Dream Homemaker: A Review of Netflix’s Dream Home Makeover

Natalie Brown is a former blogger at By Common Consent and a PhD candidate in English and comparative literature. Her dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century writers who obsessively sought places to call home. Follow her on Twitter at @nataliebrownist.

In a year when many of us are confined to our homes, Netflix offers up its latest distraction in the form of Utah-based design show Dream Home Makeover—or, as I keep slipping and calling it for reasons my LDS friends will understand, “Dream Homemaker.” In many ways, it’s the latest installment of the cultural fantasy that remodeling a home can remodel a life—a fantasy of intervention through design that has feminist predecessors in the likes of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. To Utah or LDS audiences, the career of the show’s star, Shea McGee, an influencer who converted the skills she learned improving her California home into a design studio business located in Utah, potentially offers an additional fantasy: a path toward monetizing skills learned at home in order to achieve recognition and financial success within a religious-cultural environment in which the imperative to stay home with children is also increasingly expensive and in which employment conditions are often unfriendly to families—a reality that has only become more apparent during the pandemic.

I’ll confess: I find myself dreaming about how I might emulate Shea McGee. For all the potential empowerment Dream Home Makeover dangles for women in an economic-cultural nexus that often leaves them placeless, however, it also inadvertently showcases the emotional and economic distortions arising from the tensions they face. Particularly in the early episodes, admirable attempts to find personal success through monetizing homemaking seem to risk inadvertently preying on the insecurities and pocketbooks of other women trapped within the same systems and who often constitute the target market.

“Like the beauty industry, the home-improvement industry plays on (usually gendered) insecurity—the fear that we are unattractive or inadequate,” explains McMansion Hell’s Kate Wagner in an essay for Curbed. Of course, the urge to make a space more beautiful and functional is often a good one. I understand from personal experience how living in a poorly-designed or cramped space can add rather than reduce work or make accomplishing daily tasks much harder. I know the pleasure of acquiring an object that makes me happy after years of saving because it reflects my taste and asserts that I matter as much as the kids I care for. I know that families grow and need change. What’s more troubling, however, are the moments in the show when the kind of learned dissatisfaction Wagner so well articulates intersects with McGee’s understated but visible profit motive.

Episode 1, “Forever Home,” for example, highlights a family hoping to solve by design the problem that they dislike their dated and spatially unoptimized living room so much that they do not want to invite people over to it—a phobia I have felt myself while dwelling in my current 1960s house. We might well ask, however, how so many of us have become embarrassed of our houses to begin with. How the urge to improve has become a source of dissatisfaction and social shame. Watching the show, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the desire for a certain aesthetics is at times eclipsing rather than aiding function in ways that likely help the design industry more than anyone else. McGee herself, for example, is at one point focused on installing a beautiful tub in her own house that she rarely intends to use. For me, I am convinced that my own occasional obsessions with remodeling spring as much from the feelings that I am undervalued, lonely, and in need of personal goals while raising children as they do from the flaws of my space. Improving my house, I hope, might improve my relationships and provide a focus needed in the absence of a clear career.

To her credit, McGee is quite aware that legions of women long for but cannot afford the products she popularizes. In episode 2, “Manor House Designs,” McGee hosts a warehouse sale catered to those who cannot routinely afford high-end home goods and her design services. Yet the threat that the design industry produces more unhappy homes than happy ones lurks behind the comment of one shopper who confesses she missed half a wedding to attend the warehouse sale. Even clients who can afford the best, however, are not immune from the insecurities and competition sparked by a culture in which having the right home is sometimes construed as a precondition of social life and meaningful interpersonal interactions.

In episode 2, a couple who earned their money developing tract homes hires McGee to design a custom home for their own family. This stunning mansion features not only the dream white kitchen and master suite but also such entertainment features as a basketball court and bunkroom for cousin parties. The gracious family is upfront about their gratitude and desire to share their home with the community. Like the couple unhappy with their living room, they are also focused on the worthy goal of wanting a space that facilitates social life for them and others. Who doesn’t want to consume and invest in the name of family and friends? And, yet, does such space really facilitate the sociality and meaningful interactions for which we all seem to be grasping? Their generous fantasy of building a home in which friends and family can hang out sets the unsustainable expectation that one needs such a home in order to attract visitors, perhaps because it is often hard to arrange visits in our over-scheduled moment. I bought a swing set, for example, hoping in part that neighborhood children would want to play at our house, only to discover that there simply were not that many children with time to play. Moreover, as writer Meg Conley observes, this fantasy overlooks the fact that such visitors might also want to host parties in their own now too-modest homes. While being a hostess is a culturally endorsed way of giving back, it also keeps structures of wealth and reliance on private charity intact. As the Dream Home Makeover clients’ use of the word “my” reminds us, the house belongs to them however much they may be inclined to share.

Less visible in the show are the team of primarily female designers who work for Studio McGee and appear to assist McGee with her projects. What precisely do they do? How much are they paid? Where do they live? How do they balance their jobs with their own family lives? How many women are trying to follow in the footsteps of stars like McGee without realizing her results? The show is more silent on these questions than I would like.

I do not make these observations to condemn anyone on the show—they hold mirrors to many of my own dreams and attitudes. Rather, I want to observe how Dream Home Makeover inadvertently highlights the messiness of what it means to try to earn money and/or be a homemaker in a culture that sometimes pressures one to maintain a certain kind of home or stay-at-home lifestyle while not providing the financial resources to do it. I’ve watched with admiration and envy as women—particularly Mormon women—around me have established home businesses, hosted book parties, launched clothing boutiques, opened cookie shops, or built baby product empires in attempts to navigate these waters and create opportunities that work with their values. There is a strong argument that women should be paid for the homemaking labor they are encouraged to perform, but I worry that such compensation cannot sustainably or broadly come primarily from other underpaid, and often LDS, women who are also longing for validation and security. We are too often stuck selling services and products to each other that are targeted to the specific challenges or expectations of being an LDS woman in ways that sometimes seem to amount to merely shifting money or reinforcing our mutual insecurities.

The dream houses we build will not miraculously liberate us from the structural economic, gender, and racial distortions that mark all aspects of our lives, including home design. The houses we build will not resolve our loneliness or desire for recognition when the real culprit is often the economic systems that have scattered us from friends, family, and community. We need, I believe, to understand the unhappiness, economic precarity, and caregiving challenges that feed into our fantasies of home, hosting, and better living. We need, I think, to create vibrant communities less through individual design solutions than through changes to collectively address how we work, compensate caregiving, and provide a safety net so that everyone has a place to call home.

Yet whatever I might think of the structural forces driving Dream Home Makeover and our pervasive fantasies of home, McGee’s designs are stunning. Without a doubt, McGee is as talented, driven, and competent as she is camera-ready. Her designs blend modern and traditional, light and dark in ways that make it obvious why she is a social media star who sparks my admiration. Perhaps there is something whitewashed about these ready-to-photograph designs, but, this, I admit, is part of the appeal of them to me. With their airiness, white couches, and feel of solidity without the baggage of history, they offer me the fantasy of living for a moment without the complexity of a home life characterized by messes, children, and the injustices of our moment.

Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash