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New York Times

The Strange Allure of Watching Other People Tear Up Their Homes

You see her first from behind, just before she steps away toward a tall, plain wall. You get time for a blink — that's it, maybe a tenth of a second — and then a sonic boom of indie pop drills into you, drums and rattling high-hats and a detonation of ahhhs, as a jump cut reveals that the double-height wall has been newly repainted and festooned with quadrilateral molding, angles prim enough to have been sliced by a chef's knife. Next to her handiwork, the woman stands beaming in a sundress. In the caption, a battle cry: 'We can ALL tackle hard things!!!!!' I have watched this video some 300 times. This is easily done, because it is only 20 seconds long. It's snappy, merry, somehow animalistically pleasing. The video loops on its own. You could imagine it playing out endlessly, until the worms take over, until the end of time. The woman is Lisa Chun, a 42-year-old mother of three. Chun is no interior designer, carpenter or architect: Five years ago, she worked in operations at Kipp, the charter-school network. But one day during the pandemic, marooned indoors and binge-scrolling social media, she had a sudden hankering to renovate the entryway of her house. Everyone and their mother seemed to be embarking on soup-to-nuts D.I.Y. projects at the time — and so, egged on by inspiration, stir-crazy and jonesing for a creative outlet, Chun reached for her nail gun. Just for kicks, she decided to film it on her iPhone. Nowadays Chun is one of the most popular home influencers in the world, and she makes multiple times her former salary by showing off her self-taught building and decorating. At the start, 'I had no idea people made money from this,' Chun, known to her million Instagram followers as @ told me recently when I visited her in the house that made her famous: a two-story, colonial-style new-build in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey. Since then, nearly every inch of the house has been torn up by Chun's own hands. There's that molding in the foyer ('I had to relearn math for this'), the laundry-room countertop she cut and varnished ('My first time using a saw'), the drywall she faux-lime-washed ('Real lime-washing can rub off, which is not kid-friendly'), the stone fireplace she thickly outlined with a technique called 'overgrouting' ('@chrislovesjulia, who's kind of my gold standard, taught me that'). To watch a few of Chun's 800 posts and Reels on Instagram is to be whipped onto an M.C. Escher escalator of possibility. Many, like the before-and-after transformation of the foyer wall, are panoramic delights meant to pique curiosity on an app's algorithmic homepage. Other videos are frenzied and brightly lit how-tos, typically cut into choppy, hyperspeed time lapses. Chun shows up in T-shirts and leggings, laughing and holding paint rollers. In just a few quick-cut shots, she bores a filtered-water dispenser into the mud room, or slaps LED light strips onto the underside of a chunk of wood to turn it into a luxe display console, or 'hacks' IKEA wardrobes into a custom walk-in closet. On each project, Chun is both foreperson and laborer, script-flipping a gender stereotype of physical housework. (Her husband might pop into a shot to steady a scaffolding ladder or hold a curtain rod, but the best thing he can do is to 'take the kids out for a drive and leave me alone in the house,' Chun told me.) Her videos are full of upbeat, can-do attitude, the words I'm so happy with how this turned out! constantly invoked, like a witch's spell. One particularly well-performing video she made in 2022, in which she describes herself as a guide for 'high-impact, one-day transformations' and 'high-end looks on a budget,' ballooned her follower count from 35,000 to 400,000 in just days, Chun told me. The comments on this post can be sorted into four types: There's 'You are such a boss,' 'Your house is beautiful' and 'Please come to my home,' and then, 'I'm over here struggling to organize my pantry.' Squarely in this last category do I fall: I have never tried to renovate my home, because I do not own a home, and — by the way prices and mortgage rates are trending — maybe won't ever. For me and most of my unfortunate millennial brethren, homeownership is something of a fantastical notion, not the plausible ambition it once was, before today's intractable housing crisis. But even so, dwelling in my New York City rental apartment, roughly the size of Chun's two-car garage, I can happily spend hours, days, watching home influencers knocking down walls in their cavernous basements or pouring concrete for outdoor pools. Why is this? Call it a Covid thing, the pandemic's stay-at-home orders sending our biological nesting impulse into overdrive. Call it garden-variety visual envy mashed with rampant consumerism: The internet goads us to infinite-scroll for new rugs, curate our houseplants, cruise Zillow and Architectural Digest for entertainment. For that matter, call it the wages of globalized e-commerce, a cheap and fast-shipping home-décor market letting us effortlessly cycle out a room's style from 'midcentury' one week to 'Japandi' or 'cottagecore' the next — because even if we don't own the house in which we live, the least we can do is make it look nice. And when we inevitably grow tired of our own cramped interiors, we can thumb open the screen and tumble freshly into love with other people's houses, like Chun's, for both antidotes and mirrors to our own joyful mania. It goes far, far back, this domestic obsession of ours. Some 50,000 years ago, Paleolithic proto-decorators on the Indonesian island Sulawesi scribbled out a warty pig on cave walls; Skara Brae, a preserved settlement off the coast of Scotland, shows us that humans were living inside houses by 3,000 B.C., alongside tidy furniture items like dressers, hearths and cupboards. Before the nearby volcano pummeled it into nothing, the city of Pompeii was infatuated with interiors: Upper-crust citizens loaded their homes with sumptuous frescos of gladiators and gods, which their poorer neighbors sometimes tried to emulate in their own residences. When archaeologists dug up Pompeii's middle-class House of the Larario, they exposed four small rooms and a ritzy courtyard featuring similar posh frescos to those found in richer houses. Already in 79 A.D., the house was a place of aspiration, a place to be improved. Unlike other things our modern Pinterest age has popularized, the house had already been an object of mass public gawkery for decades — through gurus like Martha Stewart and Bob Vila, then through the kaleidoscopic cable programming invented and popularized by HGTV. Since its founding in 1994, HGTV has continually refurbished its wall-to-wall lineup of fungible, fanatically watched shows, which tend to paint real estate as an exhilarating challenge. 'There's so many different ways of telling a house story,' the network's head of content, Loren Ruch, told me. 'People are just curious about how people live, how they design their places.' A more recent breed of show has emphasized the housing hustle: Programs like Netflix's 'Selling Sunset' and 'Owning Manhattan' follow brokers as they hunt down luxury properties, as well as their own paychecks. A guy who fixes the feng shui of people's homes is one of the biggest creators on TikTok, though not as big as the guy who goes around pestering strangers on the street about how much they pay in rent. Enter the Cambrian explosion of D.I.Y. influencers. Entrepreneurs like Chun building empires from and through their own living rooms offer a far closer and chummier scale for viewers than the polished productions of before. Armed with only a phone camera and a single house (and limitless amounts of pep), these people don't feel like influencers. They feel like vicarious versions of yourself — if only you had the time, or the energy, or the space. For those who do have all those things, there is unparalleled market opportunity. Amanda Vernaci is another self-starter who caught the home-reno bug in the pandemic. 'I went to Home Depot and bought my first table saw and was like, 'OK, I'm just bringing people along for the ride,'' the Michigan-based Vernaci, a.k.a. @comestayawhile, told me. In 2019, she had never so much as looked at a power tool. Now, 'many bruises on my knees' and 1.4 million followers later, she has shiplapped her ceilings, handcrafted Shaker-style cabinetry, epoxied her garage. About 10 brands ping her inbox every day pitching deals, she says; even employing a suite of business managers and assistants, Vernaci can barely keep up with the demand. The homegrown home influencer who comes with a built-in audience is every furniture or décor business's advertising dream — and they can charge brands upward of $10,000 for a single video. Brands clamor to work with these individuals because they're 'more relatable, like a trusted referral from a friend, than stars on a TV show,' Kayla Cummings, a creator also based in Michigan, told me. Cummings followed her childhood friend Vernaci's steps into the niche industry in 2021, and now, through filming house content — much of which features her goofing around with Vernaci in their newly sparkling kitchens — she has made enough money to leave her job as a social worker. 'Everybody needs or has a couch,' Cummings told me. So her thinking went: 'If I'm going to be already talking about this couch that I need or have, then how can that be monetized?' In Reno, Nev., the influencer Anne Sage, who is currently revamping an old house that belonged to her late grandfather, told me she is choosy with brands, yet can still pull in around $160,000 per year in revenue, which she considers 'pretty damn good for posting 15-second videos on the internet.' Sage has recently grown concerned about the social costs of her work, though, after an influencer friend told her that brands are now adding 'de-influencing' clauses into contracts that prohibit creators from talking about decluttering, repurposing old items or shopping less. 'That was really interesting and sad,' Sage, who started blogging about home décor 17 years ago, told me. 'And it was like, Do I want to be in this world anymore? I've been part of creating a problem that I'm now waking up to.' Yet the influx of newbies, chasing capital of their own, won't stop. A decade ago, when the Los Angeles interior designer Orlando Soria started working in home-décor media as an HGTV assistant, he ran in a circle of 'maybe 50 O.G. bloggers, design-content producer types,' he told me. He and those 50 are still in business — but they're astonished at how many other D.I.Y. home influencers seem to be out there now: 'Over 500,000? A million? It feels like it.' Soria eventually hosted his own show on HGTV, 'Build Me Up,' that ran two seasons; during the second season, in 2020, he says he made about $5,000 per episode, which broke down to only $11 per hour of work after taxes and his agent's cut. But the next year, through his own online persona as a consummate Soria was able to book $250,000 in brand partnerships in a single month. (Not all of that money ended up materializing — several brands delayed or canceled deals later that year when Covid resurged. Today, Soria says he makes around $150,000 a year.) HGTV, now the dinosaur in the home-media space, knows it can't outcompete the upstarts — but it can join forces with them. One afternoon last month, I dropped in on the network's Atlanta set of 'Married to Real Estate,' a newish series hosted by the polyglot designer-builder couple Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson. The show is something like a hard-hat 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians': Each episode has the pair bouncing between their own home with their kids, their real-estate and design offices and whatever client's house they're currently tearing up. 'We went to a couples therapist once, and she told us to break up,' Sherrod told me. In another era, HGTV might have rolled the couple off their tidy assembly line — as they did with Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of 'Fixer Upper' who slowly leveraged years of TV celebrity into their own media kingdom, Magnolia. But modern-day HGTV, nervous about aging cable viewership and young influencers' nibbling into its market share, has to squint beyond the moat of its own control. In the pandemic, it began casting talent from Instagram and YouTube. Executives now sit in conference rooms canvassing TikTok. Sherrod and Jackson were already internet-famous when they pitched 'Married,' seeing a chance to amplify their own existing businesses. 'When you find talent that has a passionate following that wants to come with them to HGTV, that's lightning in a bottle,' Ruch told me. On 'Married,' the production apparatus was a well-oiled machine: Within 15 minutes, a crew of six swept into the stripped-bare client's house and set up a tall key light among the sawdust and wiring. Sherrod and Jackson breezed in and began performing a grout-and-schmear over a kitchen facade, which would give the stone an aged look. Off to the side, one of the show's executive producers, Steve Kantor, gave bits of direction ('Talk about how nervous the client was!'), while a construction worker with AirPods in his ears revved a power drill for background noise. An hour and a half into shooting, it was already time to wrap the scene: Among their myriad other projects, Sherrod is unveiling a furniture and décor line that will be sold in big-box stores like JCPenney and Kohl's this spring, while Jackson needed to prep for hosting 'Smart Home,' another HGTV show; they also had to pick up their children, feed them and clean up their own house, so it could be filmed the following day for another episode. We are not passive viewers of all this content. Some part of us would love to replicate the D.I.Y. handiwork that we're seeing, swimming in, all the time. But most of us are exhausted or clumsy or too busy — or live in rentals where ripping up a ceiling beam is forbidden — so, instead, we vicariously enjoy the home influencer's progress, window-shopping these quick and easy dopamine jolts. And we get to traipse through her private living spaces, too, invading the intimacy of her bathrooms and children's bedrooms, dragging our own prurient desires and judgments, like peasants storming into Versailles during the Revolution. As the fundamental dream of homeownership slides further out of reach, an ordinary person's home, it turns out, can be anybody else's Versailles. If HGTV, 30 years ago, offered viewers an upscaled reflection of their own homes, then home content nowadays, to younger generations like mine, is more like a crazy fun-house mirror — showing enchanting, mythical pleasures bereft to us in the real world. Millennials these days might be buying homes at dramatically lower rates than baby boomers did at their age, but they're shelling out 23 percent more on home décor, according to a report from the real-estate company Opendoor. Even the people who do own homes today are moving less than they did 20 years ago, per a Redfin study. What else is there to do but watch other people fulfill our own wishes? Of course, it's not always so rosy inside those lovely homes we see on the screen. Breeya Shade, an influencer in Northern California, experienced firsthand the parasocial anti-fandom that can ensue when she posted a video of herself painting over her granite kitchen countertops. 'It was an out-of-body experience, seeing so many people so furious about what I did in my own house,' she told me. 'Someone told me — I'll never forget it — that I 'should swallow nails and then go get an M.R.I.' I have gotten so many death threats. I still get them.' And then there is the more literal pain of living in a house full of gaping holes, splintered wood, rusted wire. Vernaci was once 'nearly decapitated' by a flying board; Shade started off furniture-flipping on the daily, but scaled down her projects because of the toll on her body. Shade and her husband also had to move out from the suburbs and into the countryside after their neighbors complained of noise from all the hacking and sawing. (Now they live next to farmers, who run loud tractors all day long.) Back in New Jersey, I asked Chun if, having turned her home into a business, she ever feels trapped, smothered by the physical abode to which she must now constantly tend. 'For sure there will be days of cabin fever,' she told me. 'But I find that, now that I'm older and my home is more precisely designed to my preferences, I actually want to be home more. I'm increasingly a homebody.' The double economic success doesn't hurt: Almost each room brims with handsome chairs and tables and doorknobs that brands either sent free or paid Chun to promote. And even if all these P.R.-gifted goods tend to contribute toward an identikit beigeness on the Instagram Explore page, that's not necessarily a problem for home influencers' revenue. Though the average may not be getting rich, someone with a million followers can clear — through partnership gigs, affiliate marketing, private consultations, speaking engagements, influencer-education courses and product lines — six, seven or even eight figures a year. Room by room, Chun and I walked through every nook and cranny earmarked for future renovation. There was her daughters' upstairs bathroom, which needed deeper cabinets behind the mirrors to accommodate the two girls' ever-expanding skin-care products; the tiles peeling off the basement wall because the recent cold snap across the East Coast had caused them to come unglued; the in-progress backyard, where, in a rare instance, she has hired outside contractors to help set up an outdoor kitchen. ('Have you ever tried to dig a hole in the cold ground? It's hard. That's why murderers get caught, because they don't end up having the energy to bury the body.') The workday isn't just the time on camera: When not filming, Chun is editing videos, strategizing with her manager and writing a book about household operations from her home office — which has self-installed wall shelves and an adjustable standing desk she fluted with pole wrap. Despite her admiration for Joanna Gaines, Chun has no desire to ever be on TV, she told me. Fame is thorny; entrepreneurship is liberating. Leaving Chun's house that day, I turned back, wanting to have a final look at the formidable empire she has constructed. But it was a long street of stately homes, all dressed in similar elephantine tones and sloping roofs, and I found myself disoriented. Which house had I just left? I couldn't quite tell.