"a room like this justice"?

Question

I'm watching The modern family S1 episode 7 studying English. I'm not native speaker, so please understand my poor English skill. I've found like an idiomatic sentence. it is as follows,

phil : this is the great room, although "great" hardly seems to do a room like this justice.

phil is a realtor, and he is looking around a model house with his potential customer.

What i can't figure out is in bold. I think saying that is like "great" doesn't seem to fit with this room(cuz it's way better). and I think the sentence is okay without "like this justice".

so What does "like this justice" mean?

Answer 1

The idiomatic expression is to do justice to something/someone, meaning:

to treat or show (something or someone) in a way that is as good as it should be

• Words could never do justice to her beauty.
• The movie does not do justice to the book.

Now, "to something/someone" can be replaced by a personal pronoun and placed before "justice":

Just calling the movie “fun” doesn’t do it justice. (Cambridge)

or

The photograph I had seen didn't do her justice. (Collins)

In your sentence, the word order is slightly confusing, and this is what probably led you to parse it incorrectly. The sentence itself is not grammatically incorrect, but it is clumsy to insert the object consisting of more than one word between "do" and "justice". I would rather express it in this way:

This is the great room, although "great" hardly seems to do justice to a room like this.