Parlor Games

When Rich Barton launched Zillow in 2006, he was focused on digital arbitrage – buying traffic from Google, selling leads to agents. But house-horny Americans’ endless lust for hardcore imagery of 4-bedroom capes provided him with an additional opportunity. He quickly became to House Beautiful what Quicktime smut had already become to Playboy, namely a visceral and bottomless alternative. It took him about a decade to attract more “readers” than The Washington Post.

In 2024, more than 200 million scrollers fingered their way through 130 million Zillow listings, marking favorites with that little red heart. Though a few of the most cardiac arrest-inducing properties are rubberneck curiosities – a silo in Kansas, a teutonic castle in Wyoming – most are classics: the craftsman in Texas, the saltbox in Rhode Island, the southern colonial in Georgia. This isn’t architectural prudery. It’s desire – a lust for the kind of life that plays out in formal, coaster-stacked living rooms, flatscreened family rooms, and comically capacious kitchens. 

“If you come from a certain kind of background, you’re going to retain certain preferences,” explains sociologist Johan Lindell. “Income matters, but not that much. We’re social animals and we get socialized.” 

Prior to the industrial revolution, the vast majority of non-farmers were socialized in rowhouses, where children could run unhindered between open kitchens and family rooms, playing with lead and contracting diphtheria. But as factories grew in the first half of the 19th century, more and more factory managers found themselves invited into their bosses’ mansions, vast compilations of purpose-built rooms. Rooms for breakfast. Rooms for crafting. Rooms for playing pool. Rooms for the maid. Rooms for dry humping the maid. Rooms for drinking. Rooms for dressing. Rooms for schvitzing. Rooms for plants. Rooms for dry humping the plants. Prosperity, they learned, meant a lot of door frames.

But even the highest salaried managers couldn’t afford that kind of layout.

They could, however, afford a room for entertaining – a place to present themselves, their wives, their conspicuously small dogs, and their children (briefly) to curious and courtly neighbors. So they built parlors. Row houses transformed into townhouses. Gable-fronts became Gable-ells. Saddlebags became hall-and-parlors. Greek revivals became ubiquitous. America’s floor plans expanded to make room for Americans’ social ambition. By the time Civil War munitions factories had been fully retooled to produce coil-spring arm chairs and electric lights, the managers of those facilities were pulling double shifts building public-facing memory palaces cluttered with French watercolors, English chinoiserie, Indian chess boards, and Venetian glassware – proof of their worldliness, their domesticity, and their ability to reconcile the two with wit. 

This was not just the age of Henry James and the Grand Tour. It was the age of Twain, America’s great sit-down comic. When he dubbed it the Gilded Age, Twain wasn’t just describing ornate furniture; he was describing ornate people, ornate speech, and ornate ambition. He was describing a new kind of claustrophobic excess practiced in proliferating parlors. Shortly after he penned the phrase, “gilding the lily,” Oscar Wilde (who was prone to doing just that) dryly observed that America was “the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” That decadence came wrapped in Burges Snail or Acanthus wallpaper, crenellations, and faux frieze murals. In 1897’s The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton described the carefully curated and lavishly furnished “salon de compagnie” usurping “the salon de famille.” By the early 20th century, this was a practical matter for the college-educated sons of factory managers. The most valuable thing they possessed was a social network. They needed a place to keep it.

Not only did the containers built for that purpose take up space, they required side passages, corridors built to hide the footsteps of servants (or imply the need to hide the footsteps of servants that did not actually exist). For this reason, as upper-middle class American homes got bigger, the spaces inside those homes actually got smaller. The the daughters of the sons of the daughters of the sons of factory managers who grew up in those types homes came to associate that comfyness with affluence and the open-plan ostentation of 3,000-square-foot Italianate eyesores with new money – and all that entails.

Those kinds of associations shape markets. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average new single-family home in 2024 was 2,348 square feet. That’s as small as new homes have been since 2009, when the housing bubble deflated with a fart noise so loud it shocked the global economy into silence. And this isn’t about Millennials falling behind economically – despite what CNBC’s concealer-caked analysts may suggest. The ratio of 3,000+-square-foot homes to multimillionaires declined 63% between 2002 and 2024. 

Home stagers, those bustling RH archivists, are sensitive to this fact, which is why for every two explicit photos of pendulously scrotal chandeliers hung over spider-veined marble, there’s at least one topless photo of a Le Labo jar candle sitting next to a Sven leather chair from Article, perched on a book on a carefully selected side table. In New England, that book is Cy Twombly: Homes and Studios on a Shaker side table. In California,  it’s Ed Ruscha’s Made in Los Angeles and it’s a spindle accent table from Williams Sonoma. In Georgia, the book is William Eggleston’s The Outlands and it sits on a Hepplewhite lovingly upcycled from the flea market two-towns over.

“Luxury” remains the top, non-geographic search term on Zillow, but over the last few years – as the ratio of millionaires to large homes plummeted – the term “comfy” has nearly caught up. But “luxury” is a lubricating epithet, a marketer’s unctuous come-on to newly liquid members of the middle class. That kind of marketspeak ain’t subtle so it should come as no surprise that an inversion is underway. The median comfy house is more expensive than the median luxury house, a fact that is counterintuitive only to people who want to live in the sort of luxury homes comfy house people call McMansions.

The lukewarm take on McMansions is that they are pay-at-the-next-window instavillas built solely to allow developers to sell square footage at a 20% discount to adjacent housing. While that’s often true, it misstates the issue. McMansions aren’t mansions at all. They are really big, parlorless workers’ homes contorted under complex rooflines and disguised by disproportionate porticos. They are rowhouses minus The Row. Survey-based research suggests that people who search for “luxury” houses are less likely to engage in cultural activities out of the home and a lot less likely to read. They watch NFL games and MMA fights. Maybe they have folks over for the game, but they never entertain. 

They have the square footage for it, but not the space. Blame TV.

Before Milton Berle came along, America was on track to have its own middle and upper middle-class architectural vernacular. Developed by Frank Lloyd Wright, “Usonian” homes were open-floor plan iterations of colonial revivals (themselves remixes of Dutch Saltboxes and Georgian Manses) with split-level floor plans and implied parlors he called “galleries.” But Wright was an artist. He created beautiful, intricate spaces and thoughtfully integrated them into the landscape. He was a master of form, not scale. The Usonian movement needed a sales guy.

In 1943, a fruit wholesaler of no particular note moved into one of Wright’s homes in Hillsborough, California and became obsessed. But Joseph Eichler wasn’t just obsessed with Wright’s airy interiors, he was obsessed with building Wright homes at William Levitt scale. Levitt, a segregationist indifferent to aesthetics, had spent the previous decade building 140,000 mutant Cape Cod colonials around New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Eichler thought he could do something similar but less architecturally (and spiritually) ugly by adopting Wright’s vernacular. And, for a while, he did.

In the 1950s, Eichler oversaw the construction of thousands of “post and beam” homes with blank facades, large atriums, glass walls, and honey-colored mahogany panels. They were practical homes for practical people, but also hella Californian.

Unfortunately for Eichler, he was building at the dawn of the Golden Age of Television and as chunky, fuzzy Ferranti T1825s displaced Saarinen tables and Mingus records his prospective buyers began to worry that the glare from those big windows might make it hard to watch Gilligan’s Island. The homes were ideal for every purpose except looking at a screen. In the end, Eichler only sold 11,000 of them – not nothing, but not Levitt numbers –  marketing the last few hundred to Berkeley types with a fondness for the Bauhaus, Baldwin, and lysergic acid diethylamide.

Instead of easing into Eames chairs, the bulk of semiconductor plant managers in Cupertino circa 1963 watched The Brady Bunch in homes that looked like the home on The Brady Bunch. A Wright-inspired split level with its small windows, dark paneling, vomit-green wallpaper, and vegetarian turd of a floral couch plopped in the middle of the family room, that home – arguably the best known in America – was parlorless. In essence, the parlor had been sucked into a screen. Mike Brady, an architect, had let it happen. 

But Wright and Eichler wound up getting the last laughing emoji. In the early 1970s, a young man from Cupertino with a fondness for lysergic acid diethylamide became obsessed with the way their houses blended “really good design and simple capability.” In 1976, that young fan, Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, who’d grown up in an Eichler home. Jobs went on to design what “Usonian” computers that, in turn, inspired quite a few tech execs to go full “design is my passion” and shell out millions for post-and-beams in Palo Alto – then ruining by blowing out the galley kitchens.

By the late 1970s, parlors were a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a home to be suitably upper middle-class. A few decades earlier, kitchens had been workspaces appended to the back of homes. Then, in the 1960s, they expanded to fit appliances – all those General Electric 139T83 Toasters, Presto Hot Doggers, and Frigidaire Flair Range ovens. Then, in the 1970s, more women entered the workforce and kitchens started expanding at an almost exponential rate – something on the order of 8% year over year. The pangeaic kitchen island became the inflamed, hypertensive heart of the upper-middle class home. 

But that subway-tiled, Pantone 11-0601 slice of heaven wasn’t precisely what it purported to be. 

In 1980, the German designer Otl Aicher (who accidentally invented the gendered bathroom pictogram) published a manifesto arguing that whatever is for cooking is the kitchen. Everything else was not kitchen. A semantic and deeply Germanic bit of hair splitting, sure, but also a way of understanding why kitchen inflation persisted even as Seamless caught on.

In essence, the kitchen (the stuff for cooking) got moved into the nursery (the space) so women working “second shift” could do childcare while following a Paul Prudhomme recipe. The resulting hybrid space got rebranded as a domestic seat of female power – the holy of holies as imagined by Nancy Meyers – without getting a new name.

The net result of these space races is that the sort of Zillow scrollers who look for comfy homes have pronounced preferences in architecture even if they don’t know much about architecture at all. According to a survey of over 1,000 upper-middle class homeowners, the most desirable types of homes are, in ranked order:

The dream for most of us isn’t a huge home. It’s a functional home and, more specifically, a home that functions to reinforce our ideas of ourselves as social successes and caregivers – the kind of people who quote Mark Twain.