Windy City Rehab star Alison Victoria has been through a number of professional and personal changes since her hit HGTV show debuted in 2019. One thing that has endured, however, is her commitment to the series that made her famous, and seeing to it that people in her hometown of Chicago can find their dream homes. Ahead of the Season 5 premiere on the 2024 TV schedule, Victoria talked about the big changes fans will see and the “reset” of the new episodes after her legal troubles.
What Did Alison Victoria Say About The Big Changes And ‘Reset’ Of Windy City Rehab Season 5?
While Windy City Rehab was an instant success for HGTV and its co-stars, trouble began brewing not long after Season 1 aired, when Alison Victoria’s business partner/contractor, Donovan Eckhardt, lost his permit privileges in the city, as well as his contractor’s license, while lawsuits against the production began to pile up.
Through it all, Victoria soldiered on to buy and design properties that homeowners would love, and as Season 5 approached she spoke with TV Insider about the new season being a “reset” and having some big changes in store. When asked how these episodes compare to those of Season 4, she said:
This season for me is definitely a breath of fresh air. I’m through the weeds and really just putting everything into the client game. With the market, it wasn’t the right time to buy again at the beginning of the season. Going back to where I started in the client business just felt like a nice reset.
If you’re wondering what the Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge competitor means by going back to “the client business,” it indicates a major change for much of Season 5. Instead of buying historic homes in some of the roughest shape imaginable and rebuilding them to perfection, Victoria went back to what she started doing in the real estate business, which was finding clients who already owned homes and re-designing them.
As she said, while trying to recover from dissolving her partnership with the contractor and deal with the many legal issues it caused (including Eckhardt alleging Victoria fake cried on the series in a suit against HGTV’s parent company and the show’s production company), she realized the combined financial stresses of that and the housing market were too much for her to handle buying properties to hopefully flip for a nice profit.
And, any homeowner knows that it’s nearly impossible for one abode that wasn’t built to their exact specifications to completely fit their wants/needs, meaning that Victoria had no trouble locating new clients. She continued:
I had so many people reaching out to me to design their houses. I just wasn’t in a place to do that [before] because I was doing my own stuff. I had all these clients in a backlog. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m trying to make something work that’s not working right now. Why not go back to how it all started?’ So, that’s what I did. I’m working with so many amazing clients who have purchased or lived in homes I would buy. It’s right up my alley, but they are going through these renovations that they don’t necessarily understand or know how to handle.
The end result, said the bikini beach-loving designer, is a season with “so much heart” and “so many amazing designs” that she came away “beyond proud” of all the work that was done, which I’m sure makes fans doubly excited to watch.
Windy City Rehab Season 5 starts Tuesday, September 24 at 8 p.m. EST on HGTV.