Last week I had the honour of attending Colin & Justin’s Home Heist, the book launch, at the CN Tower, and having made my way through a gaggle of adoring women, I managed to snatch seven minutes of tete-a-tete with the wildest duo in home decorating. 

For the record: Colin Ryan and Justin McAllister were the nicest, most accommodating, cordial, professionals – swearing and kilt-lifting aside -- I would have ever expected to meet. For the relentless receiving line of needy fans, the boys had nothing but smiles and an inexhaustible supply of jokes. 

Accents were in top form.  

Elana Safronsky: Tell me about this book.
Colin McAllister: This is the book we always wanted to write, it’s got the right balance of info and fun and it’s got some bloody great makeovers in it as well. We never assume anything, but we hope the book will do as well as the first season did and as the second season has already started to do.

E.S.: I love the all-pink kitchen.  If I wasn’t married to such a stickler I would have an all-pink kitchen.
C&J: Well you’ve got to put your foot down!

E.S.: I overheard you’re looking at dual citizenship?
Justin Ryan: Well it’s still in the very early stages but we’re loving being in Canada, and Home Heist the program has been a roller coaster ride for us. So we’re speaking to the government and we’re looking at dual citizenship because we very much enjoy being here, we’re feeling very settled and very centred here. We’re only seven hours from Scotland – we fly home every month for a long weekend, so we haven’t lost touch with our own country. We still work in film at home, but Canada has opened it’s big arms and wrapped them right around us.  

E.S.: Do Canadians have style?
Colin McAllister: We think Canada’s got potential, but Canadians waste space! Too much storage can be a bad thing -- if I see another wasted Canadian basement… We want to get the word basement removed from the Canadian vocabulary – it should just be known as another floor!  [Basement] is a worthless word that implies darkness and an old sofa, that’s it!

E.S.: What is our worst design crime?
Justin Ryan: Without a shadow of a doubt, shagging! And not the good kind darlin’! We’ve seen shag rugs in the living room and shag rugs in the bedroom but the worst we’ve see are seven layers of shag in one bathroom; shag on the side of the bath, on the floor, on the window shelf, on the wall, on the side of the toilet wrapping around, on the top of the sink counter and where do you think the seventh layer was? On the roof! I swear to god on a stack of Canadian Bibles, it was on the roof!  

Colin McAllister: How do you vacuum the ceiling?

E.S.: You don’t, I don’t think. That’s perhaps the grossest part about it… Is carpeting ever OK in the bathroom?  Ever?
C&J: NEVER!

E.S.: What about a wall hanging?
C&J: NOOOOOO!  

Colin McAllister: You’d never ever find even heavy drapes in the bathroom, or kitchen for that matter, because they absorb all the smells and moisture, that’s why you’ve got to wash your towels because they start to smell after a while!

E.S.: What about the trend of bathtubs in dressing rooms?  Dressing rooms that may, in fact, have carpets?
Justin Ryan: That’s insane as well, you know. Colin and I like to build beautiful bathrooms with twin vanities -- you don’t need to have a face wash, or a shave or a douche or an enema in the dressing room. Keep all those ablutions to the bathroom. We keep our dressing rooms for dressing, for storage, for clothing, for books – to have a sink in there is just a little bit insane. And I’ve seen that, but worse, we have just done, on the new season of Home Heist, a bathroom, which had next to it a dressing room and in the dressing room there was one of those things where you wash your bottom – what are they called?

E.S.: A bidet?
Justin Ryan: Yes, a bidet! There was a bidet smack dab in the middle of the dressing room – what are you going to do? Change your clothes, wash your bum and then get into another outfit? I don’t get it?  

Colin McAllister: You could keep ice in the bidet with champagne in it.

E.S.: That’s an option. What about your homes? What were they like growing up?
Colin McAllister: The thing is you know, I think a home is actually more about the people than the décor. What we do is we proved a lovely stage for a really nice performance, so saying that, my home was really colourful because my parents were really colourful people.  There was always a lot of noise, we used to watch old black and white movies on Sundays, you knew it was a family home. And actually, Home Heist is not about the latest colours, or showing off to the neighbours, it's about us looking at you and your family and your environment and then producing something that’s absolutely bang on.

E.S.: Are some people so beyond help that they’re just better off left alone?
C&J: NO.

Justin Ryan: Colin and Justin -- that’s us -- can fix absolutely any house. We have tackled all manner of decorating tragedies; some of the most catastrophic kitchens, the most bilious bathrooms and dreadful dining rooms, and we always have a solution for every design conundrum.  

E.S.: Memorable moments?

Justin Ryan: We’ve just done [a house] on the new series, for a Hong Kong Chinese couple who lived in Scotland, in Glasgow – our city – for 30 years, they had the most bizarre accent I’ve ever heard! The most *** mix of accents and I had no idea at any point what they were saying.

E.S.: They out-accented you two?
Justin Ryan: They out-accented us indeed. Which reminds me of something, this week we’ve had some fan mail and it said, “Dear HGTV, we love Home Heist with Colin and Justin but could you ask the boys to speak in a Canadian accent?”

E.S.: No! 
C&J: That’s what we said! No way!  

Justin McAllister: But we can do it eh! [Breaks into a fairly authentic rendition of “hoser talk”]

E.S.: What’s next for you guys?
Justin Ryan: At the moment we're at that point where we are looking at new opportunities and planning all sorts of things. We’re going to do Hell’s Kitchen in Britain; we’ll be splitting our time between here and Britain, and possibly Australia for the next little while, and see how opportunities unravel. And we are looking at a third season of Home Heist because it’s just been so successful.

E.S.: I can’t leave without asking you about the corsage…
Justin Ryan: Today I feel I’ve been plucked and pillaged.  [Motioning to the small, tame pin on his left lapel.]  I decided because I’m wearing this crazy kilt, I would let the kilt do the talking.

E.S.: It’s actually quite tame, I don’t find it crazy at all!
Justin Ryan: Well, I didn’t want it to detract from the focal point you see…[Motioning to the large red maple leaf suspended just bellow his waist.]

E.S.: When did you start wearing them?
Justin Ryan: The corsages happened quite by chance about four years ago when – I’ve always been a little flamboyant, a little over the top – but I was filming the show How Not to Decorate and the director said, “Justin, you’re looking a bit shabby today,” I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and I thought sh*t, casual! Quick, help! And I wondered around looking for something, and grabbed some flowers from a vase and put them on.  The response in the fan mail was all about “why is that guy wearing those stupid flowers?” And it just built from there and the drama got bigger.

Colin McAllister: Now it’s become a television device!  

Related:  How Not to Decorate,  Colin and Justin's Home Show, Home Heist,Bedroom Makeover with Colin and Justin