Nicole Curtis: A Complete Life Story — The Woman Who Saved America’s Old Homes
Born August 20, 1976, Lake Orion, Michigan
For fifteen years she was one of the most recognizable faces on HGTV, the woman in dusty overalls kneeling on cracked tile floors and insisting that a 100-year-old home deserved to live. She was a teen mom who became a bestselling author. A single mother who launched a television career after being discovered in a real estate office. A preservation advocate who took a city government to court — and won.
Her story is remarkable for all those reasons. It is also complicated. Nicole Curtis’s career ended in controversy in February 2026, when she was fired by HGTV following the release of footage showing her using a racial slur during filming. The 15-year journey that preceded that moment — the triumphs, the heartbreaks, the legal battles, the personal reinventions — is the subject of this complete and unflinching biography.
Nicole Curtis Early Life: Lake Orion, Michigan, and a Girl Who Loved Old Houses
Nicole Aileen Curtis was born on August 20, 1976, in Lake Orion, Michigan — a small town in Oakland County, roughly 35 miles north of Detroit. Her parents, Joan and Rod Curtis, owned a garbage business, and Nicole grew up alongside her brother Ryan, who later became an actor.
From a young age, Nicole had an unusual obsession for a child: she was fascinated by old houses. Her parents would take the family on weekend drives through cities like Flint, Saginaw, and the various suburbs around Detroit, and Nicole would press her nose against the car window staring at the grand, decaying Victorian and Craftsman homes lining the streets. She didn’t just think they were pretty — she felt something protective toward them, as though the homes themselves had personalities and histories that deserved to be honored. That feeling, which could easily have faded as she grew up, instead deepened into a life’s calling.
She was a good student, graduating from Lake Orion High School in 1994. During her teenage years she took dance classes and was involved in activities at school. She was also, by her own account, a young woman with a complicated home life and a drive to get out and make her own way in the world.
Her plans to attend college and study law — she was interested in becoming a lawyer — would be dramatically derailed by what happened when she was just 17 years old.
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Leaving Home at 17: Florida, First Love, and the First House
At 17, Nicole packed her bags and left Michigan with her boyfriend. They settled in Tampa, Florida, where Nicole enrolled in college. She attended schools in Michigan, Florida, and Georgia over the years, eventually settling on education as her major after law school plans fell through. But the most formative thing that happened in those early Florida years had nothing to do with academia.
She and her boyfriend bought a dilapidated house in Tampa. It was a wreck — the kind of place most people would look at and see only problems. Nicole saw a project. She threw herself into it, learning restoration work not in any classroom but through trial and error, through getting her hands dirty, through the physical, intuitive process of understanding what a house needs to be brought back from the edge. She discovered that she was extraordinarily good at it.
The relationship, however, did not fare as well as the house. The couple’s son, Ethan, was born in 1997. Nicole was 20 years old, far from home, in a relationship that was falling apart. When the couple split, she found herself a single mother with a baby, a half-renovated house, and no straightforward path forward.
She did what she always does in a crisis: she got to work.
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Life as a Single Mother: Cleaning Houses, Selling Real Estate, and Surviving
The years that followed Ethan’s birth were defined by hustle. Nicole worked as a house cleaner. She waited tables at IHOP. She worked at Hooters. She sold items on Craigslist. She started a small cleaning business of her own. She did whatever she had to do to keep a roof over her head and her son’s.
She was also, throughout all of this, continuing to restore old houses. She worked on properties in Minneapolis, Tampa, Atlanta, and Los Angeles — buying distressed homes, living in them while she renovated them, selling them, and moving on. This wasn’t yet a television career or a design brand. It was survival, pursued with a deep love for the craft.
Around this time she became a licensed realtor, joining Keller Williams Integrity Realty, which served the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. That credential opened new doors. She was no longer just fixing up old homes; she was part of a professional real estate network with access to listings, clients, and visibility.
Then, sometime in the late 2000s, a production company noticed her.
Nicole has spoken about the moment that changed her life in characteristically direct terms. She was working as a real estate agent when someone from a production company approached her — not because they had been searching for a home renovation host, but because they had seen her work and the way she talked about houses. She had something on camera that was rare: authenticity. She didn’t perform passion for old homes; she actually had it. And her working-class, no-nonsense approach — this was a woman who had worked at IHOP, who had cleaned other people’s houses, who knew what it meant to do labor for a living — made her feel entirely different from the polish-and-staging world of typical home design television.
She appeared on the DIY Network program Sweat Equity in 2009, which served as a kind of audition for the bigger opportunity that was coming.
Rehab Addict (2010–2018): The Show That Changed Everything
In 2010, the DIY Network premiered Rehab Addict, a show built entirely around one premise: Nicole Curtis rescues old homes that are on the verge of demolition and restores them to their former grandeur.
The show was deceptively simple in concept and genuinely revolutionary in practice. While the broader home renovation genre had been dominated by modernization — knocking down walls, installing open-plan kitchens, adding granite countertops and farmhouse sinks — Rehab Addict went in the opposite direction. Nicole was passionate, almost militantly so, about preservation. She wanted original woodwork saved, not replaced. She wanted old tile kept, not ripped out. She wanted the bones of a house — the architectural choices of the craftsmen and builders who had worked a century earlier — to be honored rather than erased.
Her primary territories were two cities close to her heart: Detroit and Minneapolis. Both cities, for different reasons, had large stocks of historic housing stock in various states of crisis. In Detroit especially — a city that had been hemorrhaging population and resources for decades — entire blocks of extraordinary 19th and early 20th-century homes sat empty and collapsing. Nicole didn’t see blight. She saw possibility.
The show connected with viewers for reasons that went beyond the renovation content itself. Nicole was a single mom, working on camera, making decisions in real time, arguing with contractors, hunting through salvage yards for period-appropriate hardware and fixtures, and doing a huge amount of the physical work herself. She was relatable in a way that aspirational design television usually isn’t. She represented the idea that you didn’t need a huge budget or a design degree to make something beautiful — you needed love for the craft and the patience to do it right.
Rehab Addict aired on the DIY Network before moving to HGTV for its fourth season, where it found an enormous mainstream audience. Over eight seasons and 113 episodes, it became one of the network’s most beloved programs.
Some of the most memorable projects Nicole tackled on the show include:
The Ransom Gillis House, Detroit. Built in 1876 in Brush Park, this was one of the most ambitious restorations Nicole ever attempted. A Gothic-Italianate Victorian mansion that had fallen into catastrophic disrepair, it had become a symbol of Detroit’s architectural tragedy. Nicole’s restoration of it — which involved painstaking preservation of original woodwork, ceilings, and architectural details — was seen as a landmark achievement in urban preservation.
Her grandparents’ 1952 ranch home in Metro Detroit. A deeply personal project that connected her family history to her professional mission.
The LeBron James Project. Nicole worked alongside NBA superstar LeBron James on a special makeover for a deserving family in Akron, Ohio — a high-profile project that illustrated the show’s reach beyond the renovation world.
Nicole served not just as host but as co-executive producer and consulting producer, which meant she had real creative and editorial control over how her story and her work were presented. This mattered to her enormously.
Nicole Curtis Design Company and the Business Behind the Brand
Alongside her television work, Nicole built a genuine business infrastructure. She had founded the Nicole Curtis Design Company in 2000, which she led as president until 2012. She continued her work as a licensed realtor with Keller Williams throughout the television years, blending the worlds of renovation, design consultation, and real estate sales.
She has also developed product lines that extend her brand into the retail space — home decor, furniture, fashion items, and a Walmart vanity line that makes her aesthetic accessible to consumers at every budget level, which is entirely consistent with who she is as a designer.
Her estimated net worth as of recent years is approximately $8 million, accumulated through a combination of television earnings, real estate investments, design work, and licensing.
Better Than New: The Bestselling Memoir (2016)
In 2016, Nicole published her memoir, Better Than New: Lessons I’ve Learned from Saving Old Homes (and How They Saved Me). The book was both a practical guide to home restoration and a deeply personal account of her own life — her childhood, her experiences as a single mother, the spiritual philosophy she had developed through years of saving things other people had given up on.
The title carried a deliberate double meaning. It was a statement about houses — that a properly restored historic home is better than any new construction could ever be. But it was also a statement about people. About herself. About the idea that someone who has been broken, neglected, or abandoned can be brought back to something more authentic, more beautiful, more full of character than anything that was built from scratch.
The book became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. It was widely praised for its candor, especially its unflinching account of her two pregnancies, both as a teenage mother and as a single woman approaching 40. In the memoir, she wrote about telling her then-boyfriend Shane Maguire she was pregnant: “I had wanted my fabulous Mister to look at me with tears in his eyes and say what I was thinking: that this was the greatest thing we’d never asked for.” What happened instead became one of the most difficult chapters of her life.
Relationships and Motherhood: A Story of Resilience
Nicole Curtis’s personal life has been shaped by two defining relationships that both ended with her raising a child alone — and by her own unshakeable commitment to her sons above everything else.
Ethan and Steven Cimini
Nicole’s first son, Ethan Curtis, was born in 1997, the child of her teenage relationship with Steven Cimini. The relationship ended badly, and for years, Cimini failed to pay child support. He owed Nicole a reported $14,685.54 in arrears, and when he failed to appear for a court hearing on the matter, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Nicole, characteristically, appears to have eventually forgiven the debt personally even as the legal matter wound through the courts. Ethan, now 28, grew up largely away from public life. Nicole has spoken of her fierce protectiveness toward him and her regret that so much of his childhood was spent watching her grind through exhausting work.
Harper and Shane Maguire
Nicole’s second son, Harper Curtis, was born in May 2015. His father is Minnesota-based businessman Shane Maguire, with whom Nicole had an on-and-off relationship. She was 38 when she became pregnant — at the height of her television success, financially secure for the first time in her life — and she has been candid that she believed things would be different this time. They were not.
Maguire’s reaction to the pregnancy news was, by Nicole’s account, deeply disappointing. The couple separated before Harper was born. Shortly after Harper’s arrival, Maguire filed a paternity suit and sought joint custody.
What followed was one of the most protracted and publicly messy custody battles in recent celebrity history:
In 2015, shortly after paternity was confirmed via DNA test, Maguire was granted weekend visitation. Nicole filed to have case records sealed, citing her celebrity status and concerns about a stalker; Maguire disputed the stalker claim. Nicole also accused Maguire of unsafe parenting — failing to use a car seat properly, taking the infant outside in cold weather without adequate clothing, and other allegations that Maguire denied.
In 2016, Nicole relocated from Minnesota to Michigan shortly after Harper’s birth. Maguire, who remained in Minnesota, filed an amended custody motion arguing she had moved specifically to obstruct his access to their son. Nicole attempted to block overnight visits until Harper was at least two years old. The judge ruled against her on this point and ordered her to pay Maguire’s legal fees and compensation for parenting time he had missed.
In 2017, the battle intensified. Maguire filed his sixth motion, alleging Nicole was repeatedly defying court orders by refusing him parenting time. He also alleged she was using breastfeeding as a tactic to prevent Harper from spending nights with his father. Nicole pushed back forcefully and publicly, defending extended breastfeeding as both her right and her son’s genuine need. She wrote on Instagram: “Being court ordered to pump rather than feed my baby the only way he knows how. So they could document that yes, indeed, my body doesn’t produce enough milk by pumping.”
Nicole also alleged that Maguire had taken Harper into the middle of Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and exposed him to lead paint — allegations Maguire denied.
In the same turbulent year, Nicole’s own mother, Joan Curtis, filed a restraining order against her daughter, accusing her of screaming, harassing, and threatening her during what Joan described as “mental fits and rage.” Nicole did not publicly address the filing in detail.
In 2018, after years of litigation, the two parties finally reached a joint custody agreement out of court, avoiding a full trial. The agreement included joint physical and legal custody of Harper, a prohibition on both parents speaking negatively about the other in Harper’s presence, communication exclusively through a court-monitored app, and a requirement that Nicole place $250,000 into a trust for Harper — money Maguire could access to purchase a home near Nicole’s then-California residence, to be repaid when Harper turned 19.
The peace was not permanent. In 2022, Maguire returned to court arguing that Harper, now school-age, was traveling too extensively with Nicole and missing school. Nicole disputed this, filing counter-allegations about Maguire’s new girlfriend allegedly sharing private family information on social media. By September 2023, reports indicated the remaining issues between the two had been resolved.
Harper, now 10 years old, has been kept largely out of public view by his mother in recent years. Nicole has said explicitly: “I give them privacy. They’re out in public with me a lot, and I shield them.” She has said her biggest regret from her first decade of television fame is the time she sacrificed from her children in the pursuit of career and financial security. “I was chasing that money hard because I wanted a better life for us,” she has said. “And that’s something I will not do this time. You cannot put a check in front of me that is going to take time away from my family.”
The Detroit Land Bank Battle (2017–2021)
In 2017, Nicole purchased a dilapidated Detroit home for $17,000, acquiring it through what was described as a “Quick Claim deed” from the late homeowner’s widow. The home had been vacant for more than 30 years. Nicole invested approximately $60,000 in repairs and restoration — and then discovered that the person who sold it to her did not legally own it.
The Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) contacted her in February 2018 and informed her the home was theirs. They listed it for sale in early 2021. Nicole filed a lawsuit in March 2021, demanding either ownership of the home she had paid for and renovated, or full financial reimbursement.
She won the case in May 2021, gaining legal ownership of the home. It was a significant victory not just personally but philosophically — Nicole had always been a passionate advocate for homeowners and communities fighting bureaucratic systems that seemed to work against restoration and historic preservation. Winning a legal battle against a city land bank while a solo litigant was exactly the kind of fight she was built for.
Burnout and Hiatus (2018–2022): Choosing Family Over Fame
After eight seasons and 113 episodes, Nicole stepped away from Rehab Addict in 2018. The decision shocked viewers who had come to regard the show as a permanent fixture of HGTV’s lineup. Nicole was honest about the reasons.
“I was completely burned out,” she told People in 2022. “There was so much time in those ten years where I didn’t get to enjoy it at all. I was stressed out.” She reflected on how she had done most of the heavy lifting for the show largely alone, while simultaneously being a single mother. “I had a very chaotic ten years. I didn’t want to go down that path again.”
The guilt she carried about the time missed with Ethan during his childhood never fully left her. “When we were first shooting the show, my son was in sixth grade,” she told Fox News. She had told herself that the grinding hours were for her family, but she came to recognize that she had been prioritizing money over presence. She vowed not to repeat it.
The hiatus years were not idle. She focused on her sons, worked on personal properties, maintained her real estate work, and navigated the continuing legal complexities of her life. In 2019, she made a gesture that revealed the depth of her humanity beyond the television cameras: she cut off more than a foot of her hair and donated it to the nonprofit Children With Hair Loss, to be made into wigs for children undergoing cancer treatment. She did it in honor of Tessa Prothero, the daughter of her lead contractor, who had died in 2017 at the age of nine after a four-year battle with cancer.
Return to HGTV (2022–2025): Rehab Addict Rescue and a New Chapter
In 2022, Nicole returned to television with Rehab Addict Rescue, a spin-off in which she helped overwhelmed homeowners complete stalled restoration projects. She was candid about why she came back and what was different this time. “I’m hyper-focused right now on remembering where I want to be, what matters in my life, what my priorities are,” she told People.
Her children would no longer appear on screen. “I learned my lesson,” she said simply. “I give them privacy.”
She also returned with Rehab Addict Detroit and Rehab Addict Lake House Rescue, further expanding the franchise she had built. The shows aired alongside appearances on other HGTV programs including Beach Flip and Flipping the Block.
In June 2025, People published an exclusive interview in which Nicole revealed she had experienced a significant personal setback that had shaken her to the core — something she kept private but described as “devastating.” It had led to a spontaneous solo trip abroad: she missed several flights, forgot her wallet, received an emergency money transfer from a friend, and bought a house online, before finally returning to the United States. She called the experience a turning point. “I prayed on it,” she said. “I had to make a decision right there and then: we’re going to let this affect us for a very long time, or we’re going to pick it up and go.”
New episodes of Rehab Addict — which she described as “an evolved version” of the show — began airing in summer 2025. Nicole appeared to be in a strong creative and personal place. A return to form was underway.
Then came February 11, 2026.
The Firing and the End of Rehab Addict (February 2026)
On February 11, 2026 — the same day new episodes of Rehab Addict were scheduled to premiere — the entertainment news outlet Radar Online published a video clip showing Nicole Curtis using the N-word during the filming of a season 9 episode that had aired in 2025. In the clip, she is heard immediately asking for the moment to be “killed” — removed from the recording — after realizing what she had said.
HGTV’s response was swift and total. The network issued a statement: “HGTV was recently made aware of an offensive racial comment made during the filming of Rehab Addict. Not only is language like this hurtful and disappointing to our viewers, partners, and employees — it does not align with the values of HGTV. Accordingly, we have removed the series from all HGTV platforms. We remain dedicated to fostering a culture of respect and inclusion across our content and our workplace.”
Rehab Addict was removed from HGTV, HBO Max, and Discovery+. The new episodes that were to begin airing that day were pulled. Nicole Curtis was fired.
Nicole issued an apology through her Instagram Stories and in a statement to TMZ: “Regarding HGTV, I’m grateful for the 15-year journey we’ve shared. It’s been a meaningful chapter, but my focus isn’t on my career. My focus, at this moment is rightfully on my relationships, and my community — the people who truly know my character and where my heart is. I want to be clear: the word in question is wrong and not part of my vocabulary and never has been, and I apologize to everyone.”
She also added, somewhat incongruously: “As discussed, I’m a mom and I was doing mom things all day and unplugged. I realize my shows were airing, but my family is my priority and I’m just catching up to all this now.”
The public and critical reaction was mixed but largely critical. Many viewers who had followed her for fifteen years expressed profound disappointment. Some defended her, noting that she had immediately tried to have the footage deleted, suggesting awareness and shame in the moment. Others pointed out that those facts don’t diminish the harm of the word itself, or explain its presence in her vocabulary.
What is not in dispute is that a 15-year television career, built on a genuine and admirable love for preservation and community, ended in a single moment — and that the moment, however it is contextualized, was her responsibility.
The Philosophy of Preservation: Why Nicole Curtis Mattered
Whatever the complications of her personal story, the contribution Nicole Curtis made to the home renovation conversation is real and worth articulating clearly.
Before Rehab Addict, the dominant language of home improvement television was transformation — tear down, modernize, flip. The implicit message was that old meant inferior and new meant better. Nicole argued the opposite, and she argued it consistently, passionately, and persuasively for fifteen years. Her shows reached audiences who had never thought about architectural preservation and taught them to see what she saw: that the workmanship in a 1910 Craftsman bungalow or an 1880s Victorian was irreplaceable, that the story embedded in old wood and original tile and hand-forged hardware was worth protecting, and that demolishing a historic home to build a generic new one was a kind of cultural vandalism.
She was particularly focused on Detroit — a city that the broader culture had often written off — and her work there was not just television content but genuine advocacy. The restoration of the Ransom Gillis mansion, in particular, was a statement about what was possible in a city that desperately needed to hear it.
She also championed the idea that great design does not require great wealth. Her shopping at flea markets, salvage yards, and discount stores; her philosophy of repair over replacement; her insistence that budget-minded homeowners could achieve extraordinary things with patience and skill — these were ideas with real practical value for real American families.
The Books, the Brand, and the Legacy
Beyond television, Nicole Curtis built a layered brand with genuine substance:
Her New York Times bestselling memoir Better Than New remains a document worth reading — not just for its renovation philosophy but for its honest portrayal of the choices and consequences that shaped her life.
Nicole Curtis Design Company, active from 2000 onward, established her professional design credentials independent of television.
Her retail partnerships — including the Walmart vanity line — made her aesthetic accessible to a wide audience.
Her charitable work includes the deeply personal hair donation to Children With Hair Loss in 2019.
She remains a licensed realtor with Keller Williams, a working professional in real estate beyond whatever happens with television.
Who Is Nicole Curtis Today?
As of February 2026, Nicole Curtis is 49 years old — she turns 50 in August 2026. She has two sons: Ethan, 28, and Harper, 10. She is no longer associated with HGTV. Her television future is uncertain.
What is certain is that she is, at her core, the same person she has always been: a woman who grew up in Lake Orion, Michigan, fell in love with old houses as a child, left home too young, survived hardship by working relentlessly, built a television career from nothing, raised two children largely alone, and found meaning in the act of taking something that had been abandoned and making it beautiful again.
She has said, reflecting on the years of struggle: “I would give anything to have a husband that loved me and supported me and, you know, took the kids out for pizza while I designed. But I just have never had that.”
She has also said: “You’ll figure it out.”
That, perhaps, is the most honest summation of Nicole Curtis — a woman who has always, eventually, figured it out.
Nicole Curtis is the author of Better Than New: Lessons I’ve Learned from Saving Old Homes (and How They Saved Me) (2016, Viking Press). She has two sons, Ethan and Harper, and lives in Michigan.
