Why celebrities can’t stop showing Architectural Digest their homes

Architectural Digest’s Open Door is a long-running series of behind-the-scenes tours of celebrities’ homes. Photo / Youtube @Architectural Digest

The magazine’s popular YouTube series is perfect publicity for ‘down to earth’ stars. But are the homes as ‘authentic’ as the owners claim?

Ah, hey AD, welcome to my article. Come on in, lemme show you around real quick …

It’s just possible that reference means nothing to you. It is not beyond the realms of reality that you can read the words “Ah, hey AD” and not immediately hear them in a sparky, upticking Californian accent. Maybe they don’t reflexively conjure the image of an ultra-luxurious, subtly high-security front door being heaved open.

Indeed, perhaps they do not trick your brain into thinking I am a sun-kissed, mid-table A-lister in performative jeans, holding a dog the size of a throw cushion, wearing just as much makeup as is possible while still being able to reasonably claim I don’t have a scrap on, and probably going barefoot to underline the fact I am off-duty, at home, and literally down to earth.

And it’s conceivable that you don’t know precisely the kind of music (nondescript, instrumental, upbeat) and montage (lamps, tables, bed throws, lemons, aforementioned prop dog) that would follow next. It’s just that in the online year of 2024, you are surely the only person on earth in that position. And I’d love/dread to know what your YouTube algorithm serves you instead.

Of all the video strands on the internet, nothing is quite so entrancing, mystifying and suspicious as Architectural Digest’s Open Door, the interiors magazine’s long-running series of behind-the-scenes tours of celebrities’ homes – given, crucially, by the famous owners themselves. In over a decade of show-arounds (in its recognisable form, it started in around 2013), so far we’ve been served more than 150, and among other conclusions, can at least arrive at this: the old line about not being able to buy taste isn’t entirely true any more.

The idea is simple – people like to know how the rich and famous live and, well, that’s it. For decades we made do with Through the Keyhole, on which Lloyd Grossman would break and enter a detached home in Surrey, point at a framed Challenge Anneka jumpsuit and some potpourri and ask who could possibly live in a house like this (folks, it was Anneka Rice), or that bit in Come Dine With Me when they all go off and find sex toys while the host burns a souffle, or literal Hollywood house tours, which involved hailing a minibus on Sunset Boulevard and loitering outside the stars’ Los Angeles mansions until security noticed.

But that changed just as celebrity itself did. When producer Nina L Diaz pitched the idea for MTV Cribs in 2000, she was allegedly told that “no one would ever entertain the idea of letting us into their homes”. But on the cusp of the reality TV age, they opened wide. Beyonce showed us her bed, which was the same as the one found in the film The Devil’s Advocate. 50 Cent revealed his 35 baths and fridge stocked with VitaminWater. Kim Kardashian had a stripper’s pole.

Open Door was the inevitable, classier evolution. It is the product of two modern phenomena which braid neatly: a social media age when “access” and “authenticity” – or at least the illusion of those things – reign over mystique, meaning celebrities see little value in drawing a line between their personal and private lives; and our obsession with high-end property pornography, whether it’s Selling Sunset or Instagram renovation accounts. And now there is nobody too famous to appear on it. Joe Biden, who almost definitely didn’t know what he was doing, gave a tour of the Oval Office. Margot Robbie showed viewers around Barbie’s Dreamhouse while in character.

Thanks to Open Door, we now know that Cara Delevingne has a pink “vagina tunnel” in her LA house (or had, it unfortunately burnt down), and Chelsea Handler has five ice machines. It’s how we know that Lenny Kravitz’s fazenda near Rio De Janeiro has a plexi-glass grand piano that used to belong to Ingrid Bergman, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Montecito place has a full spa modelled on one she saw in Paris. It’s how we know that Maria Sharapova has a regulation bowling alley in her cellar and that David Harbour and Lily Allen have a windowless bedroom so he can sleep for literally half the day. It’s also how we know that Amanda Seyfried has never, ever, no matter what she tells us, so much as made a cup of tea in the untouched kitchen of her New York City apartment.

Lily Allen and David Harbour sleep in a windowless bedroom. Photo / YouTube @Architectural Digest

The numbers are impressive, and often unexpected. While somebody like Tan France, from Queer Eye, has struggled to nudge over 700,000 views for his Dream Home in Salt Lake City (does anybody born in Doncaster dream of living in Salt Lake City?), an average, run-of-the-mill Open Door – featuring, say, a US celebrity whose name you’d vaguely recognise as famous if it was in a WhatsApp group but whose job you couldn’t guess if your life depended on it, like Debby Ryan – could easily receive five million views for their tour. That’s the same number as clicked to see the inside of Gwyneth’s house.

At the other end of the scale, Kendall Jenner’s enormous “Cozy LA hideaway” has been leered at over 30 million times. Jessica Alba, a woman who has only become less famous since 2006, has had 38 million views on her place since 2019. Alba appears to have a fully-stocked laundrette in her home. And rapper Wiz Khalifa’s “$4.6m LA Mansion & Recording Studio”, which is actually quite a normal family house by usual celebrity standards, has been toured online over 50 million times.

“Come on in. Roll something, smoke something with me, ha ha …” Khalifa says, delightedly, at the start. His video is on 54m views – almost double the number of monthly streams his songs get on Spotify. No wonder he’s laughing. A particular highlight from his tour is when he points at a vintage Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport and explains that his baby’s mother bought it for him, “‘Cos I was mad at her and she wanted me to not be mad at her, so she bought me a car.” Nobody ever said this is relatable content.

And they are far from all bad. Alba comes across well, and clearly lives in her house. Anybody would want to spend their days in Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard’s beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone. Liv Tyler having an attic full of Lord of the Rings memorabilia is exactly what you’d hope is in Liv Tyler’s attic. Sienna Miller’s 16th-century thatched Buckinghamshire Cottage, complete with garden designed by Capability Brown, lived rent-free in my wife’s head for a year. (On reflection, a preferable way round, as nobody will ever be able to live rent-free in that house.)

Miller’s cottage, and Dominic West’s wife’s “ancestral castle”, are a tonic among the hard surfaces of many LA homes. Alicia Keys’ and Swizz Beatz’s cliff-edge glass seagull’s nest is, I’m fairly sure but haven’t time to check, an homage to the legendary “worst Grand Designs project ever” in North Devon. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s former marital home seems to be on the set of Dune.

If you watch enough of them, you come to know the tropes, and the language. Celebrities do not live in rooms, it turns out, they live in “spaces”. They do not own things, they own “pieces”. They do not have doors to the garden, they “have a kind of inside/outside vibe”. Their main instruction to their interior designer, always, was that they “wanted it to feel like a real home” – a direction usually ignored with admirable vim.

Not one person on Open Door can pass a window without commenting on how “the light is just gorgeous in here.” And above all, they “love” absolutely everything in their house. In no episode does anybody say, “Oh that old s***? Gift from my sister-in-law. Only have it up cos she’s coming round on Sunday …”

(During the pandemic, Saturday Night Live parodied the series, with cast member Beck Bennett showing “AD” around his deliberately unstyled and imperfect homes. “This is kind of a pile …” “Er, that’s a candle …”, “This was a crack, but we smoodged it, and never painted over the smoodge.”)

As for the phrase “this is where the magic happens”, well that crops up more than almost any other in Open Door. Boring people use it in earnest when they get to their study or studio or gym. People who wish to telegraph that they are kinky use it when they show us the bedroom. Once, unsettlingly, it was applied to a bathroom.

“I didn’t understand the reach of Architectural Digest, [but] it might have been the most reaction to anything I’ve ever done in my career,” Paul Scheer, the celebrated US actor and comedian, said on the How Long Gone podcast recently. “People want to see my kitchen and my den.”

The Open Door videos tend to be taken after an extensive stills photography shoot for Architectural Digest’s print and online pages. This gives its informed and specialist readers time to appreciate and ogle at the work of interior designers. As with other spin-off strands, from Vogue’s 73 Questions to GQ’s 10 Things X Can’t Live Without (incidentally all three are Condé Nast publications), the video is a bonus piece of content designed to reach a wider audience.

“I didn’t want to do one of those videos. I didn’t want to be that person. It’s impossible to look chill and not insane. To me I was like, pictures are perfect, but I don’t need to show you this thing,” Scheer, who appeared on Open Door with his wife, the actress June Diane Raphael, said. He lost that battle, but his young family moved out and went on holiday while the stills shoot took place, only returning for the video tour.

Margot Robbie showed AD around the Barbie set. Photo / YouTube @Architectural Digest

By that point in the process, the place is spotless, anything too personal has been removed at the owners’ request, and stylists and photographers have, in Scheer’s words, “moved and tweaked” things to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. One example he cites is a sofa being replaced with a smaller one to improve the perspective.

Filming happening after a team has altered the place may explain why some celebrities seem mildly surprised by what’s in their own homes. For one thing, stylists on Open Door are particularly enamoured of massive bowls of citrus fruits, giving the impression that the very next thing the owner of the house has in the diary is manning a lemonade stall for 5000 on their driveway.

The most storied example of the imported citrus sham came in actress Dakota Johnson’s episode in 2020. Johnson’s LA home was cool and serenely decorated, not unlike its owner. “This is a picture of my grandma … with one of her tigers,” she said at one point. In her green kitchen was a bowl of limes. “I love limes, they’re great and I like to present them like this in my house,” she explained.

Something seemed off, and it was. A year later, Johnson told Jimmy Fallon: “I actually didn’t even know they were in there, it was set dressing – I’m actually allergic to limes”. In a sign of how vast and meta the Open Door universe now is, the comic actress Chloe Fineman parodied that moment in her own tour (a rare rental) last year.

More dedicated investigators than I have picked up on other commonalities. At least two bloggers have watched every single Open Door episode. The YouTuber and podcast host Kendra Gaylord, whose excellent expose “I watched 151 celebrity house tours and they’re full of lies” has been watched over a million times, and picks up on pot-filling taps above stoves, La Cornue range cookers, crystals, earthquake-proofed bedrooms, cloud couches (it’s almost as if celebrities all use the same few interior designers) and, often with effortful earnestness, origin stories of bits of reclaimed wood.

“We purchased three barns in Wisconsin that were built by this incredible Amish community a little over 120 years ago, and then we just shipped out the barns and just built the house out of that wood …” the Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul tells us in his.

Committedly, Gaylord made a spreadsheet: 47% of tours are in California, 25% are in New York, and a smattering elsewhere. Four are in England, including Rita Ora’s enviable Victorian home in Kensington, which was once owned by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan illustrator Arthur Rackman. He would have loved Ora’s work.

Gaylord confirms, for clarity, that 60% of all Open Door videos do indeed feature a bowl of fruit. 65% include a moment where the host points out they have a television (relatable), but invariably it is hidden in a mirror, as with Tommy Hilfiger, behind a painting, as with Dita Von Teese, or wheeled in and out of the room on a trolley, like Alba’s (not relatable).

She has no stat for marble countertops, but I’d estimate 110% of the houses have them. So too do most have a piece of art that the host adores and is probably staggeringly expensive, but to the layman looks absolutely hideous to live with. See Kendall Jenner’s master bedroom, where she has the Tracey Emin sculpture Very Happy Girl on display. It is composed of the pink neon-lit dimensions of the penis of Emin’s ex-boyfriend. Sleep tight.

In all this, we can understand why a celebrity might want to do a 12-minute solo video that will, in all likelihood, rack up millions of views during a press tour. It is basic, good, safe publicity. We can also understand why they might like to namecheck every designer, furniture company, artist and advisor who helped with their house. It’s the decent thing, yes (though they never name their cleaners), but could have been part of their contract with those companies. Yet the most interesting discovery Gaylord makes is also, in hindsight, the most predictable: a house is quite often sold soon after it appears on Open Door.

Gaylord points out that Nate Berkus, a US TV personality and interior designer, has “flipped” four different houses featured on Architectural Digest, each for healthy profit. Ashley Tisdale, the former Disney star and another repeat tour guide, has been similarly successful in the property world. Adam Levine practically advertises an upcoming sale. Ashley Benson’s was sold before the video was even posted. In fact, according to Gaylord, “at least 29% of houses featured are sold, most within two years”.

Those might all be coincidental – rich people move a lot – but it certainly makes sense. And as Gaylord points out, if that’s what celebrities get out of letting us peer behind their curtains for a while, it seems a reasonable deal. Who needs RightMove when you can have seven million peeping toms on YouTube judging your floor plan? Now, that’s where the magic happens.