The cult of the Architectural Digest celebrity home tour Open Door video

Over the past six years, more than 33 million people have watched Dakota Johnson wax lyrical about limes.

“I love limes, I love them, they’re great, I love them so much and I like to present them like this in my house,” the actor said, while gesturing to two ceramic platters of the citrus rounds.

This little proclamation came in the middle of a 10-minute video of Johnson showing Architectural Digest around her mid-modern Los Angeles home, and it was posted to the publication’s YouTube in March 2020.

Johnson is known for being a chaos queen, and has crumbed entropy wherever she goes in press tours and on talk-show couches, so this insight into her home life, with her offhanded revelation of where her dead was buried or the table made of Winston Churchill’s yacht is very on brand.

The limes and her love for them, by the way, was a lie. She confessed a year later to Jimmy Fallon that it was all set dressing and she didn’t even know they were there. Johnson thinks she might actually be allergic to them. Or maybe not, with our chaos queen, it’s hard to know.

But the video went viral. As have numerous other celebrity house tour videos from Architectural Digest, which always opens with the glittery star opening their front door with a variation of “hey, AD, welcome to the house!”.

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard opened the door to their Brooklyn townhouse, and beckoned AD into the parlour, where the warm fire was burning. Amanda Seyfried took AD through her NYC apartment (she really lives most of the time on a farm) where she took everyone through her storage solutions under the TV.

Tommy Hilfiger, FYI, hides his TV behind a mirror.

It’s often mundane, and sometimes bizarre.

Such as David Harbour and Lily Allen’s townhouse video, which re-emerged after their very public split, and was used by the internet as exhibit A of his weirdo status – he needs the bedroom to be so dark it literally has no windows.

There are plenty of beautifully decorated New York townhouses, LA hills mansions, and even a castle – Dominic West and his aristocratic wife opens the door to her ancestral home, aka a literal castle with “neoclassical plaster ceilings”.

Last week, Julianne Moore went viral with the tour of her tasteful New York City rooftop apartment. Among a sculptural red chair that had to be kept out of the sun because it might melt and a Pierre Chapo table she loves to work from, is an Ikea shelf that sells in Australia for $90.

These AD video house tours are a voyeuristic look into a famous person’s life, a peek behind the artifice – at least in theory, because they may all be lying about their version of “I love limes!”.

Vanessa Hudgens doesn’t really play the piano (she can’t read music) and Ashley Tisdale made her husband go out the day before and buy the 400 books lined up on the shelves. Not actual readers, the Tisdales.

The practice is nothing new. There have been forms of this for as long as there have been celebrities. It’s not really that different to taking a tour of Buckingham Palace or Hearst Castle.

While Architectural Digest has been doing this for a century with celebrity homes splashed across its glossy magazine pages, the modern version of this really kicked off with MTV’s Cribs which toured the homes of the likes of Mariah Carey, Gene Simmons, Fatboy Slim and 50 Cent.

AD’s Open Doors videos are an evolution of that – more class and design, fewer yellow Ferraris and custom motorcycle workshops.

For the celebrities themselves, for those who purport to guard their privacy with ferocity, what would possess them to open their doors to the internet.

One is that “authenticity” continues to be a buzzword, the idea that in order to be truly loved by your fans, you have to be open to them, and AD allows them to do that in a very controlled way, and with better production values that just a some random TikTok video.

You get to invite people to see the “real” you, and attach yourself to the cache of Architectural Digest. Wiz Khalifa’s video, which featured his own marijuana bar, has had 54 million views since 2018.

It’s also another option in the new era of the promotional tour where you’re more likely to be playing with puppies, a game of celebrity guess who, making pizzas, eating chicken and wondering if you strongly agree or disagree with whether Spider-Man can kick Batman’s butt.

Almost anything other than actually talking about the movie/series/album/book you’re meant to be selling. It creates the illusion of celebrity as real person while still keeping them out of reach.

Moore has a new movie out called The Debut, for which she is already heavily favoured to win a second Oscar. But you wouldn’t know that from the AD video – that’s more about sparking a halo effect so you remember who much you appreciate Moore, and maybe you’ll go see her movie when it’s released in a few weeks or months.

In that case, maybe everyone wins. We get to sticky beak, they get to be pretend they’re just like us because they also have a “dump everything” drawer! In their ancestral castles and homes in the sky.