It’s not often you look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s life and think, with a fond sigh, how closely it resembles your own, but when she said that she had bought a California estate after finding it on Redfin, “my favourite pornography app”, I knew we were as one. Not in the multimillion-dollar purchase – a particular outcome that still cruelly eludes me – but in the online fantasising over property.
Redfin and Zillow are to the US what Rightmove and Zoopla are to the UK: aggregator portals that pull in property listings from almost every estate agent in the country. My own compulsive usage of them is definitely akin to some people’s relationship with porn – all right, hard drugs. In fact I began writing a column, the Rightmove Roundup, in my Substack newsletter mainly so my daughter would stop groaning every time she caught me scrolling through yet more houses I couldn’t afford to buy. I can now proudly tell her that noseying around other people’s interiors and making snide comments about them counts as work.
So imagine my delight when Gwyneth announced this week that, after many years of renovating her estate in Montecito, she is putting its one-bedroom guesthouse on Airbnb. For one night only. And that the one or two lucky guests who manage to book that double bed for 9 September, after the booking page opens on 15 August, can have dinner with her and husband Brad Falchuk too. Down there in the little mini house near their swimming pool after a day on the sun loungers.
And when I say “my delight”, I mean terror. This is the same Gwyneth who recently explained her daily diet, saying said she doesn’t eat anything till lunch, which is bone broth, and who also once said: “It’s incredibly embarrassing when people are drunk. I think: ‘Ooh, you’re really degrading yourself right now.’” So when she points at the extensive wine range her guests will be able to choose from – gulp.
In the video she posted on her Instagram, Paltrow also shows us around the property, which is seemingly a new-build but made to look like a kind of barn conversion, all whitewashed and picket fence-y but in a sunny Californian garden. She says it is “nestled right in nature so you can come and have a zen moment” and then points to all her own-brand Goop anti-ageing products she will kindly leave in your shiny marble bathroom – because what is life if not an endless marketing opportunity for ways to pretend that death is not coming for us all?
“Your skin is gonna be better when you leave than when you arrive!” she beams. Is it a promise? Is it a threat?
The thing is, this guesthouse looks rather bland and empty compared to the main house, which she already showed to Architectural Digest magazine. The bigger one is filled with artworks such as a large print that says simply: “AVANT GARDE”.
Which actually looks pretty bland too, until you realise it is one of many made by the artist John Baldessari, and that some of his others, not in Gwyneth’s possession, say “BLOW ME”, “I’M WASTED”, “APPREHENSIVE” and “MAYONNAISE”. Those guesthouse walls really need a little something too: she should buy “MAYONNAISE”.
Of course, Baldessari also made Six Colorful Gags (Male), in which celebrities from Hollywood films had their mouths covered, but this has not yet been spotted in any private residence in Montecito. Ah, Montecito – if you haven’t heard, it’s the exclusive leafy suburb of Santa Barbara just up the coast from LA, where celebrities now move when they’ve made enough money to get away from the people who paid them.
Meghan and Harry live only a couple of streets away from Gwyneth, in case you’ve got any loss-leading business ideas you want to discuss, and Oprah’s palace is nearby too.
Gwyneth and Airbnb say they are doing this in a bid to make the world a little less lonely. Yep, the promo material begins with talk of loneliness. Even though the big G will be up in her Dreamhouse, surely protected by security, while the guests are down there sleeping in the Mojo Dojo Casa House, regretting every drop of natural wine they drank. It looks to do as much for the alleviation of loneliness as Matt Hancock’s stint eating insects on I’m A Celebrity did to “raise awareness of dyslexia”.
And we still don’t even know how much it is going to cost! But hey, at least the successful bidder’s skin will be turning more youthful by the minute, lithe and supple until the mudslides come. Oh yes – in 2018 there was a pre-dawn mudslide in Montecito that killed 23 people.
Sweet dreams!
