Can You Make a New House Feel Old?

You’ve probably seen some chatter about Kendall Jenner’s new mountain house feature in AD floating around the internet. It was designed by one of my favorite designers, Heidi Caillier, who is known for her gorgeous, layered interiors with rich patterns and a lot of warmth.

I like Jenner’s new house. I’m always glad to see a fancy house that clearly has some intentionality and art to it. She could have made any number of choices I would have disliked! But overall for me, it just kind of falls flat? Normally I see photos of a Heidi Caillier house and am just dying to climb through my screen, so I wanted to unpack what I think went a little wrong here. And again: not super wrong! Just not quite as magical as I wanted it to be.

First, a pet peeve: there are elements here that aren’t real. For example, the kitchen fireplace appears to be gas with fake wood made to look like real wood, and then they stacked real wood underneath? When I see things like that in a home, it makes me question everything. Is the rug in the photo above actually vintage or just made to look distressed? I mean, look, it’s probably real, but you know what I mean? The little fakes ruin the authenticity of the broader story the home is telling.

Second, Jenner herself admitted that she was a nightmare client and micromanaged the whole thing. It’s hard to fight a micromanager when they hold the purse-strings AND are wildly famous beyond belief.

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Third (and related to the second), some of the rooms look a little derivative of things Caillier has done in the past. I suspect that’s because Jenner was looking at photos of past work and asking for things that “look like this,” rather than letting Caillier just run with her own creative vision and stupendous eye.

Fourth, this place doesn’t look like anyone has ever lived here at all. I know it’s a second or fourth or eighth home for Jenner, so I get it, but it looks so shiny and new that it reads a little cold.

And finally, Kendall’s home is a new build, and at first I suspected that the main thing that feels a little flat here is that they were trying to create a curated, lived-in look all at once. Which made me think about whether or not it’s actually possible to really make a home look like something it’s fundamentally not.

A lot of people try this. A woman I follow on Instagram became famous for making her New Jersey McMansion sort of old English style:

The incredible Jean Stoffer tried with a Michigan McMansion several years ago:

This one was more successful for me, because she worked a bit more with what she had, and didn’t try to make it look entirely like something it wasn’t… just updated it to be nicer.

Trying to make a house look like something it’s not, at its bones, feels a little off. Inauthentic. I’m not suggesting we all need to be constrained by making our homes into period pieces, but there’s something that feels a little forced about taking a very specific style and pasting it into differently flavored shell with the idea that you might fool people. It’s really, really hard to pull off.

It’s very different of course, to intentionally contrast an interior with its shell, like a modern interior for an old home, for example.

In the home above, it works precisely because it’s not trying to trick you. It’s modern design playing with intention within an old building.

BUT Caillier herself has pulled this off before! In 2024 AD ran a story about a spec home in the Hamptons that a client hired Caillier to design.

This home is beautiful and feels unique and lived-in and warm and all the things she’s famous for doing and it was “a builder’s spec house with white walls and white subway tiles,” according to Caillier. So she can absolutely pull this off! Which means I suspect Jenner pushed her own vision a bit hard and didn’t give Caillier the space to make her usual magic.

Again. It’s a lovely home! I’m not hating on it. Caillier knocked it out of the park with some of the bathrooms and the kitchen skylights especially. But I want to see this house photographed again in five years, when there’s actually been time for it to have been lived in. I do think the interior design will age well, and the house will feel better, warmer, and more welcoming.

And now, as always, some fun design-y things from around the internet lately:

My absolute dream home:

This home which is not my dream (maybe if they were all dogs?) but is definitely someone’s:

This hilarious video of AI Blueprints:

Relevant to this post, here’s Brent Hull unpacking the architecture of a bad McMansion:

And finally, a lovely round-up of kitchens that I’ve had open in a browser tab for weeks. So many to look at! So good!

That’s all for now! Happy end of 2025! See you next year!