Tour Kim Wolfe and Chelsea Meissner’s Season 7 ‘Rock the Block’ Home

Once upon a time, Kim Wolfe and Chelsea Meissner met on a beach in Samoa. One Survivor win (for Kim), multiple design collaborations and 15 years later, they’re best friends ready to win it all in Las Vegas. A self-taught designer, Kim found HGTV stardom hosting and providing much-needed renovation therapy on Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? She also mentored a team on the high-altitude renovation competition Battle on the Mountain. What’s one Las Vegas family home compared to that, even if it’s more than 5,000 square feet, and she only had seven weeks to do it?

Chelsea partnered with Kim to renovate her own house and has pitched in on other projects as well. This team is a well-oiled machine right out of the gate. “I mean, if I can survive 39 days on a desolate island, I can definitely survive Rock the Block,” Kim said. “Maybe I’m going to eat my words on that, but we’re tough!”

For Rock the Block’s lucky seventh season, host Ty Pennington welcomed four pairs to the table. Kim and Chelsea try their luck against noted trash-talker and longtime HGTV renovation guru Scott McGillivray, partnered with singer, television personality and designer Brooke Hogan; Good Bones star Mina Starsiak Hawk and her Super Bowl-winning, design firm-owning ally, Vernon Davis; and hospitality-design queen and Battle on the Beach mentor Taniya Nayak and 98 Degrees member and DIY phenom Drew Lachey.

In addition to Vegas-scaled homes with initial appraisal values of $1.9 million apiece and $275,000 budgets, the teams are challenged to strategize around a new twist. Each week’s winners have the option of taking $3,000 in prize money for the next week of renovation or laying away a $1,000 boost to their home’s final appraisal. Ready to see how Kim and Chelsea played the game? Come on in for a jaw-dropping tour of their work.

“I feel like our color palette is going to be more masculine, kind of smoky colors, like smoky sexy. Is that our vibe?” Kim mused. She and Chelsea focused on transforming the stark white box of the home’s main suite into an intimate space that enfolded its inhabitants. Drawing inspiration from statement-making hotel installations, they built a wall-spanning headboard feature that integrated floating nightstands and culminated with curves instead of corners. Art Deco-inspired wallpaper was an acknowledged risk (and an investment of $2,840), but they were determined to stay true to their aesthetic.

"I love the way this curved detail turned out … [it] makes [this installation] feel architecturally interesting," Kim said. "The way the light hits that metallic part, it’s stunning."

Kim and Chelsea’s primary suite design was an extension of the vibe they’ve cultivated over the years. “I totally think we have a leg up with our shared history — not only on Survivor, but already designing together,” Kim said. “Some of these teams are meeting each other for the first time, and so they don’t have that chemistry. There's a lot of room for conflict, and we feel confident we can navigate this very well together.”

Here, that familiarity translated into a well-curated collection of historic-feeling accents. They swathed the space in a vintage-linen hue, then styled the suite with furnishings that suggest ultra-old-school Vegas.

Chelsea and Kim rejected the bath suite’s initial layout — which crowded the shower and tub on one side of the room — and reconfigured it to lead directly into this stunning symmetrical arrangement. “Chelsea and I have this love of old things together, and we’ll spend a week at a time out at flea markets and antique shows,” Kim explained. “This 1920s fireplace façade we found at a local antique shop is going to add tons of value to the space because it’s a highly customized feature, and it brings personality and creativity to the space.” Running a gas line to make the feature functional would have added about $2,000 to its $1,600 price tag, so it’s strictly a (showstopping) decorative add.

Kim and Chelsea were on the same wavelength with their initially uninspiring closet as well. “I want it to feel like a Cuban cigar box, you know what I mean?” Chelsea asked. “I know exactly what you mean,” Kim replied. They invested in all-enveloping cabinetry that made the space feel like a humidor, then swathed the remaining surfaces — including the ceiling — in a textural chartreuse wallpaper (which cost $1,220 and happened to be the precise color of Chelsea’s eyes).

The first pair of Season 7 guest judges were as splashy as the homes they’d be evaluating: Television icon and restaurateur Lisa Vanderpump and her longtime collaborator, designer Nick Alain, brought even more star power (and distinct opinions about luxury) to the block. Lisa loved the soaking tub so much that she promptly climbed in. She also praised the distinct vanities: “I like the separation. He can have his messy side over there, and mine can be perfect here.”

“This is fantastic, the mirrors over the windows. It’s always good light,” Nick agreed.

“I did feel that the bold choice on the wallpaper … not everybody’s going to love it,” Lisa told Kim and Chelsea. However, she continued, “You achieved smoky sexy!”

For their second week on the block, the teams developed their first impressions by transforming their foyers, dens and great rooms. Once again, wall-to-wall whiteness was not going to cut it with the smoky-sexy vibe Kim and Chelsea had in mind. “This has to be so cool, because this really is the first moment you step into the home,” Kim said. To set the tone for what the rest of the house would offer, they installed wood paneling on the walls, replaced the builder-grade door with a glass version that would admit much more light and punctuated the entryway with a “killer” pendant. “One of [our] design goals coming into the house was to have as little sheetrock visible as possible for us, and one of the tools in our tool belt was to use paneling as much as we possibly could,” Kim explained.

Reasoning that the home still needed a bar — “and we need a bar,” Kim noted, “we’re in Vegas” — she and Chelsea decided to turn the “odd duck” functioning as a den beside the foyer into a bar and poker room. Aiming to spend just $25,000 on all 950 square feet of the three spaces they’d be transforming, the duo focused on creating a vibe-heavy, masculine space with more stained paneling ($960), variegated grasscloth wallpaper ($2,330) and a color-saturated ceiling that would pick up the paper’s tones. Their splashiest spend in the room was the granite slab for the bar, which claimed $3,740 of the budget — and they were glad to spend it. “I don’t think there’s any other piece of slab that could have checked all the boxes,” Chelsea said.

The great room called for a big swing, and Kim and Chelsea were ready for it. They chose to build a wall-spanning mantel and a floating wooden hearth, then installed a bold swath of red tile with monochromatic grout between them (a $4,670 investment). “Tiling the fireplace from wall to wall is making a huge statement in this room,” Chelsea said.

“I don’t think anyone else is going to do this; I feel like it’s not a way people typically think to build out the fireplace wall,” Kim replied.

“It’s very '70s, honestly,” Chelsea noted. “The color, to me, reminds me of Nevada. It’s like the red canyons.” Once again, their choice was very specific — but if it found its ideal audience, it would score a huge win.

Leaning into the “cognac-y, whiskey” tones of the tiled wall and the intimate den, Chelsea and Kim outfitted their great room with vintage-feeling velvets, warm brass accessories and strong, simple geometry. “I think that’s where good design happens; where it’s not so overly fussy and feminine, but it’s not so masculine that it feels cold,” Kim said.

When we mentioned Kim and Chelsea’s ideal audience, we were talking about Luxe for Less host Michel Smith Boyd, Rock the Block’s multiple-season winner whose bold design choices changed the way the game is played. The peacocks perched on the wall-to-wall fireplace tiling? He has a matching one in his bedroom. “I loved that your narrative was so clear. Taking that mantel from wall to wall was boss,” he told them. “Those are the kind of details I notice."

Michel wished the great room’s ceiling had beams, and “there’s another con, but take it in the best way because I heard this constantly in Season 4. It was very specific! I’m not sure it’s going to appeal to everybody, but I don’t appeal to everybody. And I don’t care. I still loved it.”

Their gamble paid off, and the win was theirs.

Chelsea and Kim were pleased with their kitchen’s bones. The layout’s accommodations for wiring and plumbing suited what they envisioned — all they had to do was extend the strong character they’d established at the other side of the open-plan portion of the home. Chelsea suggested building a cove to add architectural interest around the stove. “It’s cozy. It does look like a piece of art, kind of like our fireplace,” she said. Kim expanded on the design by adding windows on either side of the cove, then outfitting them with leggy, glass-and-brass floating shelves that complemented the home’s retro aesthetic. A massive, waterfall-edged island features the same charismatic granite the team used for the bar in the den. Dark lower cabinets provide storage.

Chelsea proposed literalizing the smoky-sexy vibe by creating a Vegas-inspired backsplash with an antique mirror (for $580). Risky? Sure. Sexy? Definitely.

“The hall-monitor people of the world are going to say, ‘Uch, this is going to be so hard to keep clean, uch, do I want to see my reflection while I scramble eggs?’ To those people, it’s not going to be quite right,” Kim said. “But to the people who are enjoying their lives, they are going to love this smoky mirror behind the stove!”

Doubling up on kitchens has become customary on the block, and the reasoning behind it is solid. Appraisers love storage and appliances, and all of those cabinets, refrigerators and freezers add up. Not for Chelsea and Kim, who left a wide-open entryway between their principal kitchen and this darker, more dramatic prep kitchen beyond it. The major appliances and most of the cabinets live back here, as does a hundred-year-old butcher-block island (sourced for just $280 at a local antique shop) that fits their space’s dimensions perfectly and imparts serious character.

Chelsea and Kim tossed the morning room’s underwhelming sliders and what Kim dubbed “a few other meh windows” and installed seven massive replacements (for $5,170) that envelop the space in natural light. “This was a subtle but very big change. This feels so cool and high-end now,” Kim said. Beneath those windows, she and Chelsea lined the walls with a banquette upholstered in geometric, retro-feeling fabric. “I was feeling a bit concerned at one point that the banquette was going to feel too heavy for that morning-room vibe, but seeing all the windows completely negates my concern because it is so cheerful and bright in there!” she added.

Though Chelsea and Kim agreed on the banquette’s design, Chelsea had to beat her old Survivor opponent in a winner-picks-the-fabric game of bottle-tossing to score the textile selection here. “This [fabric] kind of brings out that '70s [vibe], the banquette is kind of bringing back that old school,” Chelsea said.

“It does feel like one of those kind of groovy built-in sunken living-room sectional sofas,” Kim agreed.

Blind judging duties for the third week of renovations fell to a Rock the Block Season 4 and Season 5 veteran and Love It or List It designer Page Turner. Presented with a kitchen extension rather than a second kitchen, “I kind of went ‘hmm,’ but I understood … the creative process. It worked,” she told them. The morning room, in turn, threw her for a bit of a loop. “This is definitely [for] a big family, they took their morning room and turned it into a dining room. Well, it’s a lot more than a dining room; there’s a booth, it’s a restaurant! Somebody could love the space but not really want the banquette here […] and then what do you do?”

The fourth week of competition found the teams in their homes’ 250-square-foot “multi-gen suites,” billed as major opportunities to add value by building out a full additional living space. “[If] I’m buying a $3 million house, I’m not having a short-term rental in the front of my home,” Kim said. “I do love the idea of a tucked-away space where you can really put on, like, a real movie.”

And with that, she and Chelsea were up and running on the block’s wildest move: a fabric-festooned, shag-carpeted personal movie palace that was unapologetically specific and downright unforgettable.

When Kim mentioned dramatic drapes for the space, Chelsea’s imagination took off. “So you’re saying festoon it? Like a circus tent? That is very Vegas!”

The aesthetic they settled upon was a textural, earth-toned riff on the Strip’s theatrics, minus the eye-searing stripes. Instead, subtly striped fabric ($2,170) surrounds the space, while the vintage chandelier Chelsea and Kim brought in as part of the week’s design challenge presides over a massive corduroy sectional with two ottomans. Torchieres uplight the draping and provide a bit of … sexiness? “I think it’s kind of sexy,” Kim contended.

Since they were treating their multi-gen suite as an extension of the property’s other shared spaces rather than an additional bedroom, Chelsea and Kim had no need for a boxy closet that made the room feel even more cramped. They demolished that feature, then relocated their exterior door to the courtyard and added a hidden interior door connected to the main house. That afforded them space to mount a movie-worthy big-screen TV and fill the entire front wall with the kitchenette they were required to build.

Chelsea and Kim designed the kitchenette with the same repetition and long horizontal planes that made their main house feel so chic. They installed a bold row of sconces in lieu of upper cabinets, then invested in an invisible induction cooktop ($1,190) installed beneath the countertop. “It kind of preserves our vintage-movie-theater vibes, and the space could be anything,” she explained.

The secondary strategy here was to emphasize that versatility. “I feel like a lot of the teams are going to stage this as a guest suite [and] this can easily be a guest suite, but by connecting it to the house [and] a simple touch like this, not focusing so much on closet space, I do think this makes [it] more malleable to whatever the buyer wants it to be,” she continued.

Pattern-drenching the bathroom in the same vintage paper they introduced in the kitchenette, Chelsea and Kim chose features and finishes that made the space feel layered. A second faceted mirror atop their slightly foxed vanity mirror imparts more midcentury character, and the floating vanity itself is an uninterrupted expanse of striated stone. A four-headed light fixture repeats the look of the four globe sconces installed in the kitchenette at the other end of the suite.

The multi-gen suite’s judges could appreciate how very much Kim and Chelsea’s design decisions differentiated them on the block, as they made those decisions themselves. The four teams were responsible for judging each other, and they didn’t hold back when they entered the screening room.

Scott (above) burst out laughing. “I was not ready for this,” he said. “It feels like you’re in the big top. I was not ready for this at all!”

“To me, that room symbolized survival,” said Brooke. “It was like a Survivor tent … like you could matchstick a fire in there.”

“The big value adds, though, are [that] they moved the door and they added a door to the main house. That could be a game changer for the appraisal for them, so I think they made some smart layout choices,” Scott said.

The fifth week began with two fairly utilitarian builds, as Kim, Chelsea and their competitors turned to tackling their properties’ laundry rooms (adjoining the garage) and offices (beside the laundry rooms and opening via sliders into the interior courtyard). After four weeks of smoky-sexiness, they embraced the laundry room as an opportunity to take things in a practical direction. They invested $720 in a massive, freestanding industrial sink. “I think this is … the granny panties of our house,” Kim said. “It’s going to look great, but we don’t have to worry about keeping it beautiful.”

“I would appreciate that as a home buyer — to have one space that is not so ‘done,’” Chelsea agreed. “I don’t have to care about everything, you know, just leave it all here and then go enjoy the elegance!” She sewed a skirt for the sink with a funky fabric that “feels like it was your grandmother’s curtains,” as Kim put it.

The existing footprint for the office wasn’t big enough for what Chelsea and Kim had in mind. So, they demolished the closet — eliminating the space for consideration as a bedroom — to give their design room to breathe. After papering the walls and ceiling with rich, rust-toned grass cloth, they built in a video-conference-ready suite of bookshelves that give way to a pale countertop and deep lower drawers. Instead of a barely there bedroom with awkward, unwanted access from the courtyard, the office is a roomy, masculine space that feels like a proper place to work from home.

Confronted with a cavernous garage with 18-foot ceilings scaled for massive recreational vehicles, Kim and Chelsea were initially at sea. They returned to their practice of considering what the home still lacked and arrived at the centerpiece of their fifth week’s build: a full-fledged, immersive wellness space that featured natural-wood finishes and dramatic, green-black walls. They committed $7,480 to create a locker room in the area adjoining the principal suite via a hidden closet door. Then, they built out a smoothie bar and a Turkish-bathhouse-themed space with a shower, an infrared sauna ($2,690), an integrated cold plunge and ample relaxation spaces.

“Maybe we could have done an ADU back here, but I don’t think the buyer is going to get excited about another bedroom in this multimillion-dollar house,” Kim reasoned. “At the beginning of this week, the RV garage terrified me. [I] had no idea what we were going to do with it. Seeing it transformed unexpectedly, it might even be my favorite space in the house.”

Once again, Kim and Chelsea’s work found an evaluator prepared to appreciate it. OG Real Housewives of New York City cast member, designer, author and cabaret star Luann de Lesseps was ready to settle down as soon as she entered the team’s wellness space. “The spa is everything,” she said, resonating with its deep green color. “It makes it warm. You know, if this was white, it would feel like an RV garage.” She did wish Kim and Chelsea had carried their transformation underfoot as well: “I would do something with the floors,” she said. “Walking around barefoot on concrete floors?! Stone would look great here.”

Chelsea and Kim transformed their backyard in the sixth week of competition, and their work began with a design challenge. With the spin of a roulette wheel that determined which of four possible plunge pools they’d install, they landed on this 20' x 10' model. Not their first choice, but a big value add. Leaning into the minimalistic look of the pool’s unadorned concrete, they hardscaped a tiered patio with rectangular pavers and punctuated their upper deck with a classic, cabana-striped lounger-and-umbrella vignette. This outdoor oasis exudes classically Western country-club style.

At the foot of the pool, Chelsea and Kim created an expansive seating area surrounding their fire bowl by asking their landscaper to stack more of their pavers into an integrated, L-shaped banquette. They then built and stained a wooden backrest that echoed the banquette in their morning room and the wall-spanning bench on the tiled wall surrounding their great room’s fireplace. “We’ve got plenty of space for everyone to come from the banquette [inside] to our outdoor fire pit,” Chelsea said. “It’s such a large yard that it only feels right to have a big place to sit and enjoy a fire pit.”

“I’m feeling pretty dang confident about our backyard, y’all,” Kim responded. “I really am!”

The outdoor area beyond the morning room enjoyed a commanding view of the Nevada landscape, and Kim and Chelsea were determined to capitalize on it. “This is where you want to come out with your cocktail and enjoy sunset,” Chelsea noted.

“You could host a dinner party out here,” Kim said.

They constructed a yard-spanning wooden pergola that turned the space into a sunset pavilion that could, once again, accommodate a substantial crowd. “We’re both very outdoors people and we have children who like to be outside, so the backyard needs to feel like a gathering place,” Chelsea explained.

The most notable feature of the minimalistic-modern covered patio might just be what’s not there. Chelsea and Kim had initially planned a saffron-tiled backsplash to punctuate their outdoor kitchen, but its yellow was unexpectedly garish. Instead, they pivoted to handmade, putty-colored tiles with narrow vertical and wider horizontal grout lines. “It … makes it feel custom, and it kind of ends up feeling like art,” Kim said.

“And we do get the best view of the sunrise [here] and I feel like that light coming off of this is going to be beautiful, too,” Chelsea added. “It’s going to be really cool.”

Guest judge (and luxury real-estate investor and two-time Super-Bowl-winning wide receiver) Danny Amendola picked up precisely what Kim and Chelsea were putting down, and we don’t just mean the bocce balls on their hardscaped court. (That court was a power move, however, as he grew up playing bocce.)

“I just felt like it was elegant, and it was classy [and] family oriented … I could just picture kids running around,” he told them. “I could picture someone having a wedding or party or something like that in the backyard. I just felt like it was, overall, consistent and balanced.” Their commitment to their aesthetic brought home another win.

In their seventh and final week on the block, Chelsea and Kim put the finishing touches on the exterior design they’d planned at the beginning of the competition. “I love everything we’ve done in every single nook and cranny of that house, so I want the exterior to mimic that,” Chelsea said. In a nod to local architecture that cost far less that the stone they would have liked to use, they chose a creamy stucco for the body of the home, then added wood details to its soffits.

Though time constraints reduced the wooden fence and gate they’d envisioned to a smaller retaining wall with a decorative trim board and a stucco footer (for $840), that pivot gave them a finished feature rather than a half-accomplished fence at the property line. “This feels like what you’re about to see in the courtyard and the foyer,” Kim observed. “This really did work out.”

The five rectangular windows that initially framed the front door were underwhelming, to say the least. Removing them was ostensibly a risk, but doing so gave Kim an excuse to install the glass Dutch door she’d been itching to use in a project. It also made room for a pair of gas lanterns ($1,290) that brought a touch of Charleston character to the home. Visitors now have a view that carries all the way from the front door to the expansive backyard — and through yet another pair of gas lanterns in the courtyard.

The courtyard’s timeless terra cotta fireplace is the culmination of Kim and Chelsea’s creative tile work throughout the home. Here, handmade square clay tiles ($1,640) protrude from wide, recessed grout lines that make the feature feel as sculptural as it is functional. “You sort of get this solid color; this, to me, feels like art,” Kim said. “And like it’s been there a long time.”

“It feels like it has so much character!” Chelsea replied.

HGTV mainstays Drew and Jonathan Scott came to the block to tour the contestants’ finished projects and offer hints at what the appraisers who’d follow in their footsteps might be thinking. Though the Scotts spent 13 years living in Las Vegas, Kim and Chelsea’s home reminded them most strongly of their childhoods in western Canada. “It’s southern charm [and] it’s got that western vibe that we grew up with, which is awesome,” Drew said. “When you come in the front door right away it was so unique. You took risks. In every space you went for something a little different,” he told them.

Jonathan raved about their outdoor space. “I just loved how thoughtful it was and how everything was laid out, but it felt really, really cool — a place that anybody would want to spend a lot of time.”

This team played their cards close to their vests, and their competitors were not prepared for the major moves that greeted them in Chelsea and Kim's finished property. “I have underestimated their silence for weakness, perhaps, as a neighbor, and now I’m worried about the overall appraisal — because that first impression has me shaking in my boots,” Scott admitted.

“I can’t even believe people have imaginations like Kim and Chelsea!” Brooke said.

“We were hoodwinked!” Drew cried.

Scott agreed: “We were hoodwinked.”