With Love It or List It returning for a new season in 2025, many are wondering why cast member Hilary Farr left the show two years ago.
Love It or List It is a home design competition series on HGTV. The show is similar to other renovation shows like Rock the Block. It finds couples torn between renovating or moving out of their homes and then tasks a designer and realtor with devising options that may sway them to one side or the other.
Why Did Hilary Farr Leave Love It or List It?
Hilary Farr served as the designer on Love It or List It since it began in 2008, but she surprisedly left in 2023.
Farr gave several reasons for her departure following the announcement in 2023. She told People that it was "time to move on" after she'd given the show "so many years:"
"I've given it so many years of my life. It's got me through hard times. It's got the audiences through hard times. It has evolved into a mainstay of people's lives and it's been incredibly gratifying. But now it's time for me to move on and meet new challenges."
Farr said that she had worked on the show all the way through her breast cancer diagnosis, and this experience made her "really [want] to take joy out of every day," which added to her decision to leave Love It or List It because "it was becoming too easy:"
"I'm now very aware of really wanting to take joy out of every day, and that's one of the reasons that it was time to leave 'Love It or List It', because it was becoming too easy ... I was in a rut. It's been so many years. You want to feel that every day is something different and special and grasp for those challenges. That's really what I think drives me, anyway.”
In a second interview with Vulture, Farr attributed her departure to the show "becoming boring" and said she "[didn't] want to be bored."
The host elaborated, saying Season 19 "felt too much like work" and that she was weighed down by the formula of the show:
"I’ve been doing the show for years and I have loved doing it. But in the last season, which we did in Canada, it just felt too much like work. It felt very stale. It’s a very formulaic show."
Another reason Farr gave was the impact of COVID-19, saying, "The pandemic played a huge part in my decision." The designer said the stress of shooting in the U.S. while living in Canada during the pandemic and also trying to balance her second show, Tough Love with Hilary Farr, was "an extraordinarily stressful time:"
"We were in the middle of filming 'Love It or List It' in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I am right now, when suddenly the pandemic hit, and because I’m actually based in Canada, we were getting these alerts that said, 'If you don’t come now, you may never be able to get back into the country.' Suddenly I was in Armageddon. Then, because we were trying to keep 'Love It or List It' doing something for the network during the pandemic, we did some shooting in Toronto near the end of 2020.
Then, in 2021, we went back to Raleigh to shoot, and I started to do my other show, 'Tough Love', in Philadelphia, and that went through the end of May 2021. I was bouncing back and forth, and in between that I couldn’t get to Canada because of the pandemic. It was an extraordinarily stressful time."
The stress surrounding Season 19 of the reality show was enough to highlight "how much more meaningful" Farr's show Tough Love was to her. The designer said that show is "much more personal" and that she began to prefer it to Love It or List It, which "doesn't always bring the best out in people:"
"Then we decided to do the next, and my final, season of 'Love It or List It' back in Toronto. Doing that and Tough Love back-to-back, I realized how much more meaningful the latter was to me because it was much more personal and driven by a true need. There was no competitiveness in it, there was no aggression or contentiousness, which is part of the formula of Love It or List It because it is a competition, ultimately. That kind of show doesn’t always bring the best out in people, just by virtue of what it is."
When Love It or List It returns for Season 20 on April 21, Farr will be replaced by Page Turner (Flip or Flop Nashville), who joins returning cast member and realtor David Visentin.
