At first glance, Kate Gabrielle’s house looks out of place going viral on the Instagram mega-account Zillow Gone Wild.
Gabrielle, who bought the New Jersey property in 2022, is now trying to sell her 1,700 square-foot, three-bedroom house that sits on 0.36 acres.
The outside is modest compared to the rest of Zillow Gone Wild’s page, which is made up largely of garish entries like a castle with an air strip, a mansion built in the shape of a sand dollar and NBA star Jaylen Brown’s penthouse in Boston.
But the inside of Gabrielle’s house is entirely a creation of Gabrielle’s imagination, and Gabrielle’s imagination is a colorful place.
One color in particular, in fact: Pink.
“I’ve just always loved pink,” Gabrielle told Newsweek in a phone interview.
“I’ve had a lot of people ask me if it has something to do with Barbie, and I played with Barbies when I was a kid, but I’m not a huge Barbie person. I just happen to have the same favorite color as her.”
You could forgive the people who ask.
Gabrielle has a lot of experience designing her spaces.
As a child, Gabrielle was given free reign over her bedroom design by her mother. She was obsessed with the Nickelodeon television show, “Clarissa Explains It All”, in which a character played by Melissa Joan Hart explained the ins and outs of teenage life.
Clarissa, who wanted to drive, covered her wall in hubcaps and stop signs. Gabrielle, who was 7 and wanted to be Clarissa, did the same.
“My parents one year did a treasure hunt around the house for me to find hubcaps for my birthday to hang up on my wall,” Gabrielle said.
“I still have the stop sign I got. […] I haven’t stopped making my spaces as me—or as Clarissa—as possible.”
Going Viral
Gabrielle has more than 124,000 followers on Instagram herself and is no stranger to going viral.
In fact, the house that drew Zillow Gone Wild’s attention was bought largely using money Gabrielle made from another of her creations blowing up: A purse with a cup holder.
Recovering from a sickness in 2017, Gabrielle started going for walks in a nearby park. On her walks, she either forgot her water bottle or had to carry it the entire time. Both options annoyed her, and she decided to do something about it.
“For a while, I was sort of hacking purses with cardboard and Velcro to make my own little cup-holder purse,” Gabrielle said.
Cup-Holder Runneth Over
When her stimulus check arrived in March of 2020, Gabrielle ordered 250 purses of her own design with a space for a water bottle built in, but she was—in her words—”Too cowardly”, to post them for nearly eight months.
When she finally did?
“They actually sold out in a couple hours,” Gabrielle said.
She decided to take pre-orders shortly afterward, and they went viral—this time on TikTok.
“That’s actually where most of my income has been coming from for the last couple years, is from these purses,” she said.
Gabrielle has been making internet content for decades. She started her Etsy store in 2008, blogged about classic movies and built a social media following. But the cup holder purse pushed her to new heights.
“My follower count went up a sizable amount at that point,” she said.
“Most people have found me either through my artwork, or my Etsy store.”
‘The last of the brown was gone’
When Gabrielle walked into her house in 2022 for the first time, she could envision everything.
It took plenty of imagination. The house was, for the most part, brown—brown shag carpeting and brown wallpaper.
But Gabrielle loved the double oven, the rounded countertops and the four steps to the upstairs. She loved the way the house felt bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside.
“It immediately felt perfect for me,” she said.
“I think even when I was looking at it, I just kept saying, ‘Can you imagine my cat sitting on the stairs?’ Just immediately picturing living in it after I un-browned it.”
So she bought it and began ‘un-browning’. Every detail was painstakingly chosen, and every piece of furniture was selected on purpose.
“I’ve been working on it ever since, but it felt like [to] me within a couple months,” Gabrielle said.
“The last of the brown was gone.”
‘Insurmountable’
The comments on the Zillow Gone Wild story found the painstaking detail striking. After all, why would a person who cared this deeply about her space sell?
“Makes me kinda sad to see it on the market when the owner put this much curatorial care into it,” one user remarked, adding, “I hope there’s a happy positive reason to move.”
There is not.
According to Gabrielle, the downside to making a living selling viral handbags is that they get ripped off a lot.
For about eight months, she has been trying to get websites to take knockoff versions of her $57 purse down. But when vendors can post on sites like Amazon, Temu and Shein, the posts become “Whac-a-Mole,” as she put it.
“Every time one pops up, I try to get it taken down, and it just pops back up again,” she said.
“On Prime Day, one of the knockoffs went viral on TikTok, which was ironic because it was the week I listed my house.
“It just became something that became insurmountable.”
‘Why are you telling me this?’
Gabrielle has largely avoided social media since Zillow Gone Wild posted her house. She knew that some people would be supportive (and many were), while others would be cruel (and many were).
She has, after all, been on the internet since 2008. Once, a blog called “Get Off My Internet” picked up on her old kitchen. One of Gabrielle’s friends found the thread and told her that a whole thread of people online were ripping it.
“I was like, ‘Why are you telling me this?’” Gabrielle said.
“That was probably 10 years ago, and it still lives rent-free in my head.”
But Gabrielle has started to look forward to designing a new apartment space, and she has also started venturing back online. In a post with more than 5,000 likes in a week, she posted a thank-you to the kinder commenters.
‘It’ll break my heart’
“Having to move out of a house I’ve loved so much felt very isolating and sad, but your generosity has made this transition into a warm, lovely moment in my life,” she wrote.
“And I am just so, so grateful.”
According to Gabrielle, plenty of people have toured her house, but she’s yet to receive an offer. She hoped that someone might make one after the Zillow Gone Wild post, and in an ideal world, a potential buyer would want to make the space their own in the same way she did.
Still, she worries that some of the interest might be real-estate tourism, and she has plans to start making it more generic soon.
“I’ll probably start making it a little beige,” Gabrielle said.
Beige, of course, was never a part of her imagination.
“It’ll break my heart,” she said.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The post She Designed Her Dream Home. Now She Has To Sell It appeared first on Newsweek.
