Why Are We So Obsessed With Houses?

Wait why are we doing this?

My Los Angeles Backyard (Post Renovation) Photo by Sara Tramp

My Los Angeles Backyard (Move-In Day)

Scene 1

6:45 AM, Los Angeles, California

I am watering the plants in my LA backyard. I’ve spent the last two years fixing up this rental house, furnishing the house inside and out, and planting drought tolerant plants in pots and in the ground all over the property. There is no irrigation system so I have to water the plants every few days. Once they’re established, they’ll be a bit more resilient and able to be left alone longer. But for now, I need to either be here to water them or pay someone to come by. For a rental, it’s a pretty high maintenance situation. On this day, I’m watering the plants in my backyard and my front yard here in LA because I’m headed up to Londo Lodge, a four and a half hour drive into California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

Londo Lodge Living Room (Post Makeover) Photo by Sara Tramp

Scene 2

1:07 PM, Fish Camp, California

I arrive at Londo Lodge. There is debris all over the yard: fallen branches, fallen full trees, that residue that comes from when a snow plow shoots snow out and carries some dirt with it, part of the deck railing has collapsed, part of the roof is bowed in where the snow was too heavy. There is trash all over the yard, leftover from construction. The wood pile collapsed under the weight of the snow.

Why I Started Thinking About This

The other morning as I was watering my plants in LA I realized I’d set up an incredibly time-consuming home here. I can’t really leave without making sure there’s someone to water the plants a few times a week. I can’t leave without making sure there’s someone to come and grab my packages off the front porch so they don’t get stolen (the theft rate for packages left out in plain view over night is 100% - my neighborhood is a hotbed of thievery).

Knowing I was about to get in the car for more than four hours in order to drive to another time consuming house, one that got ransacked by snow this winter, I looked around my LA backyard and thought to myself, “What am I doing why did I make this so hard?” Like I didn’t need to add these plants. I didn’t need to buy a large country house with land that needs to be constantly maintained. But I did. WHY?

The past few years have been such a mindfuck that I think I’ve contemplated literally everything there is to contemplate. But as I come out of this weird three year-period of fuckery, I’m having some insight into what my motives were, how I got myself into this mess (overhoused, underbudgeted), and what to do to avoid feeling this overwhelmed in the future.

Now, in terms of practical reality, here is why I have two houses. In 2020, I looked around and realized it might be a good time to buy a house because for once I had the own payment. But I’m not a billionaire and had no help from family or a spouse so buying a house in LA just wasn’t in the cards for me. A normal house here, like one that needs to be gutted and totally remodeled, is 1.2 million dollars. So I followed another one of my dreams, having a house at Yosemite, where I grew up. I closed on my house in October 2020. In May 2021, after more than a year of my brand partnership work being essentially dead after my show ended in the middle of the pandemic’s high days, I booked a quarter million dollars of work in one month. Thinking (falsely) that my income was returning to it’s pre-Covid levels, I rented a place in LA so I could get back to reality. What followed was, OOOOPS, the Delta Variant, which either postponed or canceled most of the at $250,000. I made a calculated risk and it backfired, and I’ve been dealing with the ramifications ever since. I’m feeling some relief now as I booked another show that just finished and am *hopefully* getting close to being able to rent out my Yosemite cabin soon as my kitchen is about a month out from completion (after being in the works for THREE YEARS).

Now, my situation isn’t necessarily universal because one of my main jobs is to photograph home furnishings in my home to create marketing assets for brands. Curious what an interior design influencer does? Essentially we self-produce ads. Sixty years ago it would have taken a room full of problematic men to produce the kind of advertising materials we make, so as ridiculous and frivolous as influencers seem, they’re doing a job that garnered enough respect to have a whole popular TV show based on it (“Mad Men”) just in a newer, much more cloying manner.

Here’s an example of why my house has to look good. In 2021 I was hired to create marketing assets for Sunbrella. They wanted to do one interior shoot and one outdoor shoot because while they’re known for outdoor fabrics, their fabrics have a lot of really great indoor applications as well. At that time the living room at Londo Lodge was far from “ready.” I’d just ripped up the blue carpet and had furnished the room with leftover furniture from another collaboration. The room was not photo ready. In order to shoot the space, I installed wood flooring, painted the walls, added window treatments, and swapped out the light fixture.

Meanwhile, for the same Sunbrella collab, I needed to update my LA backyard. Now, originally, I was going to try and save some money on the Sunbrella exterior shoot by shooting it at Londo Lodge. I had spent the summer cleaning up the deck, buying plants for props, and painting the deck to make it look all the more fresh.

Unfortunately, timing didn’t work out to shoot on my cabin’s deck because furniture delivery got too close to winter season (meaning it would be impossible to shoot outside) so I had to have the outdoor furniture re-routed to LA, where my backyard was in the same “Hi, I’m a barren sandpit” state it had been since I moved in. I ate the thousands of dollars I’d spent on the Yosemite deck and pivoted to an LA shoot.

The fee for both these projects was $30,000 (before taxes, which is usually 30-40% depending on the year). That might sound like a lot to you, it definitely did to me. But the more I learn about this stuff and how expensive it is to produce, the more these rates make sense. I spent about $10,000 getting both spaces ready to shoot. Then I spent $3000 to hire, travel, and house a photographer. If you’re looking at this from a brand perspective, it makes sense because to produce a shoot that would produce the type of photo and video I created would have cost a lot more than $30,000. They would have had to rent a location, design and renovate it, hire stylists ($750 - $1500 a day plus prop costs), hire a photographer, hire a videographer, and hire producers to get the whole thing together. The reason influencer marketing works is that companies are basically outsourcing a lot of their labor. So while I used to feel guilty getting paid this much (this is the same as some people's annual salaries!) I also realize that there is so much money being thrown around in brand marketing world. I once worked on a Kim Kardashian photo shoot where the photographer was paid over $100,000 for two hours of work - my little $30K one-offs are a drop in the bucket.

So yeah, I put about $10,000 into both houses so I could make $30,000. That’s part of the job. At this point you’re probably thinking, “I should be an influencer!” And you should! All you need to do is live in poverty from age 21 to 34, have no health insurance until you’re 35, work for free forever, and live in continuous fear of rejection and instability until you die. Easy breezy!

In all seriousness, I’m bringing this up to show that I have some very practical reasons for spending money on making the homes I inhabit look good. I have to do it for work. But I think most of us, including myself, would have an urge to perfect our homes even if there weren’t obvious financial incentives for doing so. That’s what I want to explore today. Why are we so obsessed with our houses? Why do we feel the need to make them “better” and tell everyone about it?

There’s no question that houses and the perfecting of houses has become a huge industry. Everything from HGTV to Domino and ApartmentTherapy - there’s a ton of very profitable content themed around home improvement out there. I have personally benefitted from this. I wrote a book about it. I’ve done multiple TV shows about it. This Substack exists in large part because I gained a following talking about interior design on blogs and Instagram. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel stifled by my “interior design” character sometimes. I don’t always want to talk about design and houses, despite being very interested in personally invested in the topic. I’ve always seen interior design as the conduit through which I have the opportunity to talk about life and the world at large. So while it’s annoying to have people sniping at me to “stay in my lane” if I mention anything even vaguely political, I am thankful I’ve been able to have any sort of platform whatsoever.

I have had a life-long obsession with improving interior spaces. I started playing with design in my bedroom at age seven. I just have always had an urge to make spaces pretty. Which brings me to my first point.

Creativity

One theme that seems common when I talk to people about interior design is creativity. Most people feel creatively stifled by their work. They want to express themselves visually but don’t have a day job that lets them do that. So in part this massive obsession with interior design has to do with people just wanting to “play,” to do something creative. I think it speaks to a larger cultural issue of people feeling unfulfilled with their work.

I get a lot of emails from people who work as lawyers or nurses that want to become interior designers and are looking for advice. But it’s hard for me to give that advice because of these people would be trading the exact kind of stability I crave in order to do a job they might not fully understand. From the outside, Interior Design looks like fluffing pillows and choosing between swatches of fabric that magically appear before you. In reality, it’s mostly technical shit about whether the sofa is the right scale and if the nightstands are too high and that console table arrived dented who pays for that AND SO ON. It’s an enjoyable job for sure, but it’s not the playtime it’s imagined to be from the outside.

Control

Another element that I think drives people towards wanting to upgrade their houses is control. It’s really hard to control how “good” or “bad” your life is. You can strive all you want, but ultimately so much of “success” boils down to opportunity, privilege, and being in the right place at the right time. Home improvement, on the other hand, is something you can control. You figure out how much you want to spend, gather your supplies and/or labor, and get the job done. It’s a way of taking control of how “good” you life seems by making it look as “good” as possible.

As a wise woman named Di From “Clueless” once said, “Cher’s main thrill in life is a makeover! It gives her a sense of control in a world full of chaos!”

I wouldn’t be an interior designer if I didn’t think there was some value in improving the look of your home. Yes, on one hand it’s superficial. But on the other hand it’s a way of showing care for yourself and whomever enters your house. So while renovating your home isn’t going to instantly make everything in your life perfect, it’s a way of striving for perfection. And it’s understandable that given how tumultuous life can be, especially during the past three years, people would want to take control of whatever they could control to get their lives as close to “perfect” as possible.

Fitting In

Every year around December I get emails from journalists asking me what my “design trends” predictions are for the next year. They want sound bites like “Chevrons are back!” (They’re not. I hate them). But I tend to shy away from responding to those interviews because I don’t actually believe in design trends and I most certainly do not want to throw any support behind the idea that people should be scouring the internet to see what “trends” they can overlay onto their homes in the coming year.

My distaste for this comes from my general distaste towards the idea of conformity. The idea that my house should look a certain way because other peoples’ homes look a certain way. Now, I’m not saying I somehow live above design trends and that I’m not influenced by what other people are doing. If you look at my plans for the Londo Lodge kitchen they are most definitely infused with a lot of things that are trending hard now: traditional architectural styles, millwork, white oak, Craftsman details, and so on. But in an ideal world designers and design writers are not running around asking each other to conform to whatever is happening design-wise right now. In an ideal world we’d be designing spaces that will still look good in ten years because redesigning and refurnishing homes constantly is actually terrible for the environment.

While this need to fit in by having a nice house is definitely the most problematic motive for home improvement of those I’ve described, I actually think it’s the one that might drive me the most.

Growing up it kind of always felt like my family was weird and unconventional. We didn’t eat the same food everyone else ate, we weren’t Christian but lived in a pretty religious area (it’s called the USA), we called our parents by their first names, we saw movies no one else saw, we were just generally weirdos in our small town. I think in many ways my parents felt maligned and I definitely absorbed a decent amount of that alienation. We were basically the Addams Family of Yosemite. Total weirdos but you’d most certainly be rooting for us in the movie because everyone else was that “Is this made from real lemons?” girl.

I think a large part of the way I’ve presented myself as an adult has been in response to feeling that alienation. And that’s bled into my need to showcase my home spaces to anyone who would look.

“See, I’m actually not that weird,” I have been saying. “Just look at my house!”

When I was in high school my brother was dating a woman who grew up on the central coast, I think near San Luis Obisbo. For some reason my family went to her family’s house one time and they did something I had never seen anyone do before, they offered us a home tour.

The house was nothing special and I can’t really remember what it looked like. Probably some sort of mid-century ranch house. It was decorated the way my and most of my friends homes were decorated: lots of books, art and sculpture from around the world, southwestern rugs, Ansel Adams prints, pottery, elements of old world traditionalism. The house is probably worth three million dollars now but it was very humble and normal at the time.

With the home tour, it felt like the family was saying “Hey, this is the type of people we are!” And looking back on it I find it kind of refreshing. We’re kind of only used to rich people or people with noteworthy homes offering us a house tour. A rich people home tour has a different subtext. The subtext is “Hey, I’ve made it! Isn’t this fun?” And quite honestly, yes! Yes it is fun because it’s fun to see people you like succeed.

It’s the downtimes in your life, the times you aren’t doing so well, that force you to analyze things you might not normally analyze. The other day I was cleaning Londo Lodge - a never-ending harrowing process - and I looked around and thought “Fuck I am one man what am I doing occupying this much space?” Between the two houses I have seven beds, ten sofas, countless accent tables, a billion accessories, you get the picture. It’s gross. And quite honestly it’s a lot to keep up with when you can’t afford help.

The plan the whole time with the cabin was to rent it out, at which point my situation will not seem quite so ridiculous because the cabin will be used and enjoyed by people from around the world. But at this point I’m just one person with way too much stuff taking up way too much physical space. What made me think this was a normal thing to do? What set my expectations?

I think it’s this. I’ve spent most of my years since I was eighteen surrounded by wealthy people. That is what happens when the only higher education you get comes from Ivy League schools. That it what happens when you move to New York and Los Angeles and all your friends are highly successful people from those same schools. We edit ourselves into our own little worlds and sometimes we don’t realize we live in an alternate reality until an epiphany happens. An epiphany like “WHAT AM I DOING WITH TWO HOUSES WHAT IS MY PROBLEM?”

The reality is that I may never be able to afford a home in LA and holding on to my cabin may be one of the only ways for me to have an asset that gains value over time. This is the reality for a lot of urban millennials who can’t afford to buy where they live so I know I’m not alone in this.

And So Can You!

I realized about a year into living at Londo Lodge that I had oddly been victim to the very same thing I was making all my money doing: influencers selling the idea that YOU TOO could do this to your home. I’ve watched as countless influencer friends have renovated their homes, seemingly quickly and easily. For years I thought if I could just own a home I could do the same thing.

But we’re not all working with the same resources. It’s taken me way longer than I expected just to do the kitchen. In the time since I purchased Londo Lodge, I’ve watched as other friends bought much bigger homes and renovated them completely, I’ve watched as people have literally bought and flipped much more expensive properties than mine. And it hasn’t made me resentful. It just made me realize there’s a falseness to some of what we do. I’m sure their projects were a lot more cumbersome and stressful than they let on. It’s not always easy to be upfront about design hiccups when you have sponsors on board because sponsors generally shy away from anything that is not aspirational. Which puts the audience in a bind because they’re comparing themselves to situations that may or may not be fully representative of the truth, that may or may not truthfully convey how easy these home improvements actually are to tackle.

As content creators, we want to be accessible. We want people to feel welcome, that they, too, can make their houses look great. I think the general impetus behind this is good. It’s just people wanting other people to feel welcome to the party. But the downside is that it’s created the world in which people - even people like me with a ton of insider knowledge - have unrealistic expectations about how long design projects will take and just how much they will cost.

I think a large portion of our current obsession with home renovation and home makeovers stems from the unrealistic representations we see of it online. Like everything else, design has been impacted by fast consumption and disposability culture. A hundred years ago, people were not redoing their floors all the time because everyone had solid hardwood floors. But now people replace their floors basically every time they move because engineered hardwood and faux wood floors have become so widely available and accessibly priced. This is the result of the type of instant makeover design content that even I’ve been known to make. And it’s a problem.

Part of how I make my living is by inviting strangers into my house and allowing them to judge how it’s designed. So obviously that’s a huge incentive to make it as beautiful as possible. But doing so has come at a huge cost to me physically and emotionally and that has called into question what exactly all of this is for in the first place. It also just sucks sometimes to be excited about something then get some shitty comment telling you it looks bad. Yes, I make money doing this. But also yes, I still have feelings and want people to like me and what I do.

It’s still my belief that the design of a home is so personal. But even in my own life I can see how outside forces have encouraged me to upgrade my house. When I bought my house I’d just finished shooting a TV show. I’d seen other people come off TV shows and thrive: brand deals, book deals, etc. That wasn’t necessarily the case with me as I graduated into a much different atmosphere (the end of the world?). But my expectations were still influenced by what I saw other people in my same field doing. What else did I have to base my experience on?

I guess my point with all this is pretty simple: We should make our houses look nice because we want to, not because we sense some sort of outside pressure to be perfect, conventional, or “normal.” So maybe the lesson here is to not give a shit about what other people think about our houses. Maybe the lesson is to be more adventurous with our decorating.

Another lesson for me has been not to feel like my house doesn’t measure up. To avoid thinking my house needs to be better than it is. My mom made the point a while ago, “You could have just rented out your cabin as is and still made money.” I didn’t do that because it seemed unfathomable to me. An HGTV star with an ugly house? How embarrassing! But the expectation of what my house was supposed to look like came from me. THE CALL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

It’s important to remain aware of the inherent conformity and classism involved with most mainstream interior design content and therefore to question the response it elicits in us. There was a particularly stupid design trend about ten years ago where every designer was putting the same dumb Hermès throw blanket in every living room. Was including it about the beautiful design of the blanket or the fact that people knew what that “H” stood for? I’m guessing for the most part it was the latter, which is my exact problem with design trends. They tend to follow the same sort of problematic social hierarchies of the rest of our cultural mainstream. They tend to idealize wealth, whiteness, and constraining gender norms.

Let this be a lesson to all of us to ignore design trends. Let this be a lesson to all of us to be more like The Addams Family.

In conclusion, because honestly there is no conclusion this was really just meant to open up a dialogue about what drives our need to improve our homes, here is my biggest styling fail ever:

Photo by Zeke Ruelas

(In my defense the blanket was the homeowners and we didn’t have nearly enough budget for props).

If you’re honest with yourself, what do you think drives you to care so much about design and particularly about making your home beautiful? Respond in the comments!