Melanie Rose is an interior designer who also designs sex rooms for clients. How to Build a Sex Room (Netflix), then, is essentially Changing Rooms for sex people. Various couples (and whatever a throuple with seven people involved is called. A septuple?) tell Rose they would like her to convert a spare room into a sex room, and she obliges, giving them a Queer Eye-style sex-life MOT in the process.
If, like me, you never suspected that a home makeover show could involve so many butt plugs, then welcome to the new wave of sex TV. From Open House to Let’s Make a Love Scene, commissioners are finding innovative new ways to put sex on our screens. Sadly, I have come to realise that I relate most to Alice Levine, who, during one particularly intimate part of her Channel 4 documentary Sex Actually, sat blushing in a corner of the bedroom, sipping water and averting her eyes.
This isn’t explicit, as such, though it does offer a bracing frankness about desire and expectation. Rose blusters into people’s lives with a bag full of sex toys, a habit of saying “are you kidding me?” and an eye for the perfect fabric (much of it is wipe-clean). She balances no-nonsense briskness with wide-eyed enthusiasm, which puts her in the centre of a Supernanny/Su Pollard Venn diagram. Taylor, one half of the first couple she meets, calls her “the Mary Poppins of sex rooms”.
Taylor and her partner Ayjay “love having sex” and want to turn their secret basement into a “rock’n’roll dungeon”. “It’s kind of hidden away and nobody knows it’s there,” says Ayjay proudly, as he guides Rose down a ladder, which is all a little bit too Devil in the White City for my liking. With the help of her “general contractor” Mike – surely a missed opportunity for a Randy Andy – Rose puts in new flooring, lifts the ceiling, installs some furniture and neon artwork, and pops a flogging cross on the wall. We learn that her code for a box of sex gear is exercise equipment. If you are watching this and your neighbour has just had a rowing machine delivered, you may see them in a whole new light.
Rose meets various other people in all flavours of relationship. There are married couples who want to “de-vanilla” their sex life, a woman who became single at 50 and is free to “date and bang as many guys as I want”, a same-sex couple who live in a camper van and have found that it is not conducive to having lots of sex. Part of Rose’s redesign in that instance is to make the most of the roof and to put a sex swing under the awning outside, which certainly would not fly at the Camping and Caravanning Club.
It claims to be an interior design show – Netflix has filed it in the “home and garden reality TV” section – but it’s not really. Or maybe it is just a very, very interior sort of design. I did leave the series with a sneaking suspicion that some participants might have been looking for a free refurb and simply decided that agreeing to a sex room was as good a way as any. One couple wonders if their spanking bench could also be used as a coffee table. Ah ha, I thought. That sex swing is going to be used to store spuds before you know it.
I am being silly. This is a self-aware show with a sense of humour. And there is more to it than Rose’s infinite supply of butt plugs. Much of How to Build a Sex Room is about talking and communication. By allowing themselves to explore a dedicated sex space, these people are discovering who they and their partner/s are, and what they really want. I did not expect it, but the Sex Room makeover show turns out to be oddly heartwarming.
