Home Decor Voyeurs: DesignSponge on Why We Like Looking Into Other Peoples' Houses
Grace Bonney is the 28-year old Brooklyn-based blogger behind DesignSponge. The "Sneak Peeks" section on her blog is one of the web's most popular places to lurk for a glimpse into peoples' homes.![]()
All photos via DesignSponge "Sneak Peeks" gallery. This one is a close up of artist Sophie Blackall's, um, baby doll parts and stuff.
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Alyson Fox's studio
Why do people like to take "sneak peeks" into other peoples houses so much? What is that urge about?
I think the success of the sneak peeks is two fold: people love to learn how to decorate their home through examples, and the peeks give people a chance to indulge in the guilty pleasure of peeking into someone else's personal space and seeing how they live.
Have you ever shown your own home as a sneak peek?
I saved my home for the relaunch in 2007. When we redesigned the site and moved off of Blogger, the first post we ran was a home tour of our Brooklyn apartment.
Grace Bonney's home
Did you consciously style each room for the photos? Meaning, did you clean up, and arrange the books and accessories in a pleasing way?
Oh man, definitely. I think 99% of the homes we run are styled in some way, whether it's overtly or in a "quick clean up" way. It's tough to put your home out there for 50,000 people to see and not want to put its best foot forward.






























