How AI is remodeling the fantasy home
Amid housing crisis, fake listings offer one’s own delusion
I was scrolling through Instagram recently when I found a new page slipped into my feed through a suggested post: @tinyhouseperfect. It seemed designed to poke at my frustrated longings for a space of my own. I want to own a house; I cannot currently buy a house. But what if the house were very small? Very small and also perfect?
Soon I was navigating the reading nooks and chef ’s kitchens of an elfin cottage, a gothic coastal A-frame, a cozy “loch house” in the Scottish Highlands. I had projected my future self to the Scottish seaside, wondering how much the house might cost to rent for a weekend, when I realized that price was no object because the house did not exist. Each of these teensy homes had been rendered by artificial intelligence software and smoothed with an assist from more AI software. I had been fantasizing about a fantasy.
The nature of these homes was, in retrospect, obvious. Their interiors appeared improbably expansive, offering room after room of curated delights. It’s not hard to imagine why Instagram might boost @tinyhouseperfect’s computer visions into my sightline. I have not hidden my obsession with homeownership and renovation from the internet’s all-seeing eye. At night I wander between Zillow and do-it-yourself Instagram accounts, stalking the hallways of homes I will never visit, assessing the work of contractor-influencers I will never employ, weighing aesthetic choices I will never make. Now artificial intelligence has breached my domestic fantasy, reshaping my desires to fit inside its phantom walls.
In recent years, a whole AI dream-house economy has materialized. Search Pinterest for decor inspiration, and you’ll find it clogged with artificial bedrooms that lead off to websites hawking cheap home accessories. “House porn” accounts on TikTok and X churn out antiseptic loft renderings and impossible views from nonexistent Parisian apartments. The website “This House Does Not Exist” generates random new homes upon command. And dozens of AI-powered design services and apps — among them SofaBrain and RoomGPT — churn out slick images tuned to your specifications.
A jangling set of house keys was once synonymous with American success: the striver’s ultimate prize. The misery produced by this idea (see: the Great Recession) has not dampened its allure. Now, thanks to elevated interest rates, insufficient supply and corporate landlords snapping up that limited housing stock, homeownership is more unrealistic than ever. AI houses just make that unreality explicit. In the virtual market, the supply is endless, and the key is always in the lock.
Housing voyeurism has always encouraged a measure of psychic projection. On TV, the celebrity house tour and the home-improvement program are older than I am. Magazines of aspirational domesticity are older still. In the 1970s, Architectural Digest transformed from a trade publication into a showcase for publicizing the private spaces of what it called “men and women of taste, discrimination and personal achievement.” In the 1980s, viewers of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” were prompted to imagine how they might spend their millions if they had them.
This was the lousy tradeoff of American inequality: The rich got lavish homes, and everyone else got to see the pictures and experience the release that comes from judging all of their choices up close.
At the end of each “Lifestyles” episode, Robin Leach bid his audience “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
The modern version of “Lifestyles,” the Netflix reality show “Selling Sunset,” focuses not on the people who live in Hollywood mansions but on the glamorous real estate agents who sell them. As these intensely groomed real estate agents prep and stage fancy homes, viewers are invited to imagine not living in a mansion, but bringing it under our total financial and aesthetic control. Artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms only enhance this sensation of personal ownership, making a dream house feel as if it were built just for us.
The loch house on @tinyhouseperfect first caught my eye with its glistening waterfront views from vast windows, but when I looked again, I begrudgingly acknowledged that it had also appealed because it seemed to have been appointed to suit my personal tastes. There was a claw-foot tub with pewter fixtures, a charmingly messy bookshelf window seat, a kitchen painted a cool green. In the place of cabinets, it featured exposed wooden shelves stocked with shapely glass jars of potions and preserves.
I had thought of the loch house as remote, but really it had come from nowhere, or everywhere. It was crowded with design touches perfectly synced to the ones cresting on my Instagram and Pinterest feeds. The “personal taste” that drew me in was actually a highly impersonal taste: an aesthetic that dominates my internet browsing so thoroughly, it has come to feel like I selected it myself.
Even as social media and artificial intelligence bend us toward a ubiquitous megastyle, its products are often pitched as centers of creativity. An Architectural Digest article on AI design tools describes them as offering a “fresh perspective” that can “inspire architects” to think “outside the box.” But though AI prompts are seemingly endless, the results are often eerily banal. Much of the AI decor that surfaces on Instagram features the same uncanny images: liquid throw blankets, accidentally surreal wall art, hearths lit with inert flames.
The loch house I coveted was created by Ben Myhre, a Norway-based designer who started conjuring architectural concept art with AI software a couple of years ago and posting it to Instagram, where he has accrued more than 500,000 followers. Unlike some of the uncanny renderings that choke social media, Myhre’s bespoke images take many hours to build, with the help of his own photographs of buildings, generative AI program
Midjourney, AI-powered photo enhancement program Topaz and Photoshop. In addition to adorable little houses, he makes images of homes inspired by Harry Potter, Santa Claus and “The Lord of the Rings.”
“I like to use it to unlock dreams,” he said over a Zoom call of artificial intelligence, which he sees as a form of “collective imagination that anyone can access.” He guided the software to create a “cozy whimsical house kitchen in the beautiful Scottish highlands,” one with “window views to a vast scenic loch view with early autumn nature.” He called for “rustic details,” “depth of field,” “warm tones,” “style raw.” And he asked to banish certain elements: “no people, no animals.”
No people, no animals. Part of why Myrhe’s images can seem “real” is because they are created in the style of an online home tour, the kind you might find on Zillow or Airbnb. But I hadn’t totally understood the appeal of his work until he said those words; the fantasy is of spaces wiped of living things. There is a post-apocalyptic feel to the home-sale slideshow and its AI counterpart.
No human lives in the loch house, but increasingly this is also true of real dream homes. Many of New York’s luxury apartments lie empty. Some are acquired by the ultrarich as assets. They exist to house no one, even as people sleep on the streets outside. Home voyeurism has always been a form of misdirection, a glittering diversion from our inability, or refusal, to shelter everyone. It coaxes us to think of housing as a lifestyle choice, not a right. AI houses complete the trick. They represent housing that is finally freed from any responsibility toward human beings. No shelter, only vibes.