We’re all guilty of interior design nosiness. You pop round your mate’s house and lie through gritted teeth that you love their new velour sofa, your fingers itching to go on Pinterest and redesign their whole lounge. When procrastinating at work we open Rightmove and set the minimum price at £2 mil, just so we can wonder how, with all that money, someone can have such poor taste. And it’s this inherent love of poking round other people’s gaffs that led to the creation of the noughties, MTV classic, Cribs. But now, two decades on, our need for interior design inspiration is being fulfilled by a shinier, classier and more celeb filled YouTube channel: Architectural Digest.
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We should probably give you a warning here – don’t be misled by the 15-minute run time of this channel’s videos, thinking you can hop onto YouTube for a quick tour round Naomi Campbell’s Kenyan Villa whilst making a coffee, and be back at your desk in ten. Before you know it, you’ll be sucked into the Architectural Digest void, working your way through their playlists and learning how to fold napkins for the perfect dinner party decoration, realising it’s been three hours and you’ve got six missed calls from your boss. He can wait, you’ve got some online shopping to do now.
There really is endless fun on offer here, with house tours of the rich and famous, videos exploring some of the world’s priciest pads, and interviews with the architects themselves. Unsurprisingly, these videos regularly go viral, with some of them amassing more than 40 million views. And that’s likely because we’re not looking at C-List, influencer-type celebs, we’re seeing the big dogs. There’s Robert Downey Junior, Dakota Johnson – who landed herself in hot water after lying about liking limes in her house tour – Margot Robbie, the Kardashians and Wiz Khalifa, all letting us into their homes, and making our own look rather dingy. But that’s why we love it, it’s pure escapism served up in perfectly Digestible bites.
For more great design inspiration, check out Apple TV+’s Home
You can watch this recent tour of Hamilton star Daveed Diggs’s home by pressing the play button on the show image, or by clicking here.