Ask Netflix’s How to Build a Sex Room host and interior designer Melanie Rose for just about anything—a sex swing, a suspension system for the bed, a big shower in a hidden basement for you and your lovers to play in before washing off—and her answer will never change. Whatever your fantasy, your wish is the London-born interior designer’s command. (Assuming, of course, it doesn’t involve knocking down any load-bearing walls.)
How to Build a Sex Room is essentially an old-school HGTV show-cum-Dr. Ruth radio program. (Remember when they decorated homes and gardened on the home and garden channel?) For eight 40-minute episodes, Rose meets with people who want to transform their bedrooms, basements, and sheds into sensual oases.
Midway through our interview, Rose captured her ethos with the kind of line that demands a drag from a cigarette afterward: “At this point, darling, I think nothing surprises me.”
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Although the bulk of Rose’s clients are couples, How to Build a Sex Room features an array of pleasure-seekers of various ages, sexualities, and racial backgrounds. Also featured: a polyamorous family looking to accommodate everyone’s needs, and a divorced woman who has seized the moment as a chance to discover deeper fulfillment.
To Rose, a diversity of perspectives was crucial to making the series work. As she put it, “It just goes to show that you don’t have to be a certain type of person” to want a set-up like this.
Sex rooms might sound like a niche market, but Rose has made them her exclusive business for the past decade. A Los Angeles transplant from London, where she was born and raised, Rose has worked as an interior designer for 20 years—a second act that follows an acting career both on television and in theater. She made her first stage appearance at age 13, when she played Tessie in a production of Annie on the West End.
When she moved to Los Angeles, however, Rose began laying the groundwork for a switch. She took a year-long interior design course to avoid wasting time while she wasn’t allowed to work in the U.S., opened her business, and hasn’t stopped since. The final turn of the screw came when a client of a few years asked if she’d ever designed a sex room.
“I actually Googled it,” Rose recalled, “and I was like, oh my God.”
At that time, Rose said, “sex rooms” had a very different vibe: dungeon chic. “I thought they looked a bit drab,” she said. “A little bit plain, dirty, boring. Why would you do that? If you’re going to have a sex room, why not have a luxurious one?”
Each of the couples featured in How to Build a Sex Room brings a different aesthetic sensibility to the table. Some want a room that, to a lazy and untrained eye, might seem like an innocently fancy space. Others want more overt equipment—X-shaped body restraints, spanking benches, and yes, in one case, a shower large enough to fit a whole poly family.
Rose’s designs straddle the luxe and the playful. There are touches of kitsch—an ass-shaped candle here, a couple of wall hooks shaped like penises there—but there’s not a hint of goofiness to the designs or their presentation. Rose approaches her work with a playful but secure attitude that eschews anxious giggles that might’ve plagued a less secure production.
“What I really want through this show,” Rose said, “is to try and get everybody on the same plane and just talk about sex [without feeling like] they’re being judged... I wanted to have people spark a conversation with their partner like, ‘Oh. That doesn’t seem so bad, does it. Should we try it?’”
(For those wondering where to start, Rose has a bit of advice: “If you haven’t tried a butt plug, you’ve got to try it once at least.”)
Throughout the series, Rose also commissions custom items to make sure her clients get everything they want. One of the show’s funnier moments arrives as Rose—whom one client aptly dubbed the “Mary Poppins of Sex Rooms”—approaches a saddle maker to help her build a custom sex swing.
That said, the custom jobs featured here are just the tip—you know, of the iceberg. We’re talking prices “anywhere between, you know, 60, 70,000 up to a million-plus.” Apparently, you actually can put a price on a good orgasm.
Those of us with less cash to splash but at least a little DIY savvy can always buy plenty of equipment—including sex swings—right off the rack. Just one little word of caution: “If you are going to hang one in the fucking ceiling (excuse my language) please make sure you screw it into a ceiling joist or you have a backing put in the ceiling,” Rose said. “Do not just screw it in.”
And beyond that? “I would just say: measure, measure, and measure.”
