Why Rachel and Ryan Carr turned the cameras on themselves for new TV show

Rachel Carr pauses before answering. She’s not avoiding the question but rather considering her reply.

“I still ask myself that sometimes to be honest,” the celebrity renovator shares with Domain.

Carr is on the phone from Sydney, sparing a precious moment out of her day between juggling her work as a designer, renovator and mother to three children under the age of 10.

The question she paused over was this – how did she and her husband Ryan sustain renovating their tired holiday home into a luxury coastal retreat for a TV series all the while running a business and a busy family household?

The TV show in question is Holiday Home Makeover – the couple’s new renovation show that follows them as they renovate their tired south coast home into a luxury retreat in just 14 weeks.

As Carr explains, there was a method to the apparent madness of the project.

The beginning of the idea for the TV series was formed a few years ago after the couple appeared on the 2022 season of Australia’s top renovation reality TV show The Block.

The on-screen experience made the former make-up artist turned designer and plumber turned builder household names. Though, it wasn’t always an easy path.

“Our Block experience, it was a little bit different in that we went on The Block with 30 hours’ notice,” Carr recalls.

They were called to join after another couple, Joel and Elle, withdrew unexpectedly.

“Of course it really took us some time to find our feet when we were there,” Carr adds.

When they did hit their strides, they consistently delivered impressive room reveals. 

They walked away from the show with a solid $169,000 profit on a post-show sale.

It’s been three years since Scott Cam blew the final whistle on the 2022 season. Yet, something has remained with Carr. 

She and Ryan feel they could have given the Australian public more.

“It really made me think to myself, ‘OK, what can we do to turn this around?’ Doing this holiday home has always been a dream of ours, and doing it, we knew that we were going to design it in a way that was a real elevated design,” she says. 

The lingering thought sparked an idea for a do-over for the Carrs, of sorts.

“I thought if we can, let’s film it and let’s show Australia what we can do. That’s where it all came from and that’s where the whole TV concept came from,” she says.

The Carrs pitched the concept to Nine – the home of The Block – and were given the green light to go away and make their own renovation series.

“I naively didn’t think what was gonna happen. I didn’t think that I was then gonna be entrusted with making that TV show – something that I’ve never done before and something that I now realise is incredibly difficult,” Carr says of the filming process.

The couple have wrapped on their series, which is currently screening on 9Now. It’s a show, she says, they put their heart and soul into.

“Another reason that we were doing this is because we had just left our children for four months to go on The Block, and we wanted to really show them what could come of it and I was very acutely aware of not leaving them again,” she says. 

“So we really did everything in our power to affect them as minimally as possible.” 

Carr says to achieve this she and her husband worked around the clock.

Their days started at 4am. They worked for three hours until 7am, then stopped to focus on the morning routine with their children before taking them to school.

“Then Ryan and I would go down to the house. Ryan would leave early and then he’d be back at 3pm to pick them up and I’d be racing home at 4.30pm so I’m there for dinner with them and bedtime,” she says.

She says after putting their children to bed, they would work again until midnight. The routine would start again the next day.

“I’m so proud of what we’ve done. If someone said to me now, OK, you can wave a magic wand and not do it, I would do it all over again because I’m so proud of what we did,” she says. 

She credits naivety and adrenaline for getting the pair over the line.

“I think the fact that we didn’t know what was around every corner made it easy to approach those corners because we thought, ‘no, this is gonna be OK’, and then you hit with another speed bump,” she candidly shares. 

“But you get over it and you work through it and you find a solution, and then you hit another speed bump, you just keep going. So, we came through it at the end, but it was a journey.”

Another element that helped was knowing who they were designing the holiday house for.

“We had our guests in mind,” she says of the Italian inspired retreat.

“What we did was we sat down and we pitched our perfect guests, and it was a group of women, or couples, in their late 30s to early 50s, who were going on a wine tour and we built the house for them in mind.

“I think something that was very mindful for me is people are going there to escape.”

Design for your guest it’s a learning she’s happy to share with others, as is budgeting.

“One of my big takeaways as well is to know your budget and have a hard line… I know how easily things can blow out. So just know your budget, have a hard line. Of course, there’s always gonna be things that you want to add, but then change something else, but don’t go over your hard line.”

Holiday Home Makeover is currently screening on 9Now.