From the Agent: "Originally designed in 1937 by renowned architect William E. Meyer, this architectural gem has been masterfully restored, fully permitted, and thoughtfully updated for modern living. Located in the Franklin Hills enclave of Los Feliz, this landmark-quality home sits on a generous 12,555-square-foot lot and offers 2,715 square feet of elevated interior space. Sliding pocket doors open to a private patio and lush, landscaped yard perfect for seamless indoor/outdoor California living. Reimagined by a husband-and-wife design team, the Ames Residence is a rare opportunity to own a home that marries architectural heritage with modern functionality. Nestled in one of Los Feliz’s most desirable neighborhoods and just moments from top-rated schools such as Franklin Avenue Elementary, shops, and dining, this is a home of true distinction."
The open-concept living room sits at the heart of the home, surrounded by four bedrooms.
Photo by Neue Focus
The home’s floors and cabinetry are made from white oak.
Interior architect Merrill Lyons transformed a turn-of-the-20th-century Brooklyn brownstone with some unique marble and travertine.
Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.
The owner of a classic early 20th-century Park Slope, Brooklyn townhouse lived in the home for well over three decades before deciding to have it completely refreshed. Already well into their "empty nester" phase, they wanted to reimagine the 3,800-square-foot home to better accommodate their new lifestyle—largely centered on entertaining friends and visiting family. After touring a similar property down the street that was meticulously updated by interior architect Merrill Lyons, principal of Lyons Studio, they called on her to revamp the home and apply her distinctive approach. "They’d done some small updates over the years but nothing of tremendous significance and this was their chance to do what they had dreamed of for so long," says Lyons.
With new floors and wall detailing reconstituted by skilled carpenters to as closely match the originals as possible, other historical details were cleverly reused. The reconstructed main stairwell incorporates the preexisting newel posts.
A dramatic stone surround for the hearth keeps to the client’s preferred neutral-forward palette, but adds visual interest, texture, and a bit of warmth, too.
Her goal was to create a modernized home that still retains key historical features; the winning characteristic of a space for which the owners had been stewards of for so long. "When we first walked through the home, there was an overwhelming amount of dark Victorian wood detailing," the architect adds. "While impressive and beautiful, we knew that in order to implement upgrades that the home required, we would have to edit out some ornamental features."
On the main parlor level, Lyons and her team opened up what had been dark, closed-off spaces and narrow hallways. The same strategy was used in the bedrooms and bathrooms on subsequent floors. Much of the internal systems—plumbing, electrical, and HVAC—were replaced, as were the well-worn floors and crown moldings no longer up to code.
In the primary bathroom, defined by the pink stained-glass window, the architect and her team painstakingly sourced slabs of Vagli Rosato pink-and-purple marble to wrap the walls around the shower and bathtub.
From the Agent: "The Bates Glass House was designed by prominent Charlotte architect Charles Bates. The avant-garde nature of steel-and-glass pavilion homes from the midcentury era contribute to their rarity both locally and nationally. Nestled on a serene wooded lot overlooking a pond in what was once rural Charlotte, the residence is centrally located in our expanding city, yet still retains its original sense of seclusion. The interior creates a warm and balanced aesthetic juxtaposed to the glass-and-steel facade. Seamless integration with the natural surroundings extends a soothing connection to the natural world. The Bates Glass House is truly exceptional in every way."
Architect Charles Bates designed this home in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his own family.
The DTC furniture brand’s slew of endorsements made me wonder about its IRL quality. Then, I tested one of its extendable dining tables in my 700-square-foot apartment.
I try to be a healthy skeptic about DTC furniture I see endorsed by celebrities and influencers all over my For You page. As someone who works in media, and also just exists in the current age of the internet with a basic level of digital literacy (at least before AI entered the chat), I usually assume vlog-style clips touting or even noticeably featuring specific products involve at least some level of affiliate marketing or influencer gifting, as Dwell does. (If that assumption surprises you, fashion and culture writer Emilia Petrarca has a helpful explainer about how affiliates work, and how they might influence the decisions of writers and content creators, on her newsletter, Shop Rat.) So, when the Transformer Round dining table popped up on my TikTok feed just before my partner and I moved into our 700-square-foot Brooklyn apartment this summer, I imagined the extendable table—with a round wooden top and thick fluted base, at quick glance pretty indiscernible from West Elm’s Ellington round dining table—probably wasn’t exactly what was advertised. But we were really eager to be able to host in our space without having to sacrifice style for function.
The Canadian modular furniture company, founded in 2016 by six friends (none of whom had experience in furniture production), was born from a Kickstarter campaign that raised millions. The brand has always done almost all of its advertising through videos on Facebook and other social platforms and sells directly to consumers on its website and at Costco, where the original rectangular Transformer table is hugely popular. A section of the website below the words "From Our Celebrities to Your Home" features embedded vertical videos from TV personalities in the home-design universe—organizing expert Marie Kondo, who partnered with the brand in 2024 (essentially just publicly giving the products her stamp of approval), former Queer Eye interior designer Bobby Berk, HGTV star Sabrina Soto, and realtor-influencer Heather Rae El Moussa of Selling Sunset fame—explaining how they use the company’s various modular tables, desks, and outdoor furniture. There are also sponcon-adjacent clips from actresses Ashley Greene and Sophia Bush. In Bush’s video, she says in a voiceover, "I can’t tell you what I would’ve given to have had this in my first New York City apartment," as she sets up her Transformer Round dining table set in a space that, like the others’, has plenty of room for the piece when fully extended.
Again, in my mind, all of these things were potential signs that the "viral" Transformer Table might in reality have some quality issues or be less well-suited for small spaces than it promised. But my partner and I were moving into a much tighter apartment than we’d previously been in, in a neighborhood nearer to many of our friends, and one of the major draws for us was that we’d be able to have people over more often. Our existing six-person dining table would eat up the corner between the open kitchen and living room, which would be an eyesore and constrict the path between those spaces, as well as to the (much-needed) storage on the far wall. The Transformer Round table seemed like it would fit neatly into the space when it wasn’t extended and allow us to quickly adjust in the moments when more table seating was our priority. So I reached out to the company about testing the Transformer Round dining set - The Practical, which comes with a table and bench, both extendable.Here’s my honest take on what the dining set is, and what it isn’t.
Arrival and assembly
My order arrived a week after I placed it. Three men maneuvered three heavy-looking boxes to our second-floor walk-up. We had white-glove service, so I can’t speak to the ease of assembly, but the bench came fully intact, and the head of the table and two pieces that form the base took about 10 minutes for the men to piece together using what looked like standard Allen wrenches.
I pretty immediately realized one element that knocked a few points off the scale for small space–friendly design: the table, which retails for $3,537, and bench, for $1,615, each include three extension panels, and while the bench panels tuck neatly into a space within the seating when you’re not using them, you need somewhere to store the additional table leaves, which measure about 20 by 45 inches and are pretty weighty. We keep ours under our bed (we intentionally chose a bed frame that’s raised about a foot off the ground so we’d have extra room for unsightly storage), but we’d otherwise have to tuck them away in our already stuffed closets or lean them against a wall in plain sight, which would be a significant aesthetic sacrifice. The brand’s solution for this is that its Transformer Round sideboard has storage for the table’s three panels, if you want to spend the $2,615 price for it and have space for the extra item. (On both fronts, we didn’t.)
The Transformer Round dining table measures 45" L x 45" W x 30" H without any of the additional panels and when extended fully can seat 10 people. The bench has built-in storage for its unused panels, but the table doesn’t. Its three panels can be stored in the separate sideboard unit.
Courtesy Transformer Table
Quality check
I’m admittedly on the middle-lower end of the materials snob spectrum (at least for someone in my particular profession), but I have very few complaints about the actual look of the bench and dining table, which use solid wood and engineered hardwood with oak veneers and come in four finishes—Scandinavian oak, Royal walnut, Smoked hickory, and Dark walnut. We chose the first.
So far, we’ve only added one panel to the table to make it fit six people, but that took us all but three minutes. To extend both the table and the bench, all you have to do is pull the sides apart to make space for the extra panels on the telescopic steel rails, then push the sides back together and secure the panels with the safety locks underneath. The most complicated part of that experience for us was maneuvering the panel out from under our bed, which only has a foot or two of space from the wall on each side, without scratching it or the hardwood floor beneath it.
There are small, visible gaps between the leaves of the table and bench when the panels are secured together. The spaces are maybe slightly more visible than some of the marketing images would suggest, but that look doesn’t bother me much. With the bench, however, the central gap between the panels actually did cause us some trouble. Even with the safety locks secured underneath, the gap wasn’t totally taut, and the pieces would often pinch our legs when we moved slightly on the seating. Our solution for this was to buy stick-on child-safety strap locks from Home Depot to add next to the existing safety locks under the bench panels, fastening the bench leaves more tightly. (You can’t see them from eye level.) This did the job, though I do think any piece of furniture that retails for four digits should be sufficiently surprise-pinch-proof without extra assistance from adhesive latches.
The two double-shelf storage cabinets built into the fluted base is an extra small-space-friendly feature of the Transformer Round dining table.
Courtesy Sarah Buder
My favorite part of the Transformer Round dining table, somewhat surprisingly to me, is the hidden storage built into the fluted base on two sides. From the company’s furniture offerings, the feature is unique to the round dining table. I didn’t anticipate how much we’d use the tucked-away cabinets: In Bobby Berk’s video, that’s where he keeps his wine glasses, but we use the shelves to store away random things that we use pretty regularly but don’t want on display, like a lint brush or bags for compost. That extra storage has actually become invaluable to us; it’s a feature of the table we rely on much more frequently than its ability to seat more people.
The verdict
In the few months since we’ve moved into our 700-square-foot apartment, the Transformer Round dining table is the piece of furniture we’ve gotten the most compliments on. Most people comment on how it looks and ask where it’s from before we even tell them it’s extendable. I do, admittedly, usually anticipate that their enthusiasm will dim when I tell them the price tag. (And it usually does.)
What I tell them, though, is that while the pieces are definitely on the higher end of what’s out there on the market for extendable furniture that’s also design-forward (though a little less so right now during the company’s 35-percent site-wide Black Friday sale), I would probably buy the table in the future, even for a larger apartment. Though I understand if they’re still a bit skeptical.
The Round to Oval Dining Table is a versatile and luxurious piece that effortlessly adapts to your changing needs. With its innovative extendable design, this modern round to oval dining table transitions smoothly from a cozy setting for 2 to an expansive table for up to 10 people, making it perfect for both intimate meals and large gatherings. This round to oval dining table set is perfect for families and entertainers alike, offering a flexible solution without sacrificing style. Crafted for durability, this expandable round dining table is made with premium materials to ensure lasting strength and functionality. The sturdy construction features a solid wood base and precision-engineered extension mechanism, allowing for easy expansion and retraction while maintaining stability and resilience. Whether you're hosting a dinner party or enjoying a quiet meal, this wood round dining table is built to withstand the test of time and everyday use. Available in a range of stunning finishes, the Round to Oval Dining Table can be customized to suit your home’s aesthetic. Choose from Scandinavian Oak, American Walnut, or Smoked Hickory to complement or contrast your existing decor. Each finish brings out the natural beauty of the wood while offering a sophisticated look that enhances any dining room. This table is the ideal choice for those seeking a blend of form, function, and timeless design. The Transformer Round Table can also be sold as part of the Transformer Round Dining Set - The Practical, which includes the Transformer Round Bench.
In Amsterdam, an architect couple turned a historic building into the site of their firm’s offices—and added their own residence on top.
Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.
Sometimes the right project chooses you. Such was the case for couple Steven Delva of Delva Landscape Architecture and Stefan Bennebroek of Puur Plus Architects and the historic brewery building in Amsterdam that they now call their home—and office. What began as a tour of one floor of a building to convert into an apartment quickly turned into a moment to envision a much larger project. They discovered that there had once been plans for a modern addition on the top of the building and decided to meet the owner to discuss buying the roof rights. "He said, because it feels really comfortable, I feel really good, and there’s a very good connection, you should buy the whole building," Bennebroek says. They decided to build out office spaces for their respective practices in the existing building, then adda home on top of the structure.
Vines were added up the side of the building. These naturally help cool down the building and on an aesthetic level, serve as a winding green beacon catching eyes at street level. For industrial buildings that aren’t often all that welcoming and are more or less categorically disconnected from nature, these interventions go a long way.
From there came the challenge of creating a comfortable home addition, while redesigning the building’s lower levels as contemporary office space without disregarding the building’s past. Even though they didn’t intend to mimic the original brick structure’s architecture, they wanted to ensure that both the new addition and the existing building could exist in harmony.
How they pulled it off: A modern home atop a historic building
Feel it out in person: "The whole space was like a playground for us," Bennebroek explains. There was no distinction between what he and Delva worked on; the two approached the whole process collaboratively.This collaboration was partially enabled by the fact that they worked on the initial designs in person at the site, figuring out what they wanted the new addition to look like intuitively from the rooftop itself. "We designed the window divisions on-site with wooden slats to figure out what the proportions should be," Bennebroek says. Things changed during the process—one of the challenges was knowing when to say when on adjustments—but eventually plans clicked into place. What resulted is a two-level loft-like living space with massive windows that fill the double-height living space with oodles of light.
The space is now filled with light, thanks to double-height windows, allowing for plants and greenery to thrive.
Bring nature in: With so much light, there are far fewer limitations to the greenery that can be cultivated inside. Delva is a landscape architect, so plants proved particularly important to the home’s design. Not one but two trees were brought into the spaceby crane: a 21-foot-tall Japanese Acer for the terrace that anchors one side of the addition, and another smaller tree improbably located inside of the primary bathroom. "It’s such a beautiful interaction between the seasons, which are actually brought into your living area," Bennebroek says.
Just outside Portland, Oregon, a couple collaborate with Risa Boyer Architecture to turn a "super funky" residence perched in the treetops into their forever home.
When Lauren O’Neill’s mother found a midcentury home near the back side of the high school Lauren attended in Lake Oswego, Oregon, she knew it had potential—even if Lauren and her husband, Mikey, couldn’t see it yet. The couple were living in Seattle at the time, but with a little prodding from Mom, they made an offer on the property—sight unseen.
"Once our offer was accepted, we drove down to Lake Oswego and saw Fernwood in person for the first time," Lauren recalls. The reality hit hard. "I took a moment out on the deck, and I was like, ‘Mikey, this is insane. Are we willing to take on this much work?’"
Before: Exterior
After: Exterior
The home’s new tongue-and-groove fine-line exterior siding is stained a custom color.
Video games like "The Sims" have long allowed players to live out their homemaking desires. But elements from the genre have since made their way into other hugely popular series, often unexpectedly.
This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.
Let’s say you commit a crime in Grand Theft Auto: Robbing a bank, a cartoonish instance of vehicular manslaughter, a shakedown gone wrong—there are all types of options. With the police on your heels, you have no choice but to flee by heading to any car on the road, yanking the driver out of their seat, and speeding off. But where will you go? Good luck finding somewhere to hunker down inside. In a city full of buildings and doors, you’ll find that pretty much all of them are locked.
Ever since 2001, when Grand Theft Auto III brought virtual cities to life as "open worlds," the video-game genre—defined by the player’s ability to go almost anywhere in a cohesive large environment, as opposed to proceeding through a series of discreet levels—has largely focused on the public realm. In many open-world games, the built environment comprises largely flat textures, like Road Runner painting a tunnel on a rock wall. The ability to go indoors is often limited to cutscenes (prescripted events in which the player has no or severely limited control) or special one-time events. Players can swing the entire length of Manhattan in the Spider-Man games, for instance, but they can’t go into any of its bodegas. This is often a necessary limitation for technical and practical reasons. Just imagine how much manpower it would take to design every room in a single skyscraper or block in a city, in addition how much hard drive space it would take to house all of that data. Still, the lack of literal interiority can often align with a lack of figurative interiority. The lived environment says a lot about who people are and what their priorities are, and that perspective has, historically, been lacking in these types of games.
That has changed in the last few years, owing to both technical advances in what video games can allow players to do, and growing interest in games that allow players to express themselves through home design. What was once a standalone game genre unto itself is now an essential component of some of the most popular video games in the market. That substantial design modes have found their way into historical period pieces, soap opera melodramas, the nuclear postapocalypse, and galaxy-spanning sci-fi adventures is an obvious indication of the genre’s enduring appeal. More specifically, though, it can be seen as an indication of how game audiences are changing, and how quickly video-game technology is evolving. And perhaps most importantly, it offers another versatile toolkit to allow players to express themselves, not just through a limited set of actions, pre-canned dialogue, and avatars, but also through environmental storytelling. (An example of environmental storytelling, in which players intuit events, might be a room with a table and chairs knocked over haphazardly, as opposed to a character stating plainly, "There was a fight here.")
A scene from Grand Theft Auto III, one of the most popular video games of all time.
Courtesy Rockstar Games.
For decades, home design constituted a self-contained genre in video games. Early games—including ’90s stalwarts SimCity and Harvest Moon—allowed players to plan out their cities and farm, hop on the unending treadmill of maintaining a habitable living space, or a functional civic society. These games had relatively simplistic win states because, unlike conventional narratives with heroes and villains, the player’s motivation was self-evident to anyone with a pulse. To run a good city, you had to run a city with standard markers of competence, like functioning utilities and infrastructure not crippled by natural disaster. Being a good farmer meant running a farm with sufficient crop yield.
A few years later, the early 2000s brought games like The Sims and Animal Crossing, finally allowing players to go inside the homes of individual characters and make minute aesthetic decisions, like what furniture the residents did (or didn’t own), where doors went, and whether their swimming pools had ladders. These games helped draw a relationship between their character’s well-being and their home environment: Sims would get angry if their home was dirty, and Animal Crossing villagers would remark on the changing of seasons and related events, how frequently the player has logged in to check on their village, and the general state of upkeep (villagers are not fans of players who let weeds grow uninhibited). These games have spawned decades of imitators and evolutions around the design of a functioning society or domicile. The ultrapopular Stardew Valley (2016) was explicitly inspired by Harvest Moon’s calming gameplay loop of farm maintenance.
But games that prioritize letting players farm crops and lay out furniture are no longer the only titles that provide the opportunity. In the most recent Assassin’s Creed game, set in Sengoku-era Japan, players can design the layout of their hideout compound, choosing where buildings are located, drawing paths between them, planting trees, and placing animal friends around the grounds. In Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the protagonist takes a lengthy sojourn to an island in a side quest that parodies Animal Crossing’s village-architect mandate. In Spiritfarer, a ferryman shepherding animals into the afterlife must also arrange each of their cabins so that everyone can fit on the boat. The development outfit Bethesda Game Studios, best known for enormous open-world role-playing games in the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, has similarly caught the home-design bug. In its last two titles, 2015’s Fallout 4 and 2023’s Starfield, players gained the ability to not just buy a home for their character, but to also design every inch of it, devisingnot just floor plans and decor, but power grids and automated defenses as well. A feature whose customization options often amounted to "what color should the walls be?" just a few years ago has grown far more complex.
A still from the game Stardew Valley, which exploded in popularity during the pandemic.
Courtesy of Concerned Ape
In doing so, these games have grown beyond the diorama type of interactions that can often typify video games. Allowing players to nitpick the details of their virtual spaces changes how they perform in social spaces, whether they’re nonplayable characters (NPCs) or other players online. In their 2007 paper on social norms in The Sims Online, a multiplayer version of the normally single-player Sims experience in which players can interact directly with each other, the academics Rosa Mikeal Martey and Jennifer Stromer-Galley observed that "the house also creates a metaphorical space in which players use offline notions of expected behavior to guide their actions as hosts and visitors." In other words, players fall into role-play based on the "environments" that they are in. Jumping around on floating platforms outdoors, as one does in a Super Mario game, is perfectly normal. Jumping on couches and tables in someone’s carefully composed house is, at the very least, subverting expectations. A character that knocks into a virtual prop (or gets stuck in its geometry—an occasional buggy event in which two different objects occupy the same virtual space)—is not just a glitch in the software, but can also be interpreted as a social faux pas. Sure, conjuring a virtual antique wardrobe out of thin air might be easier than hauling a real one up a flight of stairs, but the end effect—of making a player feel like they are in a space that belongs to someone—is comparable.
These modes expand role-playing elements of video games beyond the character itself. Expression that was once limited to giving the main character a custom name (in Pokémon, for example) has branched out past the person into their space as well. "People like to embody their character," the YouTuber DarthXion, who specializes in videos showcasing design modes and whose real name is Dan, explains, "especially when they can design and create whatever character they like and take that in whatever direction they want. They can do a similar sort of thing with the home that character has. And much like, I suppose, in real life, they can have a home space that reflects their personality."
For Assassin’s Creed Shadows players, the recently added hideout mode makes abstract improvements tangible. Over what the developers characterize as "a little over one acre of fully customizable land on which players are able to place buildings, pavilions, pathways, bushes, trees, ponds, mossy rocks, local flora and fauna, and countless other Japanese cosmetic elements," the player gradually assembles a squad of rogues and offers them a place to congregate. Building certain structures, such as a training dojo, allows the player character and their allies to bolster their skills. Rather than simply dumping skill points into a menu interface, characters become stronger when their homes become stronger, drawing a direct connection between quality of living and overall performance.
The mere existence of the hideout, even for players who don’t care about the minutiae of mossy rock placement, also incentivizes exploring other parts of the game’s expansive map. Crates and chests throughout the land contain decorations for the hideout, tying the player’s home to the rest of society. Armor taken from a foe and paintings taken from fortresses can be put on display. Upgrading the hideout with resources like wood and metal requires the player to scour the broader region. It’s not a particularly deep system, but it’s a symbiotic one. Searching elsewhere improves the home, and improving the home makes it easier to perform actions elsewhere.
For games about the unusually specific act of "picking up trinkets to take home," the games of Bethesda Game Studios are in a class all by themselves. Titles in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series of RPGs let players pick up basically anything smaller than a piece of furniture. Mugs, teddy bears, microscopes, pieces of fruit, slabs of meat, rusty cans, and thousands of other items. In earlier titles from the studio, these items could then be sold for money, or placed inside the player’s home, once it was purchased with said money. In later games, junk can be broken down into scrap components (a broken coffee cup can be scrapped for a few units of ceramic; a baseball mitt for leather, and so on) and then reconstituted into other structures, furniture, and props. "The Bethesda stuff is interesting because I think they sort of solved a problem that they had," DarthXion notes, "in that they had littered their world with a bunch of mostly useless junk that you could pick up, and there was nothing to do with it."
The system of accruing miscellaneous junk is something of a trademark for the developers. Todd Howard, Bethesda Game Studios’ longtime creative force, noted as much when promoting Starfield. "We like having all the coffee cups. We like being able to touch everything," he said in 2021. "Those moments make the whole thing believable." The ability to manipulate any small object doesn’t really have any narrative heft in the traditional sense, but it allows players to encounter and engage with what is known as environmental storytelling, conveyed through inanimate objects. A cliché example might be a room containing a corpse, a gun, and a note saying "goodbye, cruel world." You can put the three of those together to figure out what might have occurred. In Bethesda’s fantasy games, a wizard’s shack, full of 1,000 wheels of cheese, might not have a traditional story arc, but it definitely tells a story.
All of these home-design modes might not exist at all, however, without the field of video-game streaming. Much like how HGTV shows and Zillow listings give viewers an opportunity to drool over (or ridicule) someone else’s house, video-game streaming provides the same dynamic for virtual spaces. YouTube and TikTok feature a never-ending font of video-game home tours, which complicates how players interact with these spaces as they balance three different concerns: the motivation of the character (would my character own this chair?), the motivation of the player (do I like this chair?), and the interests of viewers (is this chair interesting enough for the For You algorithm?).
DarthXion says that even if YouTube didn’t exist, he would still be enamored with the building mode in Fallout (it took him exponentially longer to finish the main narrative of Fallout 4 because he kept getting sidetracked). But the video platform also motivates him to keep going back. On the one hand, viewers like to see novel finished products. Imagine an Architectural Digest "Open Door" not of a celebrity’s house, but one that belongs to a ghoul with rotting flesh. His audience, he says, likes "getting a few ideas and ... looking for inspiration."
They also need help learning precisely how to make those ideas a reality, so building tutorials come in handy too. Whereas real-life, Bob Vila-style content might teach viewers how to place an anchor in order to hang a shelf in their actual home that exists in physical space, video-game crafting tutorials might explain how to use quirks in the game’s code to create floating platforms and rooms.
The growing complexity of home-design systems, incorporated into more theatrical games with larger deliberate narratives, can surely be taken as a sign of demand. A simplistic read might focus on demographics—the most avid game players tend to skew younger amid an ongoing affordability crisis in homeownership and urban rental markets with low vacancy rates, and as gaming has grown broader, there are more opportunities for games that are less stereotypically masculine and focused on violence and destruction. If you can’t actually afford to decorate your living space (or don’t care to improve one belonging to your landlord), maybe you can experience fulfillment in a simulacrum. Putting that aside, the clearest reason for the proliferation of the design mode is that it allows players to engage with the game on a deeper level. There’s something to be said for participatory world-building, in which a player is able to literally construct their surroundings, one carefully placed sofa at a time.
Top photo of a SimCity Societies demonstrationin 2007 by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images.
