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.
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