Dream Home‘s Lara & Peter Say The Edit Of Taeler & Elle Is In Fact, Pretty Accurate

It's the first-ever season of Seven's new renovation show Dream Home, but, like many other reality TV shows, we've already been served up a whole lot of drama. As six couples renovate each other's homes — with one of them taking home the grand prize of $100,000 — there's been one couple bringing the drama: Taeler and Elle. The sisters from Victoria are competing this season, with younger sister Elle copping a freshly renovated home.

But their time on the season has been met with plenty of bumps, with the sisters being labelled as this season's "villains". Sydney couple Lara and Peter are frontrunners this season, however, they've come to a head with the sisters many times over the season.

While we can often be naturally sceptical over edits on reality television, in an interview with Refinery29 Australia, Lara and Peter tell us that their relationship with the sisters was "intense" and ultimately, what it looks like on-screen is the reality.

"I've seen the girls in the competition — what you're seeing is what you're actually getting," Lara tells us. "This is a relationship that I've never had before, where you're in such an intense situation with the competition side of this experience."

Lara's husband Peter also says that what we're seeing unfold on the screen is how it was behind the scenes. "Everything that we've seen on the episodes so far is how it was," he says. "I've seen some comments saying it must be dramatised or skewed. It wasn't. I can assure you that whatever happened there happened naturally."

The sisters have come under fire for their gameplay tactics during the competition. The biggest one came when the sisters took the majority of the group budget for their bathroom (which was met with a perfect score). The move meant that Lara and Peter were left with a disproportionate amount of money to create a kitchen.

However, Lara is quick to note that naturally, the circumstances are quite different for the sisters — and this informs their gameplay. Lara explains that this is largely because, for married couples, both parties benefit from the home makeover as they live together. However, in sibling relationships like Taeler and Elle, and Rhys and Liam, only one half of the couple actually gets to live in the home — the other half just hopes to be the winner of the $100,000 prize money.

"The unfortunate thing for them is that they're in a different situation to all the married couples because at the end of the day... we've won, we have a renovated home like the other couples," she says. "But with the siblings, it's a different ballgame for them."

"Taeler goes home with nothing if they don't win the whole thing," Lara says. "The way they played the game, a lot of the other contestants didn't agree with or play that way."

Lara also emphasised that despite their clashes over the season, they're ultimately good people and just had a goal to achieve. "But outside, they're really great people, so I think they just played the game more hungry than others," Lara says. "They were really focused on what they had to achieve. Taeler left really young kids behind as well, so it's not like she was there for nothing. She had a goal set."

While the couple recognise that the sisters had a clear game plan coming into the competition, Lara and Peter say their approach was the opposite. "We never did any gameplay," Peter says. "I was very much in the mindset that if we just focused on our space and made it as best as possible, the rest will sort itself out."

Lara adds that at the end of the day, she really just wanted to create rooms that would satisfy the homeowners — who were both her friends and her competition. "We put the homeowner before what the judges may have judged us worse on," she says. "We still came out on top, so I'm really proud of the way we did it."