Like Grand Designs with bigger blowdries: The strange allure of influencer home renos

“So, I bought an abandoned house.”

This is how almost every post on 28-year-old Jenna Phipps’ Instagram account has started since February 1, when she showed off a dilapidated 1950s home replete with mould, broken doorways, two pianos and a pool overrun with weeds to her followers.

A-list influencers are pivoting away from traditional collaborations and endorsements and moving into property development and home renovation.Credit: Artwork: Bethany Rae

Before then, Phipps’ online content was mostly videos of her crocheting jumpers, and though her following was large by many standards (150,000), she was hardly a household name among influencers.

Just two months on from her first home video, though, Phipps’ following has grown to 1.8 million, and the words “Jenna Phipps’ Abandoned Home” has more than 153 million views on TikTok.

Understandably, she’s put down her crochet hook and is posting weekly updates on rotten ceiling beams and decomposing carpet. Followers mansplain the danger of mould in the comments section, cheer her on with likes, and speculate whether she’s actually doing the work herself.

Maybe it’s because my own home is only fractionally more polished than Phipps’ infested new abode that I’ve jumped on the bandwagon of home-reno obsessives (though unlike Phipps, I merely rent).

There’s a particularly bitter Reddit forum called “craftsnark” where Phipps’ spurned OG fans express their concerns about her new direction. (“I don’t see how she can continue with her regular craft content while she’s fixing up this lemon,” one user notes.)

But crocheters aren’t the only fans being left reeling. Increasingly, the influencers I follow are leaving once traditional content streams like beauty and fashion behind for glass decanters, hinoki side tables and pliers.

Not too long ago, one of my favourite beauty and fashion gurus casually mentioned during an unboxing video that she would be turning her third bedroom into a home office/studio. I paused my scrolling, no longer occupied by the Chanel lipsticks she was unveiling. A third bedroom? I was starting to feel the bonds of our parasocial relationship straining.

CC Clarke, an influencer with 2 million followers, has parlayed her enthusiasm for make-up into everything from contracts with L’Oreal to founding a wig brand and signing a record deal. In 2020, she launched a side account called @ccclarkehome, where she documented the redesign and renovation of her second property.

On the account, she ran most of the renovation by committee, posing questions like “bi-folds or hinged doors?” She celebrated the completion of an en suite in her dressing room and a “sexy shower” in her “zen room” with captions like: “When you realise you’re soaking up the moment you’ve spent years MANIFESTING”. From pink gemstone tiles to burnished bronze electrical sockets, the manufacturers of everything in Clarke’s Barbie-dream house are diligently tagged and thanked for (presumably gifted or discounted) materials.

As a renter, bifolds and hinged doors are low on my list of concerns. I’m too busy squabbling with housemates about washing up in the sink and trying to suppress mounting dread about lease renewal rental increases. Yet, I still find myself perusing Clarke’s waterfall showerhead and raising my eyebrows at her tile choices (too much) while urgently trying to contact my real estate agent about the water damage mark on our living room ceiling that has expanded with recent rainfall and caused us to dine by candlelight for two months.

In the UK, Love Island stars have also joined the home-reno club, maximising their on-screen love fame with back-on-dry-land property ventures.

Lucie Donlan and Luke Mabbott went viral on TikTok while documenting the transformation of their cottage in 2023. Now they’re levelling up, promising fans front-row seats as they steamroll a Cornish chapel into an open-plan modernist nightmare.

Meanwhile, Tasha Ghouri and Andrew Le Page are documenting their home renovation at @lepageproperties, showing followers which walls will be knocked through to accommodate his and hers walk-in-robes, and where the two-storey addition, housing a master en suite, will begin.

It feels like Millennial Grand Designs with bigger blowdries and better fake tans. But instead of experiencing delicious glee when planning permits stall, Italian marble goes missing, budgets blow out and marriages dissolve, we are eagerly cheering them on.

We have no reason to be. In news most will find hard to believe, England has won the race for worst country to find housing in the developed world. For every Millennial currently considering investing in their first home in Australia, there’s at least two tossing up moving back in with their parents.

Traditionally, the relationship between influencers and their audiences has hinged on a careful balance of aspiration and relatability. In 2014, I would tune into YouTube to tune out my life as an unreliable bartender and uni student. Beauty YouTubers, with their luxurious but affordable YSL lipsticks and Urban Decay setting sprays encouraged me in my unfortunate experiments with contouring and ultimately, I parlayed my studies into a far less lucrative career as a beauty journalist (with a staggering HECS debt).

But as my favourite influencers have aged, they’ve become less fiscally relatable. In 2021, CC Clarke celebrated her successes with an earnest post and a lavender Chanel handbag (currently available for $11,000 on resale). The list of unexpected life events I’d need to bank on to mimic that sort of celebratory purchase is long.

There’s no dodging the cost of buying a house. In her first post, Phipps says buying a derelict house was “cheaper” than buying a turn-key property in her home city of Vancouver. But the investment still set her back $US2.1 million ($3.2 million), according to the Vancouver Sun.

But I can’t begrudge Phipps an investment that will likely provide years of highly profitable content (sorry, craftsnarkers). While her purchase may be out of my price range, her life trajectory isn’t beyond my imagination.

Millennials have been described by The New York Times as an “outsized generation, trying to squeeze ourselves into a too-small financial sweater”. We’ve copped gruelling challenges at significant life milestones: multiple recessions, unfriendly job markets, and a once-in-a-century pandemic. But we’ve also grown up with a new form of social media entrepreneurialism that has allowed our peers to (seemingly) skyrocket social classes with only an iPhone camera backing them. It’s the adult version of fantasising about your letter to Hogwarts, or the teenage hope you’ll be stopped on the street and scouted as a model (both yet to happen for me).

The path to homeownership in the 2020s may well be paved in sponcon and #trythis content. Posting assiduously to social media may be our version of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.

Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: I will watch a woman I have never met rapidly renovate a slowly crumbling mansion and combat black mould, just as I’ll watch a teenager from France show me how to nail concealer application. In the world of social media, both exert an equal lure.

Ruby Feneley is a freelance writer.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.