The city’s interior design scene was all a-flutter this summer when HGTV selected two Houston designers to duke it out in on its newest half-hour reality competition, Showhouse Showdown. Due to the fickle nature of TV scheduling though, everyone is still waiting to find out who won months later.

In the sweltering heat of early August, Cindy Aplanalp and Angela Lee took on identical 3,000-square-foot homes in northeast Houston’s Fall Creek community. Tasked with creating five original rooms on a $50,000 budget, each designer was given roughly a week to craft unique spaces that appeal to a broad spectrum of home buyers.

More than 400 people turned up for a public tour of the houses on Aug. 13, the first 150 of which voted on their favorite of the two designs. With the help of former reality star Bob Guiney, Showhouse Showdown: The Wine Room vs. the Indoor Waterfall will settle the score when it airs this January.

“It was harder to be filmed working than I thought,” laughs Angela Lee, owner and principle designer of Evolution by Design. “You have to execute your designs, talk to the camera and try to look good all at the same time.”

“I had a style called ‘functional elegant’ to guide me through the project,” Lee says. “It’s a transitional style that’s not really contemporary and not really traditional. In other words, I looked to modern lines with a classic feeling.” To maintain the balance, she mixed traditional elements with modern accents.

While $50,000 may seem like a perfectly sizeable budget to the uninitiated, Lee says, the money goes quickly when having to account for cabinets and appliances for the kitchen. Used to working with million-dollar client budgets, both designers found themselves in the unfamiliar position of making many of their design decisions based on cost.

“I do a lot of expensive homes and wanted to bring some of those high-end elements into my designs,” says Aplanalp, a principle at By Design Interiors. “I used venetian plaster on several key walls and had my own carpenter hand-craft trim to the window casements. Instead of ceiling fans, I chose cool lighting features.”

To save her budget, Aplanalp put her family to work, having them move furniture and sew decorative pillows. She also re-purposed a broken piece of furniture to create a low-cost wine cabinet and tried to purchase as much furniture from garage sales, World Market, Costco and Pier One as possible.

“Lighting is a magical element to interior designers in that it does so much to control the overall aesthetic. First lighting, then flooring. That’s always my design mantra,” Aplanalp says of her technique. “Wait until you see the master bedroom. It’s a very sexy space designed to be a retreat. With all this wonderful accent lighting, anyone will look good naked in this room.”

Stay tuned for more details on Showhouse Showdown, as HGTV plans to post its revised fall and winter schedules in November. Everyone's going to find out who won — someday.