsessed over Legos as a kid and at age 10 even designed a suite of bedroom furniture, which his mother had fabricated for him. So against his better impulses, he risked making his parents nervous (they feared he wouldn’t make money as an architect) and enrolled in the architecture program at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the fall of 1991.

Yip’s folks, whom he adores, scarcely knew just how successful he would be in the design world. Upon finishing his architecture degree, which he paired with a master’s degree in business management, he worked for a couple of corporate architecture firms in Atlanta. At one firm, he made a small name for himself designing the interiors of a chic Atlanta restaurant, Fusebox, in what has become his signature style: pan-Asian cool. The next thing he knew, in 2000, Veranda magazine named him Southeast Designer of the Year, which is how he came to the attention of the producers at “Trading Spaces.”

When he got the call to try out for the show, “I really didn’t know what it was about,” Yip said. “I never, ever thought I would pursue the route of going with entertainment or television.” He does, though, count several musical celebrities among his private clients, such as Ed Roland, the lead singer of the rock band Collective Soul, and he was a favorite of the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines when she appeared as a guest client on “Trading Spaces.”

He says he was always wedded to the idea that high design could be achieved on a modest budget, and now “Trading Spaces” gives him the ideal platform to broadcast his approach to a popular forum. The show “is cool because it introduces design to all age groups,” Yip said. “I get so many letters every day from kids who say, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a designer just like you.’”

View Vern, Ty, Hildi and the rest of the gang at http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/tradingspaces/tradingspaces.html.