The Anti-Airbnb-Space
No Edison Bulbs allowed
You might not know the term airspace. But you know it when you see it. It’s the feeling of every coffeeshop with $9 pour-overs. It’s the Joanna Gaines section of Target. It’s stark white surfaces, abundant but well-manicured houseplants, and reclaimed wood tables, warmly lit by Edison bulb light fixtures. It’s warm sterility. It’s deeply millennial. It’s also increasingly out of fashion, supplanted by dark, moodily painted kitchens and decorative maximalism.
But back in 2016, it was peak aspirational — the way to communicate that a space was where upwardly mobile young people spent their money or time. That’s when Kyle Chayka coined the term in a feature for The Verge, connecting the dots between the fetishization of “clean” Silicon Valley design and the globalization of “cool” design.
I remember feeling it most acutely when I walked into a coffee shop in Mexico City in 2017. I was immediately comfortable. Why? Because it looked exactly like my favorite coffee shop in Missoula, Montana — which looked exactly like the coffee shop around the corner from the BuzzFeed office in Manhattan. All of them, airspace.
I’ve been thinking a lot about airspace this week. We have to be out of our house while we have some very fishing-cabin-built-in-1904 problems fixed, sealed, reworked and insulated. It’s never a good time to be kicked out of your own house, but now is the time when the vacation rentals that dot the island are empty and cheap(er). I wanted to go back to the place we stayed when I first dragged Charlie and the dogs here to visit in January 2020.
It’s an odd, angular house on top of a hill, in the middle of several acres, with a sprawling view of the Salish Sea and Orcas Island. The house was built in 2000 and feels far more 1996 than 2006. It’s covered in simple light pine. There are tall, skinny windows everywhere, which makes the entire place feel cozy and warm, even when there’s an atmospheric river blasting through (as there was earlier this week).
The wood floor downstairs hasn’t been refurbished maybe ever. It’s pocked and scratched and wonderfully worn. There’s a “den” (with a television, a tall stack of mid-2000s DVDs, books, and a fireplace) latched on to the kitchen, with a little window between the two rooms so you can pass dishes and drinks back and forth. There’s a long table (pine, of course) and well-worn couches and a perfect window seat.
To get to the master bedroom, you take stairs covered in soft chestnut carpet to a room with a pine bed, a 6’x8’ unframed map of the world and windows in every direction. The master bath features one of those great ‘90s spa tubs with the jets long broken. It, too, is framed by light pine. (I’ll post more photos to my Instagram, I promise)
All of this was fancy when it was built, which is part of the reason it still works (both functionally and aesthetically) now. I love its resistance to current trends, particularly when it comes to the decorating. There are posters of art shows from the ‘90s. There are woodblock prints of boats. The shelves are filled with ancient coffee table books with a particular focus on trains. The primary motif of the downstairs bathroom is jade frogs. There’s an old walnut upright piano and a ten foot (live!) cactus under a skylight that’s clearly aged with the house and an assortment of random, beloved coffee mugs.
My theory is that the house was built with great care by an older couple back in 2000 and is now managed by their children, who don’t or can’t live on a remote island but also don’t want to give up this special place. And I adore it, every bit of it.
The house has come under new management since the last time we stayed here. The changes are small but noticeable: all white linens, Target bedside lamps with USB plugs, a few strings of twinkle lights, and new farmhouse-style dishes and mugs, which I recognize from the other rentals the company manages on the island. It’s a smart business decision — when something breaks or gets stained, you have a ready stockpile of replacements. But it also feels like there are two aesthetics vying for the heart of the home.
To be fair, the original aesthetic of the home is not unique — a jade bathroom was very in in 2000, as was everything about this kitchen and all this pine. It’s more that the design fits the space, and the decor feels like an extension of a person instead of a reflection of an algorithm’s preferences. It’s what someone actually liked, instead of an amalgamation of ideas of what people are supposed to like or have been conditioned to understand as “nice.” That’s not to suggest that whoever decorated this space wasn’t subject to those influences at the time. It’s just that today, in 2024, it resists them.
When Airbnb first launched, it was intended to be a more streamlined way to experience these spaces — often (but not exclusively) within the actual home of a full-time resident. It was marketed to people who did not want a standardized hotel experience, whether because of price or aesthetics. But as Airbnb followed the venture capital imperative to scale (and scale quickly) the dynamic changed. More people, more spaces, more people putting more demand on more spaces.
With mortgage rates low, there were also more people buying up spaces specifically to Airbnb them at a profit — which also meant decorating them as Airbnbs. At the same time, independent vacation rental companies realized they could get more business by listing their properties on Airbnb, where they would then compete with existing properties. And what spaces did best? The ones most legible as cool, as nice, depicted in well-lit, slightly touched-up photographs that could have been lifted from an influencer’s Instagram account. The ones that most closely replicated airspace.
If you wanted to spruce up a space and get those coveted five-star ratings, you just went to Target or Wayfair and bought some airspace materials, most of them inexpensive knockoffs of the mid-century or minimalist style. If you were designing from scratch — same. It helped that the accoutrements of airspace are also amendable to repeat use. White is so bleachable; fake succulents are so resilient.
But as the character of Airbnb changed, the process of finding a space came to feel like any other online shopping experience. There are so many options, how could you possibly sort them? Could you actually trust reviews? Maybe, like me, you had a few experiences with dirty, musty Airbnbs you didn’t want to repeat. The most straightforward way to avoid doing so was picking whatever announced itself most loudly as “nice,” which is to say, as airspace. Or, as I’ve come to think of it now, as a hotel masquerading as a home.
Today, non-chain hotels regularly list their rooms on Airbnb. Why wouldn’t they? They’re going for the same customer. Usually I can’t tell it’s a hotel room until I realize there are five others with the same aesthetic, which is the same as the condos managed by Vacasa which are the same as all the pre-war two bedroom bungalows that got flipped sometime in the last five years.
I get the appeal: when I travel for work, I often want as little friction to the experience as possible. But these spaces can also feel like an extension of productivity culture — of trading serendipity and personality for the dream of total optimization. Of course, hotels have been doing a version of this for decades. But chain standardization is still relatively new. Lodgings have long aspired to some version of “nice” or at least “hospitable,” but until mass consolidation, they were all unique in some way, reflective of owners and region and clientele.
The same was true for short-term house rentals: lake cabins in the upper Midwest might have had similar vibes, but they would never have the same tableware and light fixtures. But within the consumer logic of Airbnb, personalization is profit loss. It’s three stars. And as the expectations for what an Airbnb can and should provide have increased, more and more individual owners have handed their spaces over to management companies. Cue: more and more airspace.
Standardization makes things “easier” — for owners, of course, but also for us as customers. But it also sucks the place out of a place, flattens every vacation into one indistinguishable voyage from one white duvet and stoneware coffee cup to the next. When I was a child, I thought a mid-budget hotel was the height of luxury: no mess, so many pillows, two beds, as much bubble bath as I wanted. When I was in my late 20s and early 30s and couldn’t afford my own Airspace, finding it in an Airbnb felt like cosplaying my ideal life.
But now that I have the means to create it in my own space, I feel exhausted by its demands, unswayed by its cool charms. The bed is too hard. The mugs are too big. The only way the chairs and couch could be this uncomfortable is if no one had to live with them for any extended amount of time. If this is the backdrop of an ideal life, that life is boring as shit.
I want inexplicable art that makes me look at it twice. I want a poem about the ocean someone loved so much they wrote it out and framed it themselves. I want a weird assortment of unmatched mugs!!! I want a worn chair in exactly the perfect spot. And the truth is that it’s possible to have those things — or an approximation thereof — and the clean towels and kitchen implements and other basics that make a rented space great.
Coming to appreciate these spaces has required a renovation of my understanding of “nice.” Contrary to airspace’s demands, “nice” doesn’t have to mean softening all friction or strangeness. It doesn’t have to tread the middle-ground of (white) bourgeois taste. It doesn’t have to have a “cool” redecoration mashed onto it no matter how incongruous. And most importantly, it doesn’t have to eliminate any trace of human occupancy. Instead, it can remind us of a fundamental truth: that spaces are for living.
When people talk about warmth, or comfort, or coziness, they’re not actually talking about blankets or fires or throw pillows. They’re talking about the undeniable, absolutely irresistible evidence that a place is beloved. That feeling has no defined aesthetic. It resists trends and appears at all price points. An algorithm can’t sense it. It often doesn’t come across in photos. But that feeling, the feeling I have in this space right now, writing on this window seat? It feels like a home. Maybe not my own. But someone’s. ●
These sorts of spaces are precious and hard to find — there’s no filter for them in the dropdown menu!! — but I wanted to give us the opportunity to revel in some reader favorites. And if you have one that comes to mind, please share in the comments, with or without a link (you can decide if you actually want people to know about it — but I’ll paywall these so it’ll be *slightly* more private)