Ari Smejkal has a lot of plans and strong feelings about the HGTV show “Windy City Rehab” that made the carpenter (more of an artisan, really) a recognizable figure — but first let’s review a portion of his resume that’s left off the show.
He once was a bodybuilding bouncer at Chicago’s hottest club.
The year was 1985. The mega-club phenomenon had just reached Chicago with the opening of Limelight, which had a pick-and-choose policy at the door. And Smejkal, then 23, was hired to man it.
“The first night we opened, 4,000 people came,” he says of the club, which was at 632 N. Dearborn St. “I had to pull in Michael J. Fox and all these celebrities, and I was grabbing them out of the crowd and picking them up and carrying them in.”
Dressed in jeans, T-shirt, cowboy boots and occasionally spurs, Smejkal made as much as $3,000 a week — largely from handshakes with cash in them.
“That was a crazy year of my life,” he says.
Smejkal worked a few other doors in the city (Big Nasty, anyone?) and took a few sucker punches but says he usually had the upper hand.
The gig lasted about a year, his exit precipitated by a scuffle that left a club-goer, who happened to be an attorney, with a broken arm.
“I got to fight, meet girls, drink for free. I thought I was invincible when I was younger,” says Smejkal, 60, who laughs at the notion and points to X-rays taken earlier this year during a monthlong trip to India to undergo magnetic therapy.
Ari Smejkal holds back a crowd on opening night at Limelight, a nightclub where he bounced in the 1980s.
Cheri Eisenberg
The X-rays show an old neck fracture from a tubing accident in Wisconsin when bodybuilding buds were whipping him around a lake and imploring him “not to be wuss” after a rough tumble in the shallows. He iced it for two days.
And carpentry work since his teens did a number on his shoulders. “Tough it out” stopped working when he couldn’t sleep through the night, leading him in February to a clinic in Bangalore, where he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton for about $100 a night and spent an hour a day under magnetic forces.
“I felt like I was 20 years old again,” says Smejkal, who parted ways with “Windy City Rehab” over the summer after seven seasons. “I feel like now that I am off the show I feel like I’m just starting again, like my juices are crazy. I’m doing all this cool stuff.”
A Chicago property rental magnate recently flew him to an oceanfront abode in the Florida Keys to build a Hemingway-style bar and possibly outfit the land with a series of Airstream campers that eventually will be rented out for beaucoup bucks. A gut-rehab in Bucktown for a Chicago construction company executive also is keeping him busy.
Ari Smejkal gathers his materials at a Bucktown job site.
Anthony Vazquez / Sun-Times
“And I’ve got another project coming up for a lady here. Her dad is one of the big mob guys. I can’t say the name because I don’t want to get killed,” he says with a laugh.
He says his clients also have included Joan Cusack, Brent Seabrook and Jeremy Piven.
“I think I made less money by being on the show because I blew off potential clients that would spend a quarter or a half million and just give me an idea and say: We trust you. Do what you want,” says Smejkal, who’s also still making and selling paintings, too, priced from $3,000 to $7,000.
And he’s now flipping properties for Charming Renovations, a company he and his wife Lara Heffernan just started. Their first project is a 1950s brick home in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, s a short drive from the 10-acre farm where he and Heffernan live with their three daughters, goats, chickens, dogs and cats.
They hired a high school kid/computer whiz to film the work — footage that might end up on a YouTube channel titled HDTV, short for Hammer Design TV.
He and his wife also are planning to take over an ice cream shop to open a pop-up store in nearby Cedarburg, Wisconsin, this winter to sell housewares and clothing featuring the emblem of Smejkal’s Hammer Design Group — and, sure, ice cream.
“I can only work so many hours. I’m getting older. I’ve got my young kids I want to hang out with, and a lot of time I’ll tell clients, ‘Sorry, I’m going to go play tag instead of work on your project. I hope you understand,’ ” says Smejkal, whose blended brood of six includes daughters Everly, 6, and Scout, 5.
One thing his plans do not include — network television.
“I’ve had a few offers, but I think that would take away from what I want to do again with my projects,” he says.
That the Alison Victoria-led “Windy City Rehab” soared in viewership after soap opera-style drama with former co-star Donovan Eckhardt became the focus of the show isn’t lost on Smejkal.
“I think TV loves drama,” he says.
Smejkal says it was hard saying goodbye to Victoria as he left the show because they’re friends, but he was becoming frustrated with the show’s limited budgets and his lack of airtime. Smejkal says his on-air interaction often boiled down to some version of his responding to what she wanted by saying, “I can do that.”
“They literally cut me off every time because I think they didn’t want me growing bigger than Alison,” he says.
Smejkal says he wasn’t paid the first season and later settled for $3,000 an episode after asking for $10,000. He says he never said “no” when Victoria asked him to drop what he was doing and do a project for the show.
“She’s a force,” he says.
But Smejkal did say no recently when a producer asked him to help choose the carpenters who will replace him on the show — for free.
“It became offensive, like I was going to jump at the opportunity,” he says.
He says he also was asked whether an episode of “Windy City Rehab” could focus on his work renovating a home for his wife’s Charming Renovations company, an offer he declined.
Smejkal, who grew up in the far northwest suburbs, the son of a carpenter and a school superintendent, sold his Logan Square home five years ago and moved to Wisconsin. He has no plans to move back to Chicago.
He speaks with a smile, though, of his days in Chicago, especially when, in the 1990s, his studio was in a renovated firehouse across from the Gene & Georgetti restaurant near the Merchandise Mart. The first floor was a showroom with a workshop in the back. The second floor was the guys working for him. The third floor had a racquetball court and a 30-foot bar that Smejkal built.
He’s still finishing one last project for his friend’s HGTV show — using a vinegar solution to get the exact right patina on the metal hood that hangs over a stove in the massive property on the Northwest Side featured on “Alison’s Dream Home.”
“She almost likes it,” Smejkal says with a laugh. “This is, like, my seventh try.”
