Forget getting your face on Vogue. In 2023, you have arrived at the zenith of the zeitgeist when your velvet sofa graces the cover of Architectural Digest.
Four million people have already watched the singer Lily Allen and actor David Harbour, whose Brooklyn townhouse is the cover star of this month’s Architectural Digest, give a 12-minute tour that highlights the gold swan taps in the bathroom, tiger-print media room and a windowless bedroom designed so that Harbour can sleep until 2pm.
The cliche of dog-eared magazine pages crammed with antique chandeliers and Louis XV chairs has been replaced by media empires chasing a young, video-oriented audience. The most-watched video from Architectural Digest’s Open Door series, with more than 52m views, shows the rapper Wiz Khalifa welcoming the camera into his modern LA home with a nontraditional take on bonhomie. “Come smoke something with me!” he says, before showing off the recording studio, the “nice ass view” from the balcony and a contraption for rolling 100 joints at a time.
Skyrocketing property prices have changed the meaning of home ownership. What was once a simple rite of passage into adulthood is now, for many, the stuff of pipe dreams. In the 1990s heyday of Hello! magazine, a lavish wedding in a couture gown represented the ultimate “happy ever after” moment. But three decades on, getting the keys to your own front door is the “happy ever after” that matters.
The pandemic and a long tail of working from home have centred our domestic lives in the news, and made what happens at home the subject of national conversation for three long years. Home is no longer a private matter, but a shared obsession. Add to these shifts an insatiable appetite for the “real lives” of celebrities and it is clear why interior decor magazines are eclipsing traditional fashion glossies – and why videos of celebrity home tours are bringing bigger and younger audiences to publications that were once a niche interest for the sort of people who can recognise an Eero Saarinen chair at 50 paces.
A new wave of celebrity house content plugs into real-world topics, from the politics of inequality to our obsession with wellness. The actor Julia Fox turned the house tour trope upside down when she gave a warts-and-all TikTok tour of her surprisingly normal-sized apartment, complete with shoe boxes stacked in corners – “very common for New Yorkers”, Fox points out – failed house plants and a few mice (“I let them rock, I appreciate that they … come out and clean up the crumbs that my son drops on the floor”).
During her smartphone-filmed tour, Fox comments that “excessive displays of wealth … make me feel icky” and that big houses are “just really wasteful when there are so many homeless people in this country”.
At the other end of the scale, glimpses of homes such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s, which includes a full-sized spa complete with hot tub, plunge pool and multiple rainforest showers, speak to our fascination with celebrity fitness and wellness regimes.
Forget nightclubs or art galleries: private homes are now the chicest places to see and be seen. Alaïa, the iconic Parisian fashion brand founded by the late Azzedine Alaïa and now designed by Pieter Mulier, staged its most recent catwalk show inside Mulier’s Antwerp home, with 100 industry guests seated on Mulier’s sofa, kitchen chairs, and even on his bed.
Last year, the Spanish fashion giant Zara held a Paris fashion week party in honour of the model Kaia Gerber, not in the Ritz or a buzzy new restaurant but behind an anonymous front door in the Bastille neighbourhood. Guests entered to discover a Japanese-styled townhouse with a koi pond in an interior courtyard, designed by its former resident, designer Kenzo Takada. A chic home is the ultimate invite.
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When the MTV producer Nina L Diaz pitched the idea for what would become MTV Cribs in 2000, she was told that “no one would ever entertain the idea of letting us into their homes”. The long-running success of Cribs – which introduced the world to such interior design gems as Mariah Carey’s “mermaid room” and 50 Cent’s in-house strip club – laid the groundwork for epoch-defining television from Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which ran for 20 seasons, to Netflix’s smash hit Selling Sunset, a reality show based in a California real estate firm.
A new generation of digital-native celebrities, relaxed about the blurring of boundaries between public and private lives, have embraced celebrity home tours as a tool to promote their personal brands and to challenge public preconceptions. Emma Chamberlain, a social media influencer who found fame via YouTube, confounded expectations with her sophisticated taste in mid-century design and grown-up love of a kitchen island and copper taps when a video of her home went viral. When Khloé Kardashian posts content showing her impeccably organised pantry on YouTube, it is greeted with the kind of swooning comments that were once reserved for Carrie’s walk-in closet in the film Sex and the City.
The celebrity home tour remains fantasy, not reality. During a tour of Dakota Johnson’s house for Architectural Digest in March 2020, the actor gestured to two large bowls of limes in her kitchen, explaining: “I love limes.” A year later, Johnson clarified that she is, in fact, mildly allergic to limes, and that the fruit was placed in her kitchen by stylists for the purposes of the video.
