Leslie Ezelle, a 44-year-old interior designer and mom from Dallas, has been named the first HGTV Design Star All Stars champ. She gets a $25,000 grand prize and a special appearance on an HGTV show.
Among the challenges she and other designers face this season were updating sets inspired by the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life (which sorta made other reality-show news this week), and, in the finale, transforming small repurposed shipping containers into chic, functional spaces.
We talked to Ezelle last year for this story when she was on her first Design Star go-round. She's a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader and a breast-cancer survivor with a blended family (""We're the real-life Modern Family," she told us. "I'm in a same-sex relationship, and we're a blended family. My little girl was born in China, and her little boys are quite the handful. So it's a pretty entertaining household. Plus we have a petting zoo. We've got so many living things in this house, it's crazy. Three dogs, a couple of kitties, turtles, hamsters. I'm doing a major overhaul of this space so we can make room for the growing boys.")
Ezelle also appeared in last year's Frogs for the Cure "flash mob" at TCU as one of the many people dancing on the hottest day of the hottest summer to Tim Halperin's We Fight Back. (I was there -- not dancing, thank heaven -- and even if you weren't dancing, the heat was brutal.) Here's some highlights of Ezelle's participation in the dance. You might see some other familiar faces as well.
