Design Home: A Game, An Ad, A Real Estate Nightmare

In early 2019, my husband and I decided that instead of renewing the lease on our Phoenix apartment, we’d start the process of buying a home. We had enough saved up for a down payment–not enough for a good down payment, but one that a realtor confirmed was realistic. We saw our first townhouse a few days after contacting our realtor, and even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with the first house we saw, I did. We discussed with our realtor briefly, telling him we’d go get lunch and then let him know about an offer.

I’d already been getting targeted ads for apartments and homes and realtors and furniture since we even started entertaining the idea of moving, but as we sat down at our table and I scrolled mindlessly through Instagram, an ad popped up on my feed for a free app game called Design Home: House Makeover. Design Home is an interior design game monetized via microtransactions. The concept is that you are an interior designer hired to stage rooms for clients. You are given the clients’ specifications, and you must use in-game currency to buy in-game replicas of real-world furniture, like a West Elm loveseat or a Kathy Kuo dining table, to decorate the rooms. Once your room is submitted, it is rated by other players in a one-to-one preference showdown against the same room as designed by other players.

“Oh, this looks fun,” I told my husband as I downloaded the app. “It kind of looks like building houses in The Sims. Maybe it’ll give me an idea of how we can decorate our new place.” Growing up playing The Sims, I always cared more about building beautiful houses than building actual Sims–but I was never good at it. Design Home seemed like the perfect, easier version of this hobby. It seemed like a more interactive version of watching lilsimsie build a lakeside cabin in The Sims 4 on YouTube, but without the high risk of failure in actually trying to build a beautiful home in The Sims 4.

My husband and I talked over lunch and confirmed we wanted to move forward with an offer. We loved it so much, in fact, that we were fine with putting an offer on it for the full price, even though we’d always been told to offer less and then allow some negotiation back up. The realtor seemed a little amused, though we weren’t sure why. He called us back a little later that day and gave us the news: the house had already an offer accepted that was about $20,000 more than its listing price.

“It’s an out-of-state investor buying the cheaper real estate here and turning it into an AirBNB,” he said. “It always is.”

We’d moved into our Phoenix apartment two years early from Flagstaff, Arizona, a mountain city up north that’s bittersweetly called “poverty with a view” because of its housing prices. The roommates we left behind were given short notice that they wouldn’t be able to renew their lease; the landlords wanted to turn it into a VRBO (essentially an off-brand Airbnb). We paid about $1200/month for it–an absolute steal, true–and now it goes for about $120/night, about $3600/month. Sedona, another expensive city in Northern Arizona, currently has a housing market that Realtor Magazine reports is 20% AirBNBs. An investigation by CityLab showed that in U.S. zipcodes, rent went up by 0.42% and houses increased by .76% when AirBNB properties in the same zipcode increased by 10%. Now, townhouses in our old Flagstaff neighborhood go for about $1800/month.

When you hit level 20+ in Design Home, you get access to something new. You can now decorate rooms to make up entire homes–your homes. Instead of challenges that get rated, the rooms in your home are yours to design, floor to ceiling, with no input. Usually, you can only choose furniture and decor, but in your homes, you can choose the flooring, the paint, the wood, the countertops, the types of rock or exposed brick in the architecture itself . You can redecorate the rooms in your homes over and over again, for a fee. My favorite home is my “Mountain Lodge,” which I painted in sage green and autumnal orange. I changed the location of this fictional home from Juneau, Alaska, to Flagstaff, Arizona.

For a little while when we started looking for houses, I supplement my Design Home playing with YouTube videos and blog articles about The Sims. I watch Mr. Olkan’s “LUXURY CABIN WITH POOL & SPA” build. I live for Gita Jackson’s writing about The Sims for Kotaku. As we kept seeing houses and being bought out, though, I slowly moved away from The Sims content to focus more on Design Home. Design Home is easy. It’s brain candy, engineered to let you be creative without thinking too much. And most importantly, it didn’t include the fear of failure and feelings of inadequacy that came with The Sims. My submissions in the game could be rated low, but it was fine; I’d just play more and more and smooth over the memory of failure. Everything in Design Home is ephemeral except the houses you make just for you, with limited options and a few simple taps on your phone.

We became more aggressive in seeing houses and putting offers in. For one townhouse in our favorite neighborhood, I got an alert about the listing from Zillow at 9:00AM on a work day. I emailed my husband and our realtor from my work computer. We saw the house during our lunch break at noon that day. We put in a generous offer by 2:00PM. It had already been bought. The owner wanted to turn it into an AirBNB.

I watched Zillow obsessively. In a piece titled “Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own a Home” for OneZero, Angela Lashbrook writes, “But as homeownership becomes less of a reality and more of an illusion, many of us resort to merely imagining ourselves in our own homes via the internet.” As Ben Sledge found for The Guardian, there are plenty of young people living out this same fantasy in The Sims as well. Lashbrook turns to Instagram to daydream; I turn to Design Home.

 The problem is that in trying to escape from one capitalist hellscape, the housing market, I slowly realized that all I’d done was turn to another in Design Home. Alyssa Bereznak wrote on Design Home‘s ad-as-a-game structure for The Ringer, explaining, “Decorating a room requires consulting a catalog of furniture from ‘partners,” which include major chains like West Elm, smaller startups like Article, and the infamous Kathy Kuo (a New York-based designer whose eclectic offerings have puzzled and enraged users). In a brilliant act of gamified advertising, these partners submit their inventories to be included in the game, and the app’s content team decides which to include. Design Home isn’t a game with ads in it. It’s an ad that functions like a game. My fantasies of owning a home were supplanted by the fantasies of owning an Article sideboard and a Pottery Barn cocktail table. I now know pieces of furniture, their brand, and their style name better than I know the neighborhoods I wanted to live in. This, I realized, was the cost of Design Home over The Sims. I wasn’t afraid of failure–it just came at the price of turning my thoughts into adspace. 

I start up a group chat with my friends who have started playing and title it “this fucking game.” My friends and I drive past a real-life West Elm storefront, and one of us says, “Oh my god, this game is haunting us. Let’s go in.” I don’t know whether or not we’re joking. The couch staged in the front window is beautiful.

I spend $4.99 on a decor bundle themed for Halloween. I spend $1.99 on a decor bundle with lots of pink. Another house gets bought out from under us. I get my first perfect score in the game, and my fellow players in “this fucking game” applaud me. We send puke emoji to each other when we screenshot especially ugly designs we have to vote on. Another house gets bought out from under us. I look at my furniture, and I hate it. I spend $4.99 on the game’s premium currency so I can make sure my new in-game coastal house can have that new rose gold marbled painting I love. It’s my home; it should look nice. I look at my apartment’s white walls, and I design the walls of my coastal home’s seaside lookout to be painted a lovely pale blue. We start seeing homes that aren’t even on the market yet. It doesn’t matter. They’re bought out from under us.

Eventually, we stopped looking to buy a home. Our realtor didn’t seem surprised. We moved into a new apartment instead, and I wonder how bad it would be if I just painted one of the walls. I play Design Home almost every day. I’m resigned to it. It started out as a way to cope with house hunting; now, it feels more akin to watching reality TV or YouTube drama channels or TikTok compilations. There’s something shameful to it, to the blatant capitalist nightmare of a game that’s 90% an ad to a market that is unlikely to ever actually own a home. Each time I try to stop playing, they introduce a new home for players to furnish for themselves. I can’t help it. Like a moth to the flame, I am drawn to marble and teak. I still don’t look into The Sims content. Now, it just feels embarrassing.

I put a tiny local art piece I bought when I lived in Flagstaff up on the wall in our new apartment. In Design Home, my new penthouse is filled with factory-made art. I tell myself that my reality of a quaint, personal, real apartment is what makes me happy, but still catch myself I staring longingly at the view from my penthouse’s floor-to-ceiling windows.