Hype House has 20 million followers on TikTok and, at first glance, not a stick of furniture in any of its spacious accommodations. Same for Sway House (5.3 million followers), where one post was filmed in front of a wall of barren bookshelves. Meanwhile, at Clubhouse (1.4 million), the angular Beverly Hills–based mansion that serves as a content hub, a harem of young men and women dance in expansive but empty rooms—canaries chirping inside the most mundane of gilded cages.
Welcome to the world of “collab houses,” sprawling estates where groups of nubile influencers hunker down and make short videos for social media, mainly TikTok and YouTube. The residents amplify their budding profiles by broadcasting the minutiae of their lives on the apps, and many have discovered that by joining forces with others under a single roof, their chamber dramas cast an even stronger spell across the internet. It’s a trick as old as Hollywood itself. MGM once promised “more stars than there are in heaven,” except now the stars are coming on live in the palm of your hand at a time when everybody is stuck inside.
“Most people don’t have groups of 20-plus friends who wear designer clothes and hang out by the pool,” says Fletcher Greene, the Ron Galella of the TikTok A-list, who tracks the residents’ offscreen lives on his YouTube channel, The Hollywood Fix. “They’re selling a fantasy.”
During Hollywood’s Golden Age, movie stars worked on sumptuous sets by art director Cedric Gibbons and lived in exquisite homes designed by Billy Haines. Today’s celebutantes are genetically blessed, stylish, and tech-savvy (ask your kids about Daisy Keech, one of the founding members of the Hype House collective, or Noah Beck and Bryce Hall, Sway House’s ringleaders until it recently broke up), yet the bland McMansions they inhabit in the seductive hills above Los Angeles tell a different story.
With their vaguely Mediterranean façades, open floor plans, granite countertops, and walls painted a shade of white that recalls primer, these homes, which popped up all over Los Angeles last year with the explosion of video-sharing apps, are not engines of desire or fantasy but blank backdrops. It turns out that some emperors have no clothes and some internet royals live in hollow castles, each one’s life carefully cataloged on the House’s Official Account™ as well as Their Own™, ensuring a never ending stream of content that followers can piece together like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“This is about the flash and the service. These are sets,” says the design critic Carolina A. Miranda. “It’s the banality of affluence.” The deals that keep these collectives occupied are shrouded in mystery, but, in a town that prizes the art of the deal, it goes without saying that everybody is getting theirs. Realtors are leasing blinged-out spec homes in high-profile neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Burbank for as much as $50,000 a month, according to Bloomberg. While such rentals are most often short-term, the listings are getting a bounty of publicity—or “clout,” in the parlance of the moment—because these fresh princes of Bel Air are paying for their residences with content broadcast to millions as a form of #goals.
It has become a lucrative cottage industry, literally. In November the New Jersey real estate company West of Hudson Properties, which manages a $300 million portfolio of homes, including Clubhouse, went public on the penny stocks market. Its shares, which had been trading for less than $5, exploded in February amid the frenzied GameStop stock rally after day traders misunderstood a tweet by Elon Musk saying he’d be holding court on Clubhouse, an unrelated audio social app popular in Silicon Valley. (The price has since come down to earth; even TikTokers can afford it again.)
Of course, where there are party animals there are also party poopers, and no one has been more piqued by the invasion of the TikTok squatters than the long-term residents of L.A.’s toniest enclaves. From Encino to the Hollywood Hills, neighbors report traffic jams on their winding streets, noise at all hours of the day, acts of public indecency, and piles of trash—from last night’s kegger or just fan mail being ignored.
“Every few minutes something will come, like chocolate-covered strawberries. Fans send them food, toys, artwork. They can’t even open it all,” Greene says.
“It’s like, ‘Our parents are gone and we’re going to get flamethrowers and wreck cars and party every day.’ It’s like Animal House meets Cribs, 2020 edition.”
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has gotten involved, cracking down on hype houses for openly flouting public health ordinances as Covid cases spiked in Southern California. Last August the city unplugged the utilities of the multimillion-dollar Hollywood Hills digs of Sway House “to stop these parties that endanger our community.”
Not everyone is a critic, though. In New York, mayoral candidate Andrew Yang transparently courted the youth vote by pledging to make space and subsidize rent for these newfangled content communes, because these “up-and-coming creators deserve a place to cultivate their craft.” Park Avenue, you have been warned: The TikTok Armory might just be joining the block.
This story appears in the April 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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Berlinger is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Business of Fashion and others. He’s probably wasting time on Twitter right now
