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Living in ''The Real World'' MTV put a lot of thought - and money - into creating a hip, trendy Chicago loft for its hit reality show. Too bad the cast didn''t quite get it.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Joel Reese Daily Herald Staff Writer

It was a Herculean task to complete in less than nine weeks: Take a three-story former coffee shop in Chicago and completely redo it into a comfortable living space for seven people.

And make it cool.

No, scratch that. It couldn't just be cool - it had to be mega-, jumbo-, super-, ultra-, uber-cool.

Rustic, tranquil, or even trendy wouldn't be good enough. The place had to be Cool with a capital C.

That was the job facing the crew of MTV's hit reality TV show "The Real World," which finally came to Chicago after 10 years. The first of the 24 shows filmed in Chicago last summer premieres tonight on MTV.

The MTVians found a location they liked - Chicago's Wicker Park. Then they found a building they liked - a three-story edifice on North Avenue, right near the hipster epicenter of North, Milwaukee and Damen.

Once they chose the obligatorily beautiful, telegenic, strong- willed cast, it became time to MTVify the living space. To make it so hip and flowing that every impressionable, MTV-lover would regard it as the epitome of cool-dom.

So a troop of designers, carpenters and electricians moved in and gutted the former coffee shop. They obsessed over every detail, from the kitchen chairs to the bathroom sinks to the floor coverings in the bedrooms.

"Thematically, the idea is free-form versus linear," says Anthony Dominici, the show's lanky, amiable producer who wears thick black glasses and a high mess of unruly black hair. "We've put a lot of thought into this. We don't just want to throw stuff up on the wall."

To the layman, it worked - the place looks both warehouse cool and new-school sleek. James Dean might've lived there if he shopped...