David Bromstad Twin Brother: The Truth Behind One of HGTV’s Most Persistent Myths

The question of the David Bromstad twin brother has circulated online for years, generating genuine confusion among fans of the beloved HGTV host and interior designer. The definitive answer is this: David Bromstad does not have a twin brother. The persistent rumour appears to stem from a combination of his unusually youthful appearance, the fact that he has brothers who share his striking Scandinavian looks, and the internet’s tendency to amplify unverified biographical details until they take on a life of their own.

David does, however, come from a close-knit family of four siblings. He has two brothers — Derek and David — and a sister named Dynelle. The family was raised in Cokato, Minnesota, a small town of Scandinavian immigrant heritage that shaped both David’s values and his aesthetic sensibility in ways that run visibly through his design work to this day.

What makes the twin rumour so persistent is partly David’s own personality — his energy, his expressiveness, and his theatrical presence on screen give the impression of someone who contains multitudes. Fans who find his personality larger than life sometimes struggle to believe one person contains all of it, which is perhaps the most backhanded compliment a television presenter can receive.

The real David Bromstad family story — without any mythological twin — is compelling enough on its own. A Norwegian-Swedish boy from small-town Minnesota who dreamed of designing Disney theme parks, trained at one of America’s most prestigious art schools, won a national television competition on his first attempt, and built one of HGTV’s most enduring and beloved franchises across nearly two decades of television is not a story that needs embellishment.

Growing Up in Cokato: A Small Town With a Big Influence

Cokato, Minnesota, sits in the western part of the state — a small agricultural community whose Scandinavian immigrant heritage is embedded in its architecture, its culture, and its community character. For David Bromstad, growing up there was formative in ways that are still visible in his design work.

The clean lines, the relationship between function and beauty, the preference for natural materials, and the emotional warmth that runs through Scandinavian design tradition all echo through David’s aesthetic — even when that aesthetic is expressed in the bold, colourful, maximalist terms that have become his signature. Underneath the colour and the drama, there is always structure. That structural discipline is the Cokato influence.

His parents, Donny and Diane Bromstad, raised their four children with the values typical of small-town Midwestern families — hard work, community engagement, and the particular kind of unpretentious pragmatism that tends to produce either deeply conventional adults or creatively ambitious ones who carry those values with them into entirely unconventional lives. David became the latter.

He has spoken warmly and frequently about his Minnesota upbringing in interviews, describing it as a source of grounding rather than a limitation to escape. The family remains close — his siblings have appeared in his public life and on his social media, and his parents have been referenced throughout his television career as central influences on who he became.

His Siblings: The Real Brothers Behind the Rumour

The twin rumour likely finds its most fertile ground in the existence of David’s brothers — Derek and another brother also named David — who share the family’s distinctive Scandinavian features. The coincidence of siblings with similar colouring, similar builds, and a shared family resemblance is not unusual in families of Nordic heritage, but when photographs circulate online without context, the assumptions that follow can take on remarkable persistence.

Derek Bromstad is the sibling who has received the most public attention outside of David’s fame. Like David, Derek has an interest in creative pursuits, and the brothers have maintained a clearly visible bond that is reflected in David’s social media presence and public comments about his family.

The brother also named David within the family creates its own layer of potential confusion — two brothers sharing a first name is unusual enough to generate questions, and when those questions are filtered through the internet’s tendency toward dramatic narrative, the leap to “twin” becomes understandable even if it is entirely inaccurate.

Dynelle Bromstad, David’s sister, has maintained a lower public profile than her brother’s fame might suggest — consistent with the family’s general approach of supporting David’s public career while maintaining their own private lives.

From Cokato to Ringling: The Education That Shaped Everything

David’s path from small-town Minnesota to national television ran through one of America’s most prestigious art and design schools — the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. Ringling is not a casual creative program. It is one of the most rigorous and respected design institutions in the United States, producing graduates who go on to work at the highest levels of entertainment, architecture, and commercial design.

David enrolled with the ambition of becoming a Disney theme park designer — a goal that reflects both the scale of his creative imagination and the very specific way his mind works. Disney theme parks are not simply entertainment venues. They are total environments — every surface, every colour, every texture, every spatial relationship is designed to produce a specific emotional response. For someone with David’s particular sensitivity to how spaces make people feel, it was the perfect aspiration.

He completed his degree at Ringling and began working toward that Disney goal, spending time in the professional design world before a very different opportunity redirected his trajectory entirely.

HGTV Design Star: The Moment Everything Changed

In 2006, HGTV launched Design Star — a reality competition in which aspiring interior designers competed for their own show on the network. David Bromstad entered, competed, and won the inaugural season. The prize was his own HGTV series, which became Color Splash — a show built around his signature use of bold, unexpected colour to transform living spaces.

Winning Design Star on the first attempt, as a relatively unknown designer from Minnesota, was an extraordinary achievement. The competition format is unforgiving — designers are eliminated based on both technical performance and television presence, and the judges are looking not just for someone who can design well but for someone who can carry a show.

David demonstrated both qualities clearly and has continued to do so across nearly two decades of television work. Color Splash ran for multiple seasons and established his reputation as one of HGTV’s most distinctive voices.

My Lottery Dream Home: The Show That Defined His Legacy

Of all David’s television work, My Lottery Dream Home has proven the most durable and the most beloved. The premise is simple but emotionally rich — lottery winners, often people from ordinary working backgrounds who have suddenly found themselves with life-changing wealth, work with David to find a home that matches their new financial reality and their deepest personal dreams.

What makes the show work is not the houses — it is David. His genuine enthusiasm, his ability to connect with people from entirely different backgrounds, and his talent for understanding what a space needs to feel like before he explains what it needs to look like make him the kind of television host whose presence elevates material that could otherwise feel repetitive.

The show has run since 2015, making it one of HGTV’s longest-running current productions — a testament to both its audience appeal and David’s consistent ability to bring fresh energy to a format that has now produced hundreds of episodes.

Personal Life: Openly Gay, Privately Grounded

David Bromstad came out publicly as gay in 2011 — a disclosure he made in the context of a relationship and has discussed openly in interviews since. He had a long-term relationship with Jeffrey Glasko that ended in 2015, a separation that became briefly public due to legal proceedings but that both parties navigated without extended public drama.

Since then, David has maintained a personal life that is relatively private by the standards of his public profile — sharing selective glimpses on social media without the constant disclosure that characterises many television personalities of comparable fame. His family — his parents, his brothers Derek and David, and his sister Dynelle — remain a consistent presence in his life and his public communications.

The twin rumour, the long television career, the Minnesota roots, the Ringling education, the Disney ambition that became something entirely different and arguably more meaningful — all of it adds up to a story that needs no invented sibling to be compelling.

Conclusion

The David Bromstad twin brother question has a simple, clear answer: there is no twin. What there is instead is a real family — two brothers, a sister, parents in Minnesota, and a close-knit upbringing that shaped a designer whose work has brought colour, warmth, and genuine human connection into the homes of millions of television viewers. The myth of the twin says more about how compelling David Bromstad is as a presence than it does about his actual biography. And the real story of David Bromstad twin brother — which turns out to be a story about a single remarkable individual from Cokato, Minnesota — is more than enough.