I’ve been a fashion writer for 15 years, but my latest obsessions have nothing to do with clothes. My evenings are spent on The Modern House and Rightmove (which records one billion minutes of use each month – not all mine) foraging for an alt-version of my life. Other thrills come from links to thick striped armchairs passed breathlessly around Instagram (the Studio Chair by Buchanan Studio, if you had to ask) and WhatsApp chats about how to paint a fridge.
Instead of trying to decipher (or indeed, care) whether skinny jeans are too cheugy now, I use my Pinterest boards to thrash out whether bi-fold doors have become a bit naff. Would you like to come to my TED Talk on whether the Selling Sunset dream of indoor/outdoor living is realisable in east London? After a year inside, our homes signify our taste and personalities as much as the clothes I once wore to fashion shows did.
As for property porn, we are blissfully inundated. For every millionaire’s megawatt mansion there’s a semi-detached shack with shades of serial killer decor in Grimsby – but loads of potential. There are endless Instagram accounts (follow @propertyjazz for a keen-eyed collection) and TikTok videos sharing all manner of refurbs and renovations. Niche bathroom suppliers (@thewatermonopoly), kitchen companies (everyone’s favourite, @plainenglishkitchens) and interior designers (current follows include @bossstudio and @studiosambuckley) have reached a sort of mythic cult status. Farrow & Ball has 1.3 million Instagram fans. And that’s all before we get started on kitsch throwbacks such as @the_80s_interior.
Everyone from Net-A-Porter to Boohoo is introducing homeware. Since it was launched in November, Net-A-Porter’s lifestyle category has tripled in size; Loewe’s home scents sold out in just 10 days. ‘Decorative accessories are the most popular,’ says Net-A-Porter senior market editor Libby Page, citing jewellery designer Anissa Kermiche’s vases and ornaments (voluptuously shaped female forms), La Double J and Laetitia Rouget as hero tableware brands promising the same shot of dopamine as this winter’s colour-fuelled fashion trends.
Perhaps it’s not surprising. Eighteen months of Zoom calls has provided endless repeats of the classic Loyd Grossman refrain, ‘Who lives in a house like this?’ The imposing Lego model of the Houses of Parliament in MP Clive Betts’ dining room; MP Robert Jenrick’s giant Union Jack flag; every entry on the Twitter account Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility). It’s no great surprise that one of the biggest reported issues of Boris Johnson’s tenure so far has been his £900 wallpaper. Have we ever been more riveted by what we can see over someone’s shoulder?
Our national property obsession (did you know that, per capita, we have more model villages than any other nation?) has gone into overdrive. Rightmove has repeatedly broken its own traffic records this year, with one day in April scoring more than a million visits, reflecting a 29% increase in the property market from 2019. After a year when the precocity of life has been brutally apparent, a new carpe diem attitude is prevailing. Will a new address or jazzy vase make your life better? There’s no harm in trying, right?
Thanks to the bedding-in of WFH, the city exodus is real: London is set to record a fall in population for the first time since 1988; in France the stagnant chateaux market has seen sales rise by 13% as metropoles are abandoned for bucolic grand environs. And, because of the price disparity between big cities and the provinces, people are beginning to wonder if they could realise their property dreams: ancient cottage, sea views, a spare bedroom (or two!)… They actually could be yours.
But while the pandemic has its part to play, Matt Gibberd, co-founder of The Modern House, puts it down to a force even more powerful: social media. ‘Instagram has been transformative for us,’ he says. ‘In pure sales revenue terms, we’ve more than doubled in size. [It’s] always been about the quality of photography and the idea that you can imagine yourself living in a certain way. Nowhere is that more powerful than on social media.’ In case you’re not familiar, The Modern House is the high-minded aesthete’s property obsession, an estate agent that sells houses as if compiling a highly stylised magazine (it takes on around 50% of the work it is offered, and houses on the edge of a yes/no are put to a vote in one of the company’s Slack channels).
It has become a cultural touchstone for a certain type of elevated, aspirational modern design, from £10 million lofts in central London to £600,000 beach houses in Hove. This year, they’ve also launched sister company Inigo, focused on historic properties. ‘They’re for people more maximalist in their mindset,’ Gibberd says. ‘These things are cyclical, but we are entering a more effusive, decorative, colourful, whimsical stage again. We’ve been contained and told what to do. I think there’s a desire for our limbs to just break free, being as individual as we can. Gibberd is married to fellow minimalist designer Faye Toogood, but even these devoted modernists have shifted in perspective, having moved further out to the South Downs. ‘It’s funny, being in a manor house in the countryside, we’re more decorative with pattern, texture and colour. It feels like the building can take it.’
It’s not just in the UK: Mary Fitzgerald, from Selling Sunset’s LA-based The Oppenheim Group, says that, post-pandemic, the market is: ‘Insane! People are searching for their forever homes and a safe haven. Maximalist design is super popular. Lots of pops of colour, textured wallpaper and graphic art.’ Perhaps this is another way that the tentacles of social media are wrapping their way around our houses. It’s no secret that bright colours and bold patterns are more eye-catching on the scroll. The resurgence of vibrant eclecticism might not just be about what we want to see, but what we want to display to other people.
This innate desire to look inside other people’s homes and show off our own is nothing new. Sonia Solicari, director of the recently reopened Museum of the Home (which charts how we’ve lived and the evolution of home design over the past 400 years through its ‘Rooms Through Time’) explains that, ‘The Victorian bay window was designed for a dual purpose. It gave you more viewing of the street, but it also allowed people to look into a space that was often curated with ornate bird cages.’ The east London museum is also home to a hugely popular photographic documentary series by Mark Cowper, featuring interiors of flats in the high-rise Ethelburga tower in Battersea. ‘It’s one architectural space decorated in myriad ways,’ Solicari explains. ‘People want ideas for themselves and they also want to know where they fit in society, it’s a basic need.’ But now it’s easier than ever to answer that need through our online presence.
Solicari attributes the British obsession with property to the fact that ‘the economy has been set up for centuries to encourage home ownership, as opposed to renting. With Right to Buy schemes, [it fostered the] idea that it is intrinsically better, it’s how you define yourself and that success means home ownership.’
Of course it’s notable that the latest upswing in our interest in houses comes at a time when it’s harder than ever to own one. Last year, numbers from the Office of National Statistics showed that people aged 35-44 were three times more likely to be renting their homes than people the same age 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s daydreaming about something unlikely to happen that’s fuelling our property lust, or maybe the inherent insecurity of renting has us turning to home decor tweaks as a way to exert some control over our environment.
Because decorating isn’t just about a total overhaul and bank holiday weekends spent up a ladder, wallpaper brush in hand. Brands are popping up to offer the same quick-fix style hit we used to get from a fast-fashion pick-me-up. Fashion stylist Sophie Warbuton launched Host Home in November 2018, having been inspired by direct-to-consumer fashion brands such as Kitri, and feeling frustrated by the lack of affordable well-designed interior items. She stocks an eclectic mix of pieces, from coloured candlesticks and reproduction French match strikers to sourced pre-loved pieces. Having had a steady stream of customers since launching, everything came to a halt in March 2020. ‘People just stopped coming to the website. But after four weeks it picked up and up and then went bananas. For what you’d be spending on commuting that week, you could get a rattan vase for £20, then buy some £4 supermarket flowers, pop them in your vase and suddenly the world’s a bit happier.’
As with fashion, a change in interiors can be a unique way of finding and shaping our place in the world and act as a signifier of our quest for a ‘good life’. The perfect Pols Potten vase for your tablescape; a Cire Trudon candle next to the bath, all items that chart the person we are buying into being.
But there’s nothing quite as good at fuelling dissatisfaction than endlessly looking for something – anything – else. The heavy demands that the past year has put on the home, and the delving into our fantasy lives – Could I live in the country, the suburbs, another city? – can provoke a more existential reckoning – If I did, who would that make me?
Like most of us over the past year, I was forced into evaluating everything about my home. For the first lockdown, my husband and I decamped with our three-year-old to my mother’s place in Surrey. I’d always felt horrified at the idea of moving back to the suburbs, but with our forced exile, doubt crept in. How delightful to not live next to the A12. Or have men relieving themselves at the end of our road. We spent the weeks constructing fantasy lives online: Oxfordshire… Brighton… Bath? After three months, we returned to our East End terrace, flush with ideas of where we could go, but without any clear decision on what to do about it, or who we might like to be – so much of our identity is tied up in where we live. As a delaying-tactic/compromise we settled on knocking out our rotten kitchen.
We weren’t alone. Mel, 37, found her wife becoming obsessed with moving to rural France to be near her expat parents. ‘Honestly, the thought terrified me. While I like visiting the countryside, there’s no way I could live there. But it felt like such an emotional issue for my wife – every time I was at all negative, she got extremely upset and accused me of being close-minded. We’d have these heated discussions which turned into: “What do we want from the next 10 years of our lives, what is best for our three-year-old daughter?”
'It got really deep and existential. And it scared me because I feared what happens if it turns out we fundamentally want different ways of life? How do we ever reach a compromise? She would sit in bed next to me scrolling property sites well into the night and I’d lie there feeling this sinking dread – like we were drifting apart.’
In the end, the family travelled to France and made property viewings. Mel secretly hoped seeing the reality of life as a same-sex couple with a child in the middle of nowhere would put off her wife. ‘Thankfully, I was right! The houses we visited looked great on paper but in reality were crumbling or creepy. The final straw was a house in a forest with a mangled car crashed into a ditch just outside the front gates. A move is definitely on the cards in our future, but I’m pleased to say that the novelty of this idyllic country life in France appears to have worn off.’
Journalist Olivia Lidbury – who launched the Instagram account and website Home Stories in 2020 as a way of documenting stylish ‘real’ homes – is on the other side of the transition. She moved out of London at the end of last year, from a Victorian terrace to a late-1960s modernist house in Kent (bought via The Modern House, of course). Having filled her previous home with antique French furniture, she’s had to embrace an about turn. ‘I had a bit of an identity crisis and we haven’t bought anything yet,’ she says. I look at all the cottagecore on Instagram and think, Oh that’s nice! But then maybe it’s good to try something else.’
Perhaps it’s going to be the way the turmoil of the past couple of years expresses itself through our homes that’s going to be the real next ‘trend’ in domestic inspo. Writer and influencer Katherine Ormerod has been documenting her chic interior updates to the rental house she, her partner and two children moved into after falling victim to lockdown hell. ‘I think in the past, people would only have shown the finished result rather than the process. But because we’ve had this authentic movement, you can follow people who’ve been renovating their house for the past five years and see all the amazing things they’ve done. The high-low attitude is prevalent – someone showing off their already finished £4 million house doesn’t feel aspirational to me. I like the idea of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’
But more than mere decoration, this year has underscored the critical role of where we live and the privilege of our options. The advantages of a good home have never been more stark, and incessant fantasy life-building is not always the balm you need. After being burnt with negative equity and trying to sell, Ormerod recognises the emotional toll that constant house scrolling can unleash. Having signed up to a two-year lease on her rented property, she’s stopped looking. ‘I’ve even unfollowed The Modern House,’ she says.
This article appears in the September issue of ELLE UK, out now.
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