The Hell of Living in a Home With Any Celebrity Connection
Move over, Graceland. Thanks to social media and Google maps, even mildly famous houses now get tons of visitors—some owners get a kick out of it.
4 min
NEW YORK—It’s a Tuesday evening on Cornelia Street, a side street in Manhattan’s West Village. A little after 6 p.m., 17-year-old Lily Posner and her grandmother stroll down the street and come to a stop about half way down the block. There, they start snapping photos of a brick house.
Posner, clad in a grey hoodie and carrying a shopping bag, explains she is a “very big fan” of Taylor Swift, who rented the house around 2016 and immortalised it in her song “Cornelia Street.” A Vermont resident, Posner spent the day shopping and sightseeing before stopping by to get a glimpse of Swift’s former abode.
Though the singer never owned the house and only lived there for a brief time, Posner’s enthusiasm is undimmed; she calls the Cornelia Street visit a highlight of their trip. “I love the song,” she says. “It’s iconic.” As she speaks, another pair of fans arrive at the house to take photos.
A few blocks away, a similar scene is unfolding in front of 66 Perry Street, a brownstone that appeared as the home of Carrie Bradshaw in the TV series “Sex and the City.” Never mind that the series ended in 2004: Every few minutes, another group meanders down the tree-lined street to snap photos of the house. A chain strung across the stoop bears a “Private Property: No Trespassing” sign as well as instructions to keep voices down and stay off the steps.
Step aside, Graceland. These days, a home doesn’t have to be especially famous to get a steady stream of curious—and sometimes pushy—visitors. Thanks to social media and Google maps, homes that are even moderately well-known can now be inundated with people eager to take selfies or relive on-screen moments. This can come as a surprise to the homeowners, who find themselves fielding requests for tours or overhearing impromptu singalongs.
“Now because everything is online, anybody who has a passing interest can find out exactly where it is in about five minutes,” says Erika de Santis, who owns the Redding, Conn., house where Mark Twain died. She says the number of so-called Twainiacs stopping by to see her home has steadily increased in recent years.
In Albuquerque, N.M., owners of the house that served as the home of Walter White in “Breaking Bad” erected a fence around the property after fans kept throwing pizzas on the roof, in homage to a pivotal scene in the show. When Compass real-estate agent Larissa Petrovic recently showed Swift’s former Cornelia Street home to potential buyers, she says they were shocked by the number of people photographing it. They didn’t make an offer.
Real-estate agent Danny Brown of Compass has the listing for the Los Angeles house that served as the exterior of the home on “The Brady Bunch.” His client, HGTV, renovated the interiors to match the sitcom’s set, and put it on the market in May for $5.5 million. “It’s been bonkers, with nonstop showing requests,” Brown says. Most aren’t from serious buyers, but people simply trying to get a look inside. Recently, potential buyers came dressed in “full ‘70s retro-wear,” Brown says. While they were touring the home, two women stood outside for 20 minutes singing the show’s theme song. The potential buyers headed outside to join the serenade. “It was a whole chorus of five or six people singing the theme song,” Brown says. “That’s the sort of crazy stuff that happens in front of this house.”
The house is now in contract and set to close in a few weeks, he says.
In 2017, John and Katie Tashjian bought the South Carolina house where the ‘80s movie “The Big Chill” was filmed. When they bought the circa-1850s house, it was in disrepair and still had two sets in it from the filming of the movie, says John Tashjian, a real-estate developer. The couple embarked on a three-year renovation before moving in full-time.
The home is a local landmark. Still, they were taken aback by the number and persistence of visitors. Every weekday some 25 to 50 people stop by and twice that many on weekends, John Tashjian says. In addition to snapping photos, many belt out songs from “The Big Chill,” especially “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people singing ‘Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog’ like it’s some kind of old-time revival,” he says.
When they first moved in, they left the property’s gates open. So many people ventured into their yard, however, that they ended up putting in gates that close automatically. “There were people sitting in our yard, taking videos,” says John Tashjian. Others brought picnics or re-created scenes from the movie. Some knocked on the door to ask for a tour. Sometimes he obliged, depending on “what kind of mood I was in.”
These days, visitors are welcome to take photos from outside the gates, he says. He does get irritated when looky-loos drive on the grass, or knock over the steel bollards that edge the property. Still, he realises attention comes with the territory. “If you’re going to own this house, you can’t be surprised by the reception,” he says. “It’s like living next to an airport and complaining about airplanes.”
One reason for the growing attention to these homes is that streaming services make older TV and movies instantly available.
In 2012, real-estate agent Adele Curtis represented the buyers of the Winnetka, Ill., house where the 1990 movie “Home Alone” was filmed. “At that point, it was kind of ho-hum, it’s the ‘Home Alone’ house,” she says. While at the brick Georgian, she never noticed passersby taking pictures.
Nowadays, fans can be spotted outside the house snapping photos “at any time of the day or night,” she says. “It’s become more popular than it ever was.”
James C. Barry, whose parents were longtime owners of the house that served as the home of Blanche, Dorothy, Rose and Sophia on “The Golden Girls,” says the show had a surge in popularity before the family sold it in 2020. Once, a man knocked on the door and said his girlfriend was a huge fan of the show, and asked if he could propose to her in the home’s driveway. Barry’s mother agreed, and after he popped the question, “she came out with some champagne to toast them.” The couple sent Christmas cards every year expressing their appreciation.
Mallory Crichton and her husband live next door to what is known in Los Angeles as the Black Dahlia murder house, where an unsolved 1947 murder is believed to have taken place. Both homes are gated and set back from the street, so the many true-crime fans who stop by each week often get confused and take pictures of Crichton’s “pretty normal” three-bedroom rental instead.
She points them in the right direction if she happens to be home, but she’s not always around so many likely return home with photos of her abode instead. “But good for them,” she says. “Ignorance is bliss. They and their friends probably don’t know that it’s not actually the Black Dahlia murder house.”
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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