Why Nicole Curtis can’t quit ‘Rehab Addict’ — or Detroit
For the new season of her hit HGTV show, the home renovator battled burnout to tackle projects in the Motor City and Wyoming
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Almost impossible to believe now, after watching Nicole Curtis up to her tool belt in rotting floorboards and moldy ceilings all these years, but the working title of her HGTV series was going to be “Princess of Preservation.”
“And I was like, ‘Listen, this is wrong — there is nothing about me that’s a princess!’” grins Curtis, the industrious blonde Lake Orion native who has been the foundation of the HGTV and DIY home renovation series Rehab Addict since 2010.
“Then one of our editors said, ‘What about Rehab Addict?’ When we started, everybody thought I was a drug user! So it was really hard that first season to sell the show with that play on words. But I am absolutely addicted to what I do. I am who I am.”
The new season of Rehab Addict, premiering at 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 24 on HGTV, finds Curtis getting her fix by fixing homes in not one but two states, nearly 1,500 miles apart. In what she calls “one of my wildest challenges yet,” she’s renovating an historic home in Detroit, where she has restored numerous properties on the show and its spinoff series Rehab Addict Rescue and Rehab Addict Detroit including the Ransom Gillis house in Brush Park — although she describes the current house as “utter disgust” and “one of the dirtiest houses I’ve ever seen” — and a 1980s house in Wyoming, where she recently relocated for a time.
Why Wyoming? She wishes she knew.
“I took a little break from TV,” says Curtis, a loud and tenacious advocate for historic home preservation. “It’s no secret I’ve been battling developers and cities and councils, trying to save a bunch of homes. I’m from Lake Orion, which used to be this little tiny town, but they sold out to developers and I lost — we lost — about 15 historic sites the past two years. It’s very sad. It used to feel like a lovely little village, now it’s all developments.
“I was burnt out. My heart was so broken from watching all those buildings get destroyed. I was in Paris, checking houses online, and I saw this little forgotten house in Wyoming. I thought, ‘I’m just gonna do it.’ Now, had I really put some thought into it, ‘You don’t know anyone in Wyoming,’ ‘All your tools are in Detroit,’ I don’t know if I would have done it. But nobody knows me in this small town, knows what I was doing or why I was shooting, which was just what I needed.”
Curtis believes that unlike many series in the home improvement genre, where major construction appears to go smoothly with unlimited budgets, her warts-and-all approach is what has made Rehab Addict a longrunning success.
“As soon as we get on camera, I want to show the realness,” she says, sporting a gray “Detroit Coney Island” T-shirt. “I want to show the real side of construction. It doesn’t always go right. Sometimes you fail. I don’t have $200,000 to put into a kitchen, so we’re going to put $200 into a kitchen. I like old houses and want to keep them old.
“There was a real question at the network when we started: ‘Is anyone going to watch this?’” Curtis recalls. “People want to see flashy, all these expensive things. But of course, the rest is history. Our fans are rabid. They love it. They love when I screw up. They love that I look like hell warmed over, wearing the shorts I’ve had since 2010. In fact, I’m wearing them right now. That’s what you get. I want to show who I really am.”
Who she really is now, she declares, is a Detroiter through and through, which made her Rehab Addict conversion of the “utter disgust” local house — complete with squatters — even more disheartening.
“The squatters were a sweet little surprise,” she cracks. “We’ve been very fortunate. I think this is only the third or fourth time in all these years where we’ve actually had to get people out. You could drive by the house and see lights on, so we called the utilities. They all said they don’t care who owns the house, as long as the bills are paid. Come to find out they were stealing it all!
“I’m always a positive person when it comes to old houses, but there was garbage everywhere and the back half had no roof. Now, it’s gorgeous.”
Any concern that describing the pre-rebuild house as “utter disgust” and “one of the dirtiest ever” might just reinforce Detroit’s negative national image? “No,” Curtis responds.
“When I started the show I was based in Minneapolis, but I was a loyal Detroit girl and wore Detroit shirts all the time,” she relates. “It was very confusing to people, and when I would explain I’m from Detroit they would go, ‘Ugggh!’ Well, now it’s trendy.
“I grew up in a little town, but I dreamed of being inner city,” she reveals. “I left that town at 17 and never looked back. That’s not where my heart is. I’m a Detroiter. I don’t live anywhere trendy in Detroit. You’re never gonna find me in a trendy hotspot. My boys call themselves Detroiters. We were just at the Grand Prix. People see us at Eastern Market every Saturday. We’re at Greenfield Village four to five times a week. I’m old school, you know?”
Curtis looks at this Detroit rebuild as a statement. “Any [house] flipper coming in would have just torn everything out, thrown it in a dumpster and put in everything new,” she believes. “This is to show you that even if it’s a tiny Detroit house, its history still matters. If you want to build new houses, we have so many vacant lots you can take your money there and I will come and celebrate with you. But we need our history in Detroit. Every old city needs its history. Our history here is so important.”
