Debbie Travis’s take on technology

The Internet’s influence on the décor host’s work and daily life

By Heather Camlot

You’d be hard-pressed to find Debbie Travis, host of From the Ground Up on HGTV Canada, sitting in front of the computer searching the web while the cameras are running —the scene certainly doesn’t make for compelling television — but that’s precisely part of the prep work involved when renovating or redecorating a room. “Doing research for TV shows is fantastic,” enthuses Travis. Here, she speaks about how the Internet affects her daily life, at work and at home.

How does technology play a role in your life?

I hate voice mail with a passion. You can chase people for a week. E-mail came in and saved us all. You can have one-word answers: great, brilliant, fine.

On a personal level, none of us — I don’t think — of this generation are letter writers. And it enables you to keep in touch with people without waiting for the annual Christmas card.

I work with my writer who’s in a different city. We do all our books through e-mail. I write, I send it to her, she tidies it up, puts in the big words, sends it back . . . We do our newspaper columns like that as well. It’s backwards and forwards. Before we’d be sitting on the telephone.

How does the Internet help your show?

For the television show, we use a lot of suppliers on the web. We work a lot with a company called Umbra, from Toronto; we can go on their web site and say: “Okay, we want that, that, that,” and we get the items the next day. That kind of thing for my show is absolutely astounding. We can also get supplies from the States — a lot of stores in the States won’t send catalogues to Canada — so this way we can access their web sites.

How does it help your business?

We’re a production company and we’re always trying to come up with new ideas for shows. The good side of that is you can go on [the Internet] and make sure no one else is doing a show, but half the time you go on and say, “Spain’s doing the same bloody thing” because all the companies around the world say what they’re working on. We need to make shows we can sell abroad, so they need to be as original as they can possibly get.

Do your two teenage boys have their own computers?

Their school is actually giving every kid a laptop. I think that is the future. I think all kids in the next five years will have all their work on it. They can check their grades; I can check their grades. You can see how your kids are doing, truthfully.

Do you monitor their Internet use?

We did in the beginning. With the age group my kids are, it’s very sad, but I think they’ve seen it all. When they started using the computer maybe three years ago, they did the giggle-giggle thing at friends’ houses, and I hate to think of what they’ve seen. There’s no use blaming technology. Parents have to start talking to their kids at a very early age. I can’t stop them and I can’t ban it, because they’ll just go to a friend’s house and do it. I think you have to be there, be at home, as much as you can.

What are some of your favourite sites?

I like hotels.com. I just went on, booked the wrong week. . . . Amazon to track your books. When I was on Oprah, I had four books out, and we saw one book outdo Harry Potter, only for a couple of days. Your book is at number 250 out of a million books, and you see it go to 50 to 20 — that’s the seventh most-selling book in the world that minute. What that really means I don’t know, but it feels good.