Northern exposure

 Two interior designers from Sugar Land get to create a bedroom for Extreme Makeover

 By MAGGIE GALEHOUSE

Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

 Two interior designers from Sugar Land en route to a big job in North Pole, Alaska — yes, there is such a place and, yes, it's as remote as it sounds — couldn't risk losing their hard-to-find fabrics along the way.

 So they carried their materials onto the plane and checked their clothes.

 That's how Angie Prejean and Rene Hightower ended up in an Alaskan Safeway at 1:30 in the morning, buying T-shirts to wear to bed. Their pillow shams, duvet and dust ruffle were safe, but their personal items were suspended, temporarily, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

 The mother-daughter team, owners of the online interior design company CrayonCastles.com, flew to Alaska in June to create a bedroom for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Viewers can see their finished space on the show's two-hour season premiere at 6 p.m. Sunday on ABC.

 The show's producers stumbled across the company on the Internet and loved the spaces the two women put together, which often include hand-painted furniture and custom bedding and lighting.

 Prejean started the company three years ago so she could work from home and raise her young children. Initially, she and her mother designed spaces for children and teens, but they've expanded their services to include parents and grandparents.

 Prejean and Hightower had just three weeks to plan the Extreme Makeover room, get the furniture made and sent to Alaska, and find all the fabrics. Then began their whirlwind, five-day trip.

 Factoring in the hours spent traveling, working time in Alaska boiled down to two extremely long days. And "days" is the operative word. Thanks to the summer solstice, the sun set around 12:30 a.m. and rose again at 2 a.m.

 "You're so delirious from lack of sleep," says Prejean. "You have no conception of time because you're focused on working and because it doesn't get dark. I lived on Red Bull."

 The furniture they'd sent ahead was stored at a huge staging area nicknamed Bin City. "Nothing was store-bought," says Hightower, who has also worked as a financial planner. "And a lot of it came out of Texas. Our artisans donated their pieces." (The show relies on donations, and Prejean and Hightower paid their own travel expenses.)

 But even with most of their materials in place, there was last-minute sewing to be done. Prejean and Hightower rounded up neighborhood volunteers with sewing machines and created an impromptu sweatshop.

 Sewing with the neighbors showed them the community's commitment to building a 5,000-square-foot home for a family of 13. Among the VIPs who rolled up their sleeves: the lieutenant governor of Alaska and the mayor of Fairbanks.

 The highlight for the mother-daughter team was meeting Laura Rogers, the 16-year-old whose bedroom they designed. "She was amazing," says Prejean. "She has cerebral palsy. She is one of eight children, the only girl with seven brothers. She has slept on the kitchen floor her entire life."

 Prejean and Hightower say the trip to Alaska seems even more surreal when they consider that it almost didn't happen.

 "The show first contacted us through e-mail," explains Hightower, "and the message went straight to my spam basket. I nearly trashed it."

 maggie.galehouse@chron.com

  Mother-Daughter Design Duo (Rene Hightower and Angie Prejean) with Betsy Rodgers and her daughter, Laura, whose room Crayon Castles Design team completely created and donated.