Out of a desperate desire to avoid the doom-and-gloom news reel for at least a few hours a day and with Covid-19 keeping me confined at home, I have become interiors-obsessed. There’s no more pleasant distraction than searching for the perfect rug to really pull a room together, debating variations of patterned wallpaper, or agonizing over exactly how many scatter cushions are too many scatter cushions.
An hour or two a day can easily be wiled away planning a whole-house refurbishment. The only problem is, like most young people, I don’t actually own a home that I can decorate. Instead, I’ve been sucked into the world of decorating apps, and their creators have been expecting people like me – permanently renting millennials, AKA “Generation Rent”.
The popularity of interior design apps is understandable. Although 80% of millennials would like to eventually own a home, homeownership rates among people under 35 in the US have fallen by 20% in the last decade. The economic uncertainties that we are facing today – with mounting student debts, the rise of the gig economy and a seemingly impending recession – make mortgages seem even more out of reach. Personalizing a house may have been a luxury that older generations enjoyed in real life, but for many young people tapping away at our phone screens may be as close as we can get.
This less-than-perfect reality has spurred a meteoric rise of apps to fulfill us digitally. Design Home is one of the most popular interior design apps, with over 75m downloads and at least 1 million daily users. Players are given daily “challenges” of decorating different rooms, with a vast range of furniture to choose from. Virtual cash and rewards are handed out daily, and can also be won based on a rating system.
Although the app is free, users can also purchase in-game currency to perk up lackluster rooms with more expensive items – and there’s certainly the temptation to do so. After all, players’ designs are directly pitted against each other, as users vote for their favorite designs of the day, with top designs receiving more highly prized rewards. Enter enough challenges, and you’ll receive the requisite amount of points to be able to decorate an entire house, a much-prized reward that can take weeks of playing steadily to acquire. There are scores of similar apps currently on the market, each racking up hundreds of thousands of users carefully crafting their own video-game-style homes.
“Now, more than ever before, people are spending more time at home ‘nesting’, and surroundings can make a difference in our happiness,” explains Design Home’s creator Chris McGill. “People may not be able to decorate and customize their own homes, but still wish to cultivate their creativity and express themselves through interior design.”
As social media have encouraged us to share pictures of perfectly color-coordinated rooms with total strangers, our homes are no longer a private space – they are frequently photographed and regularly fill up our feeds with #instagramworthy style. Interior design apps fill the gap between our increasingly high aesthetic aspirations and the reality of rentals.
“I think [interior design games] satisfy our need to see beautiful design and interact with it in a very personal way,” explains Alessandra Wood, a design historian and the vice-president of Modsy, an online interior design service that allows buyers to see digital renderings of their room before they make purchases. “Over the past few years, as home design has shifted into the spotlight thanks to Instagram and Pinterest, interior design games allow users to play and experiment with interior design – two things nearly impossible to achieve without time, effort and money in real life.”
It seems that home decorating apps have arisen at a culturally serendipitous time for their creators. Interior design for the masses has become mainstream at the very moment that homeownership has plummeted, and apps like Design Home have sprung up in its place. But Design Home also experiments with new models of marketing, raising interesting questions about how game play and consumerism could interact in future. Many of the items available in the game are also for sale in the real world, with users able to click through to connect to various websites to purchase items.
“Design Home is changing the way consumers connect, learn and engage with the interior design industry and how brands meaningfully reach consumers through creative gameplay,” explains McGill. “With any new product, it’s important to start with a thesis about an unmet consumer need. Interior design is already a creative passion for millions of people but may not be accessible in people’s daily lives. Creating Design Home was a way to connect players and makers; giving players access to styles and furniture from all over the world and exposing furniture makers to passionate customers.”
With large swaths of Design Home’s audience seemingly drawn to the app by the limitations of their own living situation, and with scant information currently available on the success of the model, it is unclear how much interior design apps manage to monetize this marketing scheme, or whether most of their income is made through small in-app purchases, with users upgrading their digital inventory rather than their real-life homes. But one thing seems sure: as the housing market continues to be inaccessible for young people, homeownership will become an ever more distant fantasy – perhaps one increasingly enacted on digital devices.
McGill is optimistic that the world of virtual decorating will continue to grow. He thinks in the future Design Home will be more than just a distracting game, but a means of blurring the already indistinct lines between fantasy and reality, as well as game playing and marketing.
“Design Home will continue to transform the interior design and gaming industries by connecting retailers and consumers in an empowering and innovative gaming playground, giving players deeper visibility into an array of home decor, including boutique brands with no retail presence,” he says. “Design Home brings a positive light to people’s lives, allowing them to relax, be creative and learn and then put the game away and apply those learnings to their real-life decorating skills. In light of the current situation, people are looking for this creative outlet more than ever.”