It's a good thing Evette Rios thrives on digging into new projects. The lifestyle expert, television host, designer and DIY maven is in the midst of what might be her biggest undertaking to date. Rios and her husband, attorney Stephen Davies, are renovating a three-story, 7,600-square-foot building just outside Downtown Allentown. The third floor is living space for the couple and their two young sons, Yagüez and Juarionex, or Yago and Rex for short, respectively. But it's Rios's hope that the lower levels can be spaces that engage the community and fellow entrepreneurs in the neighborhood she now calls home. “I'm falling in love with the area more and more,” says Rios of the Lehigh Valley.
Rios has made a career out of seeing the possibilities in the world around her, whether that means transforming a barren deck into an outdoor workspace, whipping up a July Fourth hot dog tray that would make Betsy Ross proud or fashioning Halloween costumes out of the odds and ends you might find tucked away in a closet. It's a skill she says she picked up from her mother and father, who both moved to Manhattan from Puerto Rico when they were children. “My parents have what I would say is an immigrant mentality—my whole family does—where it's always about reusing, never throwing things away, trying to fix what you have.”
Rios grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, an area she recalls as being a bit rough: “Lots of drugs, lots of poor families. But for the most part, really nice people, working-class people, and I have very fond memories of the friends I had there.” She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her parents and two brothers. Space was at a premium; Rios had to get creative to be creative, using the hallway or whatever enclave she could find as a makeshift art studio that could be quickly disassembled. She says her parents, too, were creative types in their own ways. She recalls watching them dabble in various facets of home improvement, such as taking classes in wallpapering and re-upholstery. “They knew they wanted nice-looking things but couldn't afford it,” Rios says, “so it was always about rehabbing and making the most of what you had.”
Post-college, she embarked on a brief career in biology at New York's American Museum of Natural History, where she got an eyeful of mollusks in the department of malacology. “My job was looking in a microscope and drawing what I saw, basically,” Rios says. It was a lot of alone time, and it wasn't for her. “I need people, I need to collaborate!” she says. So, Rios switched gears and pursued interior design.
One of her employers was noted designer Sheila Bridges of Harlem, who was a regular contributor to NBC's Today show and also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Part of Rios's job was prepping for those segments. That's how she eventually found her niche in the world of design TV. “I felt like that could be a good thing for me,” she says.
And it definitely has been a good thing. Rios's resume is a lengthy one. Over the years she's been a mainstay of daytime TV, with regular appearances on The Rachael Ray Show, the Today show, The Wendy Williams Show and The Chew. She's also hosted a number of shows for just about every lifestyle network there is: Lifetime, HGTV, A&E and FYI. Rios has shared her expertise with a variety of print publications as well. One example is a post-Hurricane-Sandy makeover she did for her parents' apartment that was the subject of an eight-page spread in Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
Rios and her family became full-time Pennsylvania residents about three years ago when a home in the Poconos that they used as a respite from New York City living on weekends and holidays became their permanent address. Rios says, while they enjoyed the tranquility of their surroundings there, they began to miss being closer to the restaurants and cultural amenities that a city typically offers. And when it was decided that the boys would attend school in the Lehigh Valley, Rios began looking at properties nearby. She found herself increasingly drawn to Allentown. “I liked the general vibe and how urban it is, how multicultural it is, the fact that there's a symphony and there's an art museum and there are big-city things. I felt like this could be a great place for us.”
But when she came across the listing for a three-story, 110-year-old commercial-residential hybrid a few blocks removed from the downtown area, it wasn't a love at first sight situation. Far from it. “It was not at all exactly what I was looking for,” Rios says. It was big, it was pricey and it was full of stuff; the previous tenant operated a catering business at the site for many years. But the slowdown of the pandemic gave Rios and the owner time to get to know one another, and eventually they found middle ground and struck a deal.
The two boys immediately took to the new building—“I kind of feel like it's a kids' playground,” Rios says, “there's just so much space”—and the new city. “They can use their scooters again, which is something they used all the time in [New York]. Here they can scoot around and walk to places.” Meanwhile, Rios and Davies have been testing their DIY mettle around the home. “We've had to do projects that are way beyond our skillset, but we've been trying to do most of it ourselves to save money and also to make it more of our own space,” says Rios.
But there's much to be done and they know bringing in professional contractors is inevitable. While the upper floor, which features a staircase leading to a rooftop deck, will remain the family's residence, Rios has big plans for the other levels. On the second floor, she envisions a lifestyle studio with a working kitchen, a workshop space that could be used for video and photography as well as group activities like cooking classes. The bottom level, as Rios sees it, will be a commissary kitchen that can be rented by those looking for an incubator for their food-based businesses. And not only that: Rios also wants to open a takeout-only café where people can sell what they make “to get the feedback locally from the community on their recipes and what they're working on.”
Rios is in talks with a production company to document the lengthy renovation process. “I don't think these live-work spaces have really been done in design TV very much and it's kind of a new reality for all of us,” she says. “We need to find a way to marry our work and our lives a little deeper than we have before.”
She knows, though, that her plans are ambitious. There are zoning and permitting issues to navigate with the city. And Rios has to balance the building rehab with the demands of family life and career. “I didn't anticipate it would be quite as all-consuming,” she says. But even if plans for the community kitchen and work space don't pan out and the building's primary function is a family home, Rios says there won't be any buyer's remorse. “Our worst scenario is still a pretty good one.”
