Dream Facades: Architecture, Reality Tv, and Our New Physical-Digital Hybrid Homes

For fans of Jia Tolentino and Amanda Montell, a probing and lively exploration of the unlikely dwellings we regard on reality TV -- and what they say about American history, modern life, and the architecture of our desires.

People like reality TV. There’s been a lot written about the cult of celebrity, how this ＂reality＂ angle draws us in through a mix of voyeurism and relatability. But when we look at the houses on these shows, what are we seeing? Predominantly, multi-million-dollar single-family homes in areas that forcibly removed minority groups and mimic the style of a whitewashed age. Why do we watch and covet these conservative homes, while professing to want lives unbound by heteronormative patriarchy and outside of suburban fantasia?

Jack posits two main theories: that our relationships with these shows (and social media) have conflated our physical dwellings with the spaces projected onto and projected out from our screens to create a ’physical-digital hybrid home’ that we see as representative of our actual home; and that what we actually covet when we covet these houses is safety and security, not the specifics of the styles being sold.

Dream Facades focuses on seven reality TV shows: Selling Sunset; The Kardashians; The Real World; The Bachelor; Trading Spaces; The Real Housewives of Atlanta; and Fire Island, and their specific associated architectural style. Morley takes us through reality TV’s labyrinthine properties to illuminate what makes us covet these spaces and devour these shows, and what that says about America, ourselves, and the future of design.

Jack Balderrama Morley is a queer, Xicanx-Anglo writer and managing editor of Dwell, a preeminent digital and physical magazine dedicated to home design. Jack’s nonfiction writing has appeared in Dwell, and their fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, No Contact, Gertrude, and Soft Punk.