Airbnb Is Trying to Breathe New Life Into the Party House

Airbnb has finally built a house. It’s a small property, but one that seemed challenging to create: the two-story pastel Victorian from the 2009 movie Up. "One of the most iconic homes in any film, ever," said Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, as images of the home flashed behind him at an event in Los Angeles, where he kept reassuring the audience that it was real. Yes, Airbnb’s design team really did recreate every domestic possession of fictional retired balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, down to the two plane tickets to Venezuela on the mantle. Yes, these are actual photos of the home on an Abiquiu, New Mexico, mesa that somehow look even better than Pixar’s own stills from the film. And yes, that is a crane lifting the house, 8,000 balloon-like orbs and all, into the air, suspending it 50 feet above a white picket fence. The audience gasped. The house does, in fact, go up.

It was a lot to absorb, and that’s exactly what Airbnb was going for at its summer release event at a soundstage in Historic Filipinotown this week. The Up house is the first of the home-sharing platform’s new "Icons," 11 immersive, one-night experiences the company unveiled, which Chesky heralded as a return to Airbnb’s roots. "They allow people to step into someone else’s world, and, at its best, this is what Airbnb does," he said. "It’s what we have always been about."

But what Airbnb is actually about continues to be a heated topic of debate as more and more cities place restrictions on just about everything one might want to do in "someone else’s world." Just six months ago, Chesky was promising big changes to an app plagued with complaints about high prices, bait-and-switch listings, and excessive fees. New York City had just begun enforcing what Airbnb called a "de facto ban" on its services, and other cities found clever workarounds to limit Airbnb’s influence. As inflation sent rent soaring, Airbnb has been blamed for siphoning away rental units, keeping desperately needed housing stock off the market. And after the devastating fires in Maui, Hawaii’s legislature voted to give counties the power to phase out short-term rentals, which is expected to be signed into law Friday. None of those challenges were addressed in this year’s presentation, except maybe when Chesky made a joke about the cost of an Icons experience: "There are no cleaning fees." Everyone laughed.

In an effort to deflect the criticism Airbnb is under for contributing to the housing crisis, the company looks to be shifting its focus away from smaller, everyday homes and doubling down on the party house. Chesky talked about how the vast majority of Airbnb stays—81 percent—are made by groups of people who have to find and agree upon the perfect place. But the app is notoriously bad for group bookings. So, Chesky said, Airbnb built a new process that helps multiple users crowdsource a property instead of, say, shifting the decision-making to a dreaded external spreadsheet. The thinking goes that, for 10 people traveling together, getting everyone to agree on whether "Midcentury Palm Springs Home for 10 with Sparkling Pool" is better than "Pristine Palm Springs Midcentury Wonderland Sleeps 10" can be a challenge. The new wishlist and group chat features would hypothetically make this process a little bit smoother. But, it still won’t do anything to shift municipal policies in places like that desert destination, where a large group will still have to adhere to famously strict noise restrictions.

With the Icons, Airbnb guests can be transported away from at least a few of the rules of the real world, and enter ones built on fantasy. They’re an extension of past listings that have appealed to a very specific brand of Gen X and millennial nostalgia: a Barbie Dreamhouse in Malibu; the Home Alone house, listed around Christmas last year; a ’90s basement in the last remaining Blockbuster store. A new Icons category on the app allows users to register for such experiences, with the winners chosen by lottery. (Airbnb says it will pick 4,000 winners this year.) The winning guests are given only a few days’ notice to get to the property, then are closely monitored by Airbnb staff, making a stay in, say, Prince’s Purple Rain house in Minneapolis, decidedly less fun than advertised. But someone will be very excited to wake up surrounded by roadsters at the Ferrari Museum in Maranello, Italy, with former Formula 1 driver Marc Gené escorting them to a race. Marvel universe fans will definitely flock to the X-Mansion, an actual Westchester, New York, estate where artist Josh Vidas has painstakingly painted each surface to imbue the X-Men ’97 training academy with 2D comic-realism.