Pretend renovations, houses you’ll never buy: the therapeutic benefits of real-estate fantasies
4 min
Ellisha Caplan has exercised , maintained a healthy diet and gotten sleep to manage stress. Lately she’s found something that makes her feel even better: Zillow.
In spare moments, the 47-year-old consultant in Delaware searches real-estate websites for homes in her price range in Philadelphia, where she went to college, and in the small German town where her family has spent several idyllic summers. She looks up nearby restaurants and bike trails, too, imagining her life if she retired there.
“It’s calming, like a massage for my brain,” Caplan says. “I get to let my mind run awhile and just go with the flow.”
Rising prices, few options and high mortgage rates have made home buying uniquely painful right now. But make-believe house hunts are different. They transport people out of their current problems into a fantasy of a better future, a relaxing habit one fantasiser likens to a “digital glass of wine.” I call it Zillow therapy.
Trawling Zillow for alternate versions of your life isn’t the same thing as gawking at real-estate porn, memorably captured in this “ Saturday Night Live ” skit. People using Zillow for therapeutic reasons tend to focus on a specific place, perusing homes they think they can afford and imagining life there. Down the rabbit hole, they cruise Google Maps and local websites for bars, hiking trails or—guilty as charged—bookstores and libraries.
“The fantasy is sustaining,” says Giulia Poerio, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, in the U.K., who studies how daydreaming can help regulate our emotional well-being. “Even if you can’t get what you need right now, you can Zillow it and get a little bit of energy or hope to keep you going.”
In reporting this column, I heard from people whose Zillow fantasies focus on homes with large backyards, where kids and dogs can romp outside unsupervised, and on places with a detached studio for writing or drawing. Nostalgia powers lots of people’s searches: They look at homes in a childhood town or another place they lived when life seemed simpler. Others use their daydreams to identify what’s missing from their current lives, such as community or nature.
My Zillow therapy sessions centre on Seattle . It’s far from hurricane season in Miami, where I live. I have a close friend there. And there’s plenty of water where I can sail . I search for (and imagine renovating) homes near walking trails and marinas, with a room where I can write with a view of some magnificent trees. Instant Zen.
Looking at worse houses rather than better ones is a balm for some people. Unattractive or cramped homes make them feel better about where they currently live, especially if their own home is less expensive. Psychologists call this phenomenon downward social comparison.
“If you want to see the 900 square feet that $1.8 million can get you, just put in a San Francisco ZIP Code,” says Hooria Jazaieri, an assistant professor of management at Santa Clara University’s business school who studies how people regulate their emotions. “It’s a great way to make you feel grateful.”
Zillow is helping Bill Marklein, 39, get through an expensive kitchen remodel—he and his wife have a baby daughter and have been doing dishes in the bathtub for months. He browses listings in his price range within a 30-mile radius of his home in Plymouth, Wis., lingering on the kitchens. Nice ones make him feel good about his investment. But hideous ones with 1970s avocado-green cabinets or battered white refrigerators sticking out into the room cheer him up, too.
“It’s like having a digital glass of wine,” says the business owner. “It shows you that life isn’t so bad.”
Zillow’s user data suggests that plenty of us are doing this. The company’s real-estate websites and apps, which include Trulia and StreetEasy, have a combined 217 million average unique monthly users. Yet just slightly more than four million existing homes were sold in the U.S. last year, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Zillow is “not a replacement for therapy,” says the company’s home trends expert Amanda Pendleton, though it can give people an emotional boost.
“It’s a judgment-free zone,” she says. “Unlike on social media, no one is going to comment on the home you’re looking up and tell you it’s a terrible choice.”
Still, there are drawbacks to spending too much time in our imagination.
“The fantasies zap your energy,” says Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University, who studies the psychology of motivation. Her research shows that while people who have positive fantasies about the future feel better in the moment, they often don’t achieve the goals they’re dreaming about. “Your attention is away from your current reality,” Oettingen says.
The solution, if you want to make your dream come true, is to identify the obstacle in the way of achieving your goal, she says. If you can’t move right now, accept that and choose a more immediate goal. Can’t buy a house in the seaside town your family vacationed in as a child? Plan a trip to the beach.
And if you’re serious about a future move, take steps to make it a reality down the road.
Elizabeth Uslander, 42, lives in San Diego but enjoys perusing house listings in small towns in the Colorado mountains to help her cope with the pressures of running a business and blending her family with her new husband’s. She looks for homes with direct access to nature and enough bedrooms for all, then researches how close they are from the ski slopes, shops and the local bar.
She shares her favourite listings with her husband, which she says is “like making drip castles in the sandbox with your bestie.” Recently, they found a home they like so much near Steamboat Springs that they visited it—and then bought it.
They have no plans to move right now but plan to visit often. Uslander says that just owning it makes her feel that her current stressors are temporary.
“I actually made the fantasy come to life,” she says.
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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.
“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.”
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.”
