Emma Chamberlain is the 21-year-old influencer with 11.8 million YouTube subscribers who is famous for … we’ll get back to you on that one. Anyway, Chamberlain has made enough money in the last five years that she is now the proud owner of both an LA mansion and, more importantly, an Architectural Digest magazine Open House video.
If you’ve not seen them before, these AD house tours are like a more highbrow MTV Cribs with American celebrities gloating about their aesthetic eye, cheering their own choices for cabinet colors and antique dressers.
Chamberlain’s video is remarkable in the series only because she is so very young. Social media was seething with envy not only because Chamberlain’s $4.3m is the stuff of Pinterest moodboard dreams, but also because she was born in 2001. Not since fellow quirky white girl Dakota Johnson debuted her own “serene Hollywood home” in 2020 have people been so excited about a green kitchen and some natural light.
Emma Chamberlain is too young to have that house and I think she should give it to a responsible adult (me) who would not spend $31,000 on a chandelier pic.twitter.com/sqJ7Uj2PhA
— Hannah Tindle (@hannahtindle) September 29, 2022
OK, so why is Chamberlain worthy of all this wealth and attention? Well, she’s a California native who rose to fame as a YouTube personality in her teens. Her open, relatable humor and fun editing style have been credited by the New York Times with “invent[ing] the way people talk on YouTube now, particularly the way they communicate authenticity”. She already has a Time Magazine “25 Most Influential People on the Internet” and a Forbes “30 Under 30” under her belt, and a combined online following roughly matching the population of Canada. She is also an ambassador for Louis Vuitton and Cartier, and has not only been invited to and attended the Met Gala but for the past two years has interviewed celebrities on its red carpet for Vogue to wide acclaim. You might have seen clips of her and Gigi Hadid saying things like “big slay”, or perhaps bursting into laughter after absent-mindedly responding to Jack Harlow with “love ya!” Oh, and she also runs her own coffee company, Chamberlain Coffee.
Young celebrities have figured out that a viral Architectural Digest house tour and photoshoot of your perfectly styled millennial/Gen Z home have become a way for them to build their brand without the pain of having to hang out with an annoying journalist for a week who might say things about you you don’t like. Unfortunately for them, we’re still allowed to say things they might not like. And so, to the house!
“I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life,” she beams at the start of the video as she opens the door to a property with a “woodsy cabin in Lake Tahoe feel, but in LA”. The house has been meticulously redesigned by Chamberlain and Ashley Drost and Marie Trohman of LA-based interior-design firm Proem, boasts five bedrooms, seven bathrooms (why do rich people need so many bathrooms?), a basketball court, a pool (obviously) and some of the most gorgeous natural light you’re ever likely to see.
naur bc this is exactly what i want for my house???? emma chamberlain ur house is SO PERFECG pic.twitter.com/W3WSUjWdDU
— ananda (@scarberlain) September 28, 2022
Some rooms are undeniably beautiful, some are hideous (sorry, kid), and if Emma needs anyone to house-sit while she’s away (which is a lot) I am totally down, but there is something about the home that feels deeply impersonal, no matter how many carefully coordinated pops of color we are shown. In fact the closer you look, the more it feels like you are being shown a space inspired entirely by Instagram sponsored ads. Untouched trendy books du jour, bright checkered patterns, ugly “conversation-starter” sweetcorn stools, a $31,000 Trueing Studio chandelier that looks like it would be at home in one of the no-chairs-only-planks-of-wood coffee shops that have come to take over our cities.
The overarching theme is mid-century modern but without a single piece from the middle of the century. Yes, there are clean lines, gentle curves, organic shapes but it feels more like the Mad Men collection for Crate and Barrel – cut adrift from history or culture or personal memories, her home is just a bunch of covetable stuff.
still thinking about the before and after of emma chamberlain’s kitchen pic.twitter.com/yZzluapTmd
— Rachel Karten (@milkkarten) September 29, 2022
Whole Instagram accounts are dedicated to this vague aesthetic now, composed of scans from table books and design magazines from the “long 1980s” school of design. But more than a unified aesthetic narrative, what most of these pieces share is instant recognizability. There’s the mushroom lamp, beloved by many an influencer, the tiger throw that I’m certain I’ve had advertised to me while doom-scrolling at 2am, a walk-in dressing room filled with grid-friendly shoes and sweater vests and finished, naturally, with the pink-hued Ultrafragola mirror posted by everyone from Frank Ocean to Bella Hadid.
I’m not sure what it means that living in a sentient Instagram feed featuring a $300 woven cement mixer slash cat bed has become the ultimate goal for a generation, but for all its authentic detailing and “personal” touches, Chamberlain’s house, undeniably beautiful, feels more like a showroom than the home of a 21-year-old girl. The phenomenon is perhaps best summarized in the video itself, as Chamberlain shows us her record collection and record player, neither of which have ever been used before but are obviously things that someone as committed to aesthetics as Chamberlain must own. For a generation of people priced out of ever owning their own home or even choosing what color to paint the walls who have resorted to mood-boarding and ambient Zillow browsing, it is a dream come true. Chamberlain just happens to have the means to have made this collective moodboard of our times real. “Who’s making the rules?” she quips in regard to her decor choices. “Me.” For better or for worse, she is.
