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A family living in Bahrain opened its home to GulfWeekly to witness its transformation at the hands of an interior designer after winning a store competition.
Yazid Salah Eddin, his seven-month pregnant wife Khitam Ahmed and their three-year-old daughter Yasmeen live in Hidd and let their dreams take shape at the hands of experts from Home Centre.
They were one of two local families treated to complete room makeovers courtesy of the store in Bahrain City Centre as part of a regional competition.
The Jordanian Eddin family opted for a modern design with a red, white and black colour scheme. The Home Centre team started the designing process at 7am by removing their old furniture and giving the living room a fresh coat of paint and were finished in a flash by 1.30pm.
As the team was hard at work behind a large green partition, the father of the household, Yazid, 30, a civil engineer, anxiously waited in the dining room for the final outcome.
His wife, Khitam, 30, couldn’t stand the suspense and went out with her daughter as the work progressed.
Yazid said: “We shop quite a bit in Home Centre and as normal I was chasing my little girl in the store when Khitam suggested we enter the competition.
“I didn’t think we would actually win and I even told her ‘don’t even think about it’. Khitam insisted that anything was possible and although I was sceptical, I gave in.
“I uploaded the images of our living room on the Facebook competition page and when I got the call that we had won I couldn’t believe it. My wife immediately started saying ‘see, I told you so’. Typical, but we couldn’t be happier!”
In any makeover TV show the best part is at the end when the cameras capture the reaction as the transformation is unveiled to the contestants. Before the partition was removed the family members were blindfolded in dramatic style and when they were asked to remove their eye masks they were overwhelmed with emotion.
Little Yasmeen ran and jumped on the new white sofa and stared at the red ceiling lamp which featured an Arabesque-design keeping to the theme requested by Khitam.
It turns out the child loves roses and a rose painting had been placed on a wall and the room was adorned with flowers on the coffee table. Khitam was left speechless. Eventually, with a broad smile, she said: “This is even better than I ever expected.
“I’ve wanted to change the living room for some time but Yazid kept saying that we didn’t know whether we were staying in Bahrain or moving and it was always ‘oh, we’ll wait for a few months’ and it was a never ending wait.
“Even if I was to design the room myself I would never have thought of transforming it the way they did. We will now definitely be entertaining a lot more. Home Centre did an amazing job!”
The family was shortlisted from 40 entries and were joined in Bahrain by the Abdul Aziz family in Al Muqsha for the BD1,000 makeover treatment for a room shared by three children.
There were also 18 other winners across six Gulf States.
The competition was open to public voting allowing applicants to share their entries with family and friends in order to gain votes and increase their chances of winning.
Home Centre’s visual merchandising expert, Hanne Gokstad, who had already completed makeovers in Kuwait, travelled to the kingdom to design a children’s room for the Abdul Aziz family as well as the Eddin’s living room.
Miss Gokstad said: “The contest was inspired by the US and UK room makeover shows that they have on television and follows on from a successful promotion we staged last year in the UAE to celebrate Home Centre’s 15th anniversary.
“It was so popular our management decided to expand it this year to also include Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain.
“There was a big selection process and the final decisions were based on a number of factors such as the reason behind why the family needed the makeover and the image of the home.”
