Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How To Build A Sex Room’ On Netflix, Where Melanie Rose Designs Rooms To Bring Out Couples’ Sexy Sides

Melanie Rose is a luxury designer that designs sex rooms. Yep, that’s right. She’s a kindly British lady with short white hair and sensible but colorful clothes; she used to design all sorts of interior rooms but when she was hired to do a sex room, “I quickly found out that [they] were the most wonderful things to design,” so she does this exclusively now. In How To Build A Sex Room, she goes to couples’ houses, finds out their wants and needs, and builds them the sex rooms of their fantasies (which are often quite… interesting).

HOW TO BUILD A SEX ROOM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Over music that reminds you of an old-fashioned TV series, a woman approaches a house in a bucolic suburban neighborhood.

The Gist: First up is Taylor and Ajay, who are into not-so-light BDSM, and they want to convert a “secret” space into a sex room where they can just go nuts. The room is through a trap door in the washer/dryer closet; it’s essentially an unfinished basement with exposed brick, plumbing along the low ceilings and the water heater and a utility sink.

To get an idea what they want, she presents the couple items like a heavy chrome butt plug, handcuffs, and a multi-tailed instrument for flogging. She also takes them to a place where BDSM experts hook Taylor up to a St. Andrew’s cross and show Ajay how to properly flog her. She loves it, which is helpful because Melanie wants to put one of those crosses in their “rock and roll sex basement.”

The other couple, Raj and Ryan, have a more modest request: They just want their main bedroom to feel like somewhere that will get them in the mood. They both have their ideas of what the place should look like, but right now it’s so bare that the mattress is on the floor. The biggest request is to make it feel like a sumptuous hotel suite, because they feel sexiest when they’re on vacation.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? How To Build A Sex Room isn’t much different than an HGTV-style design show like Trading Spaces… except for the sex room part.

Our Take: As squinchy as we feel watching Melanie being cheeky about how we “don’t know what happens behind closed doors… but I do,” and hand uncomfortable couples like Raj and Ryan things like riding crops and flogging whips (well, Ryan was uncomfortable, anyway), you do have to give the couples who are participating in How To Build A Sex Room a lot of credit. They’re pretty much opening up their sex lives to cameras and a worldwide Netflix audience, meaning that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people now know their bedroom business.

What we wonder is if the results are worth it. We only get to see one completed room in the first episode — Raj and Ryan’s reveal is left for episode 2. But we all know that the rooms we want to see are going to be less like Raj and Ryan’s romantic getaway and more like Taylor and Ajay’s spankatorium. We’re not even exaggerating; Melanie gets a spanking bench that the couple thinks can double as a coffee table (after cleaning it of course).

We hope that these renovations are actually done with quality materials and don’t ruin houses, unlike some things we’ve heard about from lawsuits against other home makeover shows. It would really stink if these couples opened up their sex life and are left with a shoddily-done sex den that ruins their plumbing. Even if the materials and workmanship are top notch, imagine what happens if they decide to move. Followers of Zillow Gone Wild would have a field day with the listing.

The tone of the show can be a bit too cheeky at times, but it does have a light touch, and Melanie’s almost-giddy sex-positive personality certainly helps the shy couples open up.

Sex and Skin: More sex talk than action, of course. The woman who co-owns the BDSM den gets topless, though she’s wearing pasties. The show is surprisingly reserved, all things considered.

Parting Shot: Highlights from the upcoming first season are shown.

Sleeper Star: Mike, Melanie’s general contractor, seems quite happy going with the flow, even when Melanie wants him to help her “test” the spanking bench.

Most Pilot-y Line: While explaining the history of the St. Andrew’s cross, Melanie that its design is perfect for another purpose, “one perhaps you didn’t learn about in Sunday school.” That’s one of those cheeky lines that made us cringe.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While we would never volunteer to be on How To Build A Sex Room, we do admire those who do. And the show seems to be sex-positive and respectful of those who appear on camera. We just wish Melanie Rose weren’t given such silly single entendres to utter.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.