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Livingetc’s new Meaning of Home series examines how social media has made domestic spaces both places to live and images for public audiences. The essay draws on architect Javier Fernández Contreras and creators The Berlin Chapters to explore that tension, while noting that an online audience does not necessarily make a home feel like a set to its residents.
Livingetc has launched The Meaning of Home, a series about the forces shaping domestic life, with an opening essay on how social media turns homes into both lived spaces and public images. Drawing on architect and academic Javier Fernández Contreras and creators The Berlin Chapters, the report asks whether Instagram-era design ideals change what people expect their homes to do.
The essay describes a shift in which domestic spaces serve not only their residents but also audiences viewing them online. Platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Twitch and Pinterest circulate interior images and, Fernández Contreras argues, can help shape the standards people apply to their own homes. He calls the platforms’ influence a source of “aspirational futures” and says the home is increasingly treated as a “container for visual representation.”
The report connects that change to the pandemic, when many people began broadcasting from home. It says bookshelves, kitchen islands and the walls behind desks took on additional roles as professional signals, workspaces and video backdrops. For creators, the essay adds, home renovation may also become a sequence of online content, with demolition, sourcing and a finished room presented as separate stages.
But visibility does not automatically mean residents experience their surroundings as a performance. Dima and Guy, the Berlin-based creative duo behind The Berlin Chapters, say their home remains a home when they are not making content. The source says they began sharing their interiors on Instagram the previous year and had nearly 82,000 followers at the time of the report. They describe practical content-making concerns such as light and weather, rather than designing their home around an audience.
When Home Becomes a Public Image
The report matters because social media can make comparison part of ordinary decisions about where and how people live. A room may be judged not only by comfort or function but by how it appears in a photograph or video. Fernández Contreras says this can promote normative models of domesticity, a concern that places online interior trends alongside wider discussions about idealized images and self-presentation.
The essay does not claim that every person who uses social media redesigns their home for an audience, or that a visually composed interior is inauthentic. It instead identifies a tension: images can expand access to design ideas and help people develop visual awareness, while also supplying standards against which their own spaces are measured. The stakes are personal and cultural, involving privacy, identity, aspiration and daily comfort.
It also complicates the idea that a home must choose between being functional and being visually considered. The report notes that art, craft and furniture increasingly overlap, and that arranging objects with care can enrich an interior. The harder question is whether those choices serve the people who live there, the people who view the images, or both.
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Livingetc presents the essay as the start of The Meaning of Home, a series using design and personal stories to examine how homes shape—and are shaped by—culture, psychology, history, politics and economics. The article’s central premise is that the home was never entirely private: interiors have long communicated identity, status and aspiration. What social media changes, it argues, is the potential scale and persistence of the audience.
The piece describes homes as increasingly resembling both sets and galleries. In a set-like home, a kitchen island may serve as a recording location and a desk wall as a camera backdrop. In a gallery-like interior, artworks or collectible furniture may receive space and lighting that draw attention to them. The report treats these as connected effects of the home’s public life online, not as proof that domestic spaces have stopped being lived in.
Fernández Contreras is identified as an architect and academic and the author of The Interiors of Social Media: Architecture, Space, and Technology in the 21st Century. The Berlin Chapters provide a contrasting example: their home reaches a substantial online audience, but they say they do not experience it as a set when they are not creating content. Their account underlines the difference between a home’s representation on screen and its everyday use.
““A container for visual representation.””
— Javier Fernández Contreras, architect and academic
How Deep the Online Gaze Reaches
The essay raises questions about social media’s influence but does not quantify how many people change their interiors to appeal to online audiences, or how strongly platform exposure affects individual design choices. It offers expert interpretation and a creator’s account, not a survey or causal study establishing that social media directly changes how most people live.
It is also unclear how the pressure varies by platform, income, housing circumstances or whether someone creates content professionally. The source does not set out how followers respond to The Berlin Chapters’ interiors, or whether the duo’s audience has affected particular decisions in their home. Its follower count is a snapshot reported in the article, not evidence by itself of influence or impact.
The report leaves open whether the gallery-like home is a temporary style trend, a lasting design shift, or simply one visible part of a wider range of domestic life. It does not argue that visual curation is inherently harmful, and it does not suggest that residents always feel watched. The degree to which an online audience changes private habits remains an open question.
Further Stories on Domestic Life
Livingetc describes The Meaning of Home as a new series that will use essays, interviews and personal stories to examine questions shaping life at home. The supplied report does not give a schedule for future instalments or identify their subjects, so no publication dates can be confirmed.
For readers, the immediate point is not a new design rule but a question raised by the essay: when choosing and arranging a home, whose needs are being served? The article sets out competing realities—online visibility and everyday use—without claiming that one must displace the other. Further pieces in the series may add perspectives, but the source does not specify what evidence or viewpoints they will include.
Key Questions
What is The Meaning of Home?
The Meaning of Home is a new Livingetc series about the ideas and forces shaping domestic life. The publication says it will use essays, interviews and personal stories grounded in design.
What does the essay say social media changes about homes?
It argues that platforms can make a home both a place to live and an image viewed by an online audience. Fernández Contreras says social media may also shape people’s expectations and standards for domestic interiors.
Do The Berlin Chapters say they live in a set?
No. Dima and Guy say that when they are not making content, their space feels like their home first, rather than a set. They describe light and weather as practical considerations when creating content.
No. The essay offers analysis and personal testimony but does not provide data measuring how many people change their homes because of social media or establish a direct causal effect.
Source: livingetc.com
