Bob The Builder

You recognize the plaid shirts, the soothing voice. The constant calm and encouragement. Bob Vila taught and entertained homeowners for decades. But what is the first true reality-TV star up to now? Building the future of Bob Vila.

- Tom Chiarella

WHEN BOB VILA moves uptown—through the rain and morning foot traffic, into the cold November breeze—he does not stop talking. This is Manhattan, at 10:40 in the morning. The sidewalks on the Upper East Side, near Vila’s home, are jammed with Christmas shoppers. Vila’s voice carries into a morning tumult of cellphones and overcoats, shopping bags and umbrellas. He’s discussing the problem of restoring Ernest Hemingway’s house outside Havana, which now stands as the Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigía. He’s been serving as a consultant on the project for over a decade.

And he is nothing if not a narrator. Because it’s Vila—or perhaps because of Vila—it’s a story we are familiar with, told in the particular fits and starts of the teardown, assembly, and construction of an old house. “The roofing tiles are a good example. The pallets of tile that arrived on the building site were too brittle. They couldn’t even be installed. Their manufacture was trapped in an entirely outdated process.” Vila turns his shoulder and ducks past a pair of window shoppers. “Cuba, of course, was still using seventy-five-year-old technologies in the manufacture of building materials.” At the corner, Vila hustles forward to cross traffic with the light, speaking over his shoulder. “This created a lot of problems in the climate control and HVAC, the museum end of things, where they had letters and manuscripts that demand pretty strict climate control in their storage.”