Who is Nicole Curtis’s Ex Ryan Sawtelle? Why He Came Back for New Season of ‘Rehab Addict’

After a three-year absence from HGTV, longtime “Rehab Addict” star Nicole Curtis is back with a new four-episode season premiering on June 24, 2025. She’ll take on properties in Detroit and in Wyoming — a purchase she made on a whim as she flew back from a restorative trip to Paris in 2022.

The show feels like a whole new ballgame for Curtis, who says she took time to heal from past traumas and build her own production company. The four-episode season features lots of familiar faces from the home restoration expert’s past seasons and life, including her ex-boyfriend, Ryan Sawtelle. But that turned out to be a bit of a regret.

“That is the worst idea I ever came up with,” she admitted to TV Insider. “I’m just going to throw it out there. I’m always an optimist.”

Who is Ryan Sawtelle & When Did He Date Nicole Curtis?

Sawtelle’s Instagram profile describes him as a woodworker with experience in home renovation and the founder of the White Heart Foundation, which serves wounded veterans. The organization has been supported by celebrities including Rob Lowe and Chris Pratt.

After two bitter divorces, Curtis was initially thrilled to connect with Sawtelle in 2018, whom she told People the following year brought her “a calm I’ve never known.”

“Not that it’s been easy,” she told the outlet at the time. “Everyone has a great first few months rocking everything they have in common, but after six months you start digging into the other stuff and you either grow apart or negotiate those differences and move forward. And (you) have to make a decision to focus on the fun.”

People reported that Curtis started following Sawtelle on Instagram as he chronicled his eight-year-old niece Arden’s brave journey with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG), an aggressive pediatric brain tumor. Curtis had supported her friend Bobby — a frequent “Rehab Addict” contributor — when his daughter Tessa was fighting another form of brain cancer. She and Sawtelle bonded over those hard journeys and other life experiences, she told People in 2019.

Ahead of the June 2025 season premiere, Curtis told People, “We were together a long time and I was very close to his family. So we never really stayed out of contact. Your lives are so enmeshed.”

When she started working on the house in Wyoming, she didn’t know many people there who could help her, but Sawtelle lives in nearby Utah, so she called him up.

“We just went out there together and checked out the house,” she said. “It wasn’t anything else. There was definitely no reconciliation or ‘Maybe this was a mistake not being together.’ No, no, no, …. Us going separate paths was a hundred percent the best idea that we ever had.”

Nicole Curtis Decided Not to Include Her Boys in This Season of ‘Rehab Addict’

Although there will be other familiar faces in the four-episode season, Curtis told People that her two sons won’t be featured.

Her grown son Ethan, whom she shares with her ex Steven Cimini, is in her 20s and appeared on multiple seasons of “Rehab Addict” when they were both much younger. She also has Harper, born in 2015, with ex Shane Maguire.

“I learned my lesson,” she told People of featuring Ethan on the show when he was younger. “I think there’s one gift we can give our children, and I give them privacy. They’re out in public with me a lot, and I shield them. My son, when we first started the TV show years ago, we didn’t have all the social media presence. He was in sixth grade, he thought it was cool, and his buddies thought it was cool to be on TV. And they still make fun of him because they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, we can see you as a young boy, you had braces’ and all this. But I won’t do that again. My boys are my most precious, precious things in the entire world to me.”