People PEOPLE Chip & Joanna Gaines

20 YEARS OF MARRIAGE & MAGNOLIA “CRAZY HOW FAST TIME HAS FLOWN BY… IT STILL FEELS LIKE SOMETHING WE’RE GETTING USED TO. BUT WE LOOK BACK AND ALWAYS JUST SMILE”—JOANNA GAINES CHIP & JO AT 20: ‘WE WOULDN’T CHANGE ANYTHING’ THE GAINESES TALK LOVE, WORK, KIDS—AND WHAT’S NEXT • MAGNOLIA’S TEAM OF EXPERTS’ BEST HOME, FOOD & GARDEN IDEAS PLUS JOANNA’S FAMILY RECIPES…

Even they cannot believe it has been 20 years—and they lived it. “Gosh, it went fast,” he says. “We were so in over our heads,” she adds. In May 2003 Joanna Stevens wed Chip Gaines, and after the honeymoon they opened a little home furnishings shop in Waco, Texas, that they christened “Magnolia,” for a flower he had once climbed a tree to pick for her. In a couple of years, Joanna was greeting customers with an infant strapped to her—that baby boy, Drake, is now college-age. And when, a decade and four kids into the marriage, they shot a pilot for their first renovation show, Fixer Upper, thinking that “we were going to love it if for no other reason, we’d have all this amazing family footage,” says Chip.…

THE FIRST TIP-OFF WAS CHIP GAINES’S TIE. A bit la-di-dah for his first day on a construction site, but then this was no ordinary Fixer Upper. After years of trying, in 2019 he acquired Cottonland Castle, a grand Waco landmark complete with a turret. “It was a surprise,” Joanna admits. “He did not ask my permission.” Perhaps because he was afraid she’d balk at a 4,300-sq.-ft. stone behemoth built between 1890 and 1913 whose glory days were in the 1920s as a home for local businessman Alfred Abeel. After changing hands several times, it sat abandoned for 20 years. Graffiti defiled its crumbling plaster walls, while ancient wiring and a not-up-to-code swimming pool, one of the first dug in Waco, made it a safety risk for anyone who would dare…

IT STARTED AS A CLASSIC HOMEOWNER’S nightmare—a contractor failing to deliver and leaving a job undone. In 2016 Brice Gilliam, who had just started his career as an orthodontist, and wife Brooke Gilliam, recently laid off from her job as a pharmaceutical sales rep, were attempting to build their forever home in Nashville. They had a vision: a modern four-bedroom with custom touches by Brice. (Though not a professionally trained designer, he had been sketching plans for his own bedrooms since he was just 10 years old.) Alas, their contractor had other ideas. “He wanted to build a spec house, basically,” says Brooke. “Our expectations did not meet,” Brice agrees. “It was up to us to get it finished.” They did and in the process turned that “very stressful” nightmare into…

IN CHIP AND JOANNA GAINES’S carefully tended Magnolia garden “they’re more like dandelions,” jokes designer Ashley Morrill of her rough-and-ready Maine Cabin Masters castmates, brother Chase Morrill, her husband, Ryan Eldridge, and their childhood friends Matt “Dixie” Dix and Jared “Jedi” Baker. For eight seasons (on DIY Network until a 2022 move to Magnolia Network), the Manchester, Maine, crew has been restoring decrepit vacation cabins and delighting viewers with humor, beards and eye-popping renovations. People spoke with the team on a break from sifting through some 4,000 applications for future episodes. How did you start the show? CHASE: My daughter’s friend’s mother knew the production company looking to do something in Maine and said we should talk. They must have liked the beards and the accents, because we ended up doing a…

PERHAPS IT’S THE WAY THE LIGHT MADE the walls look dull. Maybe the drab kitchen could have functioned more efficiently. Gray Benko had another reason to transform her 1815 home in Summerville, S.C., into a haven of unabashedly bright hues and smile-inducing patterns: It was believed to be haunted. Told this story right before the 2019 closing, Benko now admits, “I was scared!” To lift her spirits and appease the apparition (allegedly a dark-haired little girl in a white dress), “I said, ‘I’m going to fill my house with happiness and color.’” She did just that, using her years of experience as a photographer to gorgeously document the process on her Instagram page, which has caught the eye of more than 68,000 followers—and the folks at Magnolia. For the record, Gray’s…