The launch of Jessica Sebastian-Dayeh and Hallmark’s first home renovation series holds a different weight after losing her own home just two months before its premiere.
Sebastian-Dayeh’s now destroyed Malibu home was one of the over 16,000 structures that burned down in the devastating Los Angeles fires in January. The executive producer and creator of Hallmark’s first-ever home renovation series “Home is Where the Heart Is” tells TheWrap that the title still resonates with her.
“I feel comfortable promoting this series, because the DNA of this series is how I feel truthfully about ‘home’ having lost my home,” she said. “It is where your heart is, because you build so many memories there, and so this series is about emotion and about your attachment to a home and about history and about memories and infusing that in design.”
Hosted by Hallmark favorite Luke Macfarlane and interior designer Olivia Westbrooks the Hallmark+ series takes several families on the journey of refurbishing their home while preserving the historical, cultural or familial significance of it. After meeting Macfarlane, the producer said she did not want to make the series with anyone else.
The actor also has a talent for wood-working, which he puts to the test on the series. Each participant received a custom piece for their home made by the Hallmark star.
Sebastian-Dayeh was inspired to create the series after watching her aging parents, who still live in the house where she grew up, and “thinking about what is going to happen to that house and how many memories there are associated with the house,” she said. The executive producer wanted to ensure that whatever happened to their home the memories and stories would stay alive in it.
“The idea was that our hosts would help them infuse story and history and emotion into the house, and also look at ways of repurposing things,” she said. “Often when you see homes being redone, that gets thrown away, that gets discarded.”
Set in Atlanta, Sebastian-Dayeh said she was inspired by the diverse range of homes featured on the first season of the home-reno series. Whether it was preserving a Victorian Era home, repurposing Grandma’s recipes or infusing a modern statement wall, it was important to the “Home is Where the Heart Is” team to lead with the Hallmark emotional flair.
“You see Olivia pull from history and create our art pieces and various things that can live on in a home. Luke thinks about the family’s history, the story repurposes things, builds things that can be handed down,” she said.
When Sebastian-Dayeh and her husband visited the site of their burned home and sifted through the ash and rubble, the couple found a perfectly singed illustration from an art book that meant a lot to the pair.
“We went back a few times, and we found this is very strange. We found a burned piece from a book that was an art book that was the first piece of art that my husband and I had bought together as a couple,” she said.
It was an image of a man and a woman crying and looking longingly into one another’s eyes, torn out almost as if it was intentional. The executive producer intends to turn it into an art piece in her next home.
“That is a piece of our history that I will make into something and then put in in my next place and hand that down,” she said. “Your house is really your identity, which you should celebrate through design, which is part of our show.”
This project was the founder of her own production company Maven’s first foray into the home renovation space. She said one of the most thrilling parts was watching the participants’ reactions to their finished home. Sebastian-Dayeh admitted every time the hosts brought the families back for the home reveal she and the team got butterflies.
“We all were nervous about, are they gonna like it?” she said. “People are very attached to a home, and so to hand over the control where you’re telling someone your life story, and then you’re going to walk back in and your rooms are going to be completely changed by someone’s perception of what they believe your story to be. That’s really interesting to see.”
For what the future holds for the producer, she is not placing herself in a box. But she does see more potential for the home renovation series with Hallmark.
“I like any space that has an emotional and psychological layer to it,” she said. “Whether that’s crime, whether that’s home design, whether it’s home renovation, whether it’s a celebrity bio doc, or some other documentary series, for me, it’s always about a human story.”
All episodes of “Home is Where the Heart Is” are available to stream on Hallmark+.
