First Person

As a teenager, Michael Ward was obsessed with Trading Spaces, the TLC design show in which two sets of neighbors were paired with a professional designer, handed a small budget, and given two days to redecorate one room in each other's homes. At Curbed National, Ward offers an ode to the show's most controversial designer, Hildi Santo-Tomas, who plastered rooms with hay, vinyl records, or furniture on the ceiling, rendering "a sense of liberation through her design—a sense of liberation that is one of the backbones of a gay or queer sensibility." [Curbed National]