Airbnb has finally built a house. It’s a small property, but one that seemed challenging to create: the two-story pastel Victorian from the 2009 movie Up. “One of the most iconic homes in any film, ever,” said Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, as images of the home flashed behind him at an event in Los Angeles, where he kept reassuring the audience that it was real. Yes, Airbnb’s design team really did recreate every domestic possession of fictional retired balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, down to the two plane tickets to Venezuela on the mantle. Yes, these are actual photos of the home on an Abiquiu, New Mexico, mesa that somehow look even better than Pixar’s own stills from the film. And yes, that is a crane lifting the house, 8,000 balloon-like orbs and all, into the air, suspending it 50 feet above a white picket fence. The audience gasped. The house does, in fact, go up.
It was a lot to absorb, and that’s exactly what Airbnb was going for at its summer release event at a soundstage in Historic Filipinotown this week. The Up house is the first of the home-sharing platform’s new “Icons,” 11 immersive, one-night experiences the company unveiled, which Chesky heralded as a return to Airbnb’s roots. “They allow people to step into someone else’s world, and, at its best, this is what Airbnb does,” he said. “It’s what we have always …
But what Airbnb is actually about continues to be a heated topic of debate as more and more cities place restrictions on just about everything one might want to do in “someone else’s world.” Just six months ago, Chesky was promising big changes to an app
