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Orangeville father-daughter duo wins top prize on Home Network’s Renovation Resort

May 29, 2025   ·   1 Comments

By Joshua Drakes

Graham and his daughter Hollie Laird went head-to-head with competitors on a home improvement TV show, where they were tasked with designing a winning vacation home. In the end, the father-daughter duo ultimately secured the $100,000 top prize.

Hollie described the feeling as electric.

“We’re just feeling like we’re on cloud nine,” she said. “The response we’ve gotten from our friends and family, it’s really been incredible.”

Hollie said Graham and her are already planning to invest the prize money back into their family business, Laird Kitchen and Bath, and begin working on another vacation home, following the success of their project featured on the Home Network’s “Renovation Resort.”

“We’re definitely going to put some into the business, but we’d really love to work on something like a vacation property again together,” she said. “I think that would be such a dream, just curating a home for people to share with their friends and family.”

The journey to victory started long before the cameras started to roll.

Hollie had seen a post about the casting of a competitors from a previous season, and after reaching out about it, they recommended that Hollie and Graham give it a try.

“She reached out to me and said ‘Oh, you guys would be great for this,’ and I thought to myself, yeah, this sounds like the perfect opportunity,” she said. “It’s a designer, a builder, and it’s also for a vacation home, which is something that I had looked into doing in the near future, then I reached out to dad, and I said, so how about we apply for this?”

A big adjustment was going from working primarily on kitchens to a whole house. 

The show runners, while initially skeptical, ultimately agreed, according to Graham.

“When we were casting for the show, they were concerned that we were too specialized in kitchens,” he said. “Then the one who made the casting decision said, ‘The kitchen has everything. Everything we’re doing in this house is involved in a kitchen. So if they can do that room, it translates perfectly into the rest of the house, because all the skills needed in the kitchen are needed throughout the rest of the house.’”

The main adjustment was getting used to a filming schedule. Hollie said that at first it was jarring, stopping work abruptly for interviews, and it really made them both change their workflow to compensate at first.

“It was really challenging to get the flow of the filming process at first,” she said. “We’re used to working, we’re used to doing our job, not really being pulled away for interviews, being pulled away for little mini-challenges, bonus builds. It was very confusing at first, but we learned from our errors and learned from the time frame challenges, and just focused.”

The duo focused on a theme that both respected the age of the house and also an upgrade to a more modern age. Hollie said they drew inspiration from the colours of a family rug to encapsulate the build.

“My grandmother’s rug was the inspiration for the colors throughout the home,” she said. “I knew I wanted it to feel familiar, traditional, but not old, like traditional with some modern, fresh takes on things. So I took that as my colour palette,”

“My other inspiration was bringing the outdoors in. I think that’s really important when you’re in a vacation home, to feel like where you are is important to what’s going on inside,” Hollie added.

For eight weeks, Graham and Hollie worked tirelessly to design and renovate the vacation home of their dreams, which proved to be a unique challenge for the pair. 

The duo previously focused on mainly kitchen design, which Graham said was his favourite room in a house, and where some of the fondest family memories are shared.

“It’s just as a parent, you like to congregate with the family when they’re not busy,” he said. “It’s where you sit together and have dinner, it’s where you talk as a group, it’s a space where you come back to that is never going to change. So the importance of that room resonated with me as a parent.”

In fact, the duo got started with kitchens being a requirement for their partnership. When Hollie first approached her father to work together on renovation projects, she said he specifically requested that they had to do kitchens, no matter what. 

“I was working at a residential developer in Toronto, and I wanted to make a change,” she said. “I had always sort of wanted to do something a bit different and be a little bit more in control of my career. I wanted to be more involved in design.”

Hollie continued, “So I reached out to my dad, and I asked if he’d be interested in working together, and he was down as long as we were able to do kitchens. I quit my job, and I moved home briefly, just to get the business going, and the rest is history.”

As for what comes next for the father-daughter duo, they’re already jumping right back into work, having received multiple requests the moment the winning episode aired.

“So we had a bunch of different calls come in and ask for work,” Hollie said. “A lot came in right when the announcement came out, which is fun. It seems like there’s some momentum, so we’re going to roll with that.”

Anyone interested in watching the Orangeville father-daughter duo compete in Season 2 of Renovation Resort can steam it on STACKTV.

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