The Myth of the Beautiful Home

Some call it art. For many, it’s survival.

Feb 23, 2025

We’re sold a fantasy about home. A picture-perfect illusion, wrapped in soft candlelight, fresh flowers, and the smug glow of a well-baked loaf.

The lie?

That domesticity is a creative act, an aesthetic, something to be curated like an Instagram grid. That wiping down counters, folding linen just-so, and setting out pastries for our children is an expression of art rather than an endless, unpaid labour cycle dressed up as choice.

It’s a beautiful story. It’s also bullshit.

For most women, home isn’t something we pause to perfect. It isn’t art. It’s the grinding machinery of daily survival. And survival isn’t still. It’s relentless motion—the pendulum swinging between exhaustion and duty, between control and suffocation.

This is the trap of the romanticised home. The idea that domesticity is something women can simply “choose” to embrace, as if the weight of it isn’t suffocating us. As if the ability to make it “artful” isn’t built entirely on privilege, financial stability, and a partner who picks up his share of the load.

Domesticity With and Without Choice

There’s a version of home life where women get to treat it as an ecosystem of creativity—where cleaning is mindful, homemaking is sacred, and everything has a place. But let’s not pretend this version is open to all.

For most, home is a battlefield of unpaid, unrelenting, unseen labour. There is no “pausing to potter.” There is only the next task, and the next, and the next.

This isn’t about demonising women who enjoy homemaking (me too, more on that later). It’s about naming the reality that for many, it is not a choice.

It’s also about calling out the industry built on this lie. Because let’s be real, this isn’t just a lifestyle; it’s a brand.

The Business of Selling the Perfect Home

Women writing about homemaking-as-art rarely do it for free. They are selling something—whether it’s a course, a lifestyle, a product, or a highly curated illusion of effortlessness. The dreamy kitchen, the perfectly arranged bookshelves, the domestic goddess who somehow has time to style it all.

What gets cut from the frame?

The cleaner. The overnight tidying spree. The childcare. The supportive partner. The financial security that allows domestic perfection to be an aesthetic rather than an exhausting necessity.

And yet, we eat this myth up. We internalise it. We hold ourselves up to impossible standards.

The Stories We Tell, The Stories We Swallow

Curated motherhood isn’t just a personal choice—it shapes what every woman is told to aspire to. The expectation isn’t just to keep a home, but to make it artful. And if you can’t?

Well, clearly, you just haven’t cracked the secret to balance yet.

We need to talk about who gets to call domesticity beautiful and who is shackled by it. Because for many, the home is not a peaceful sanctuary. It is a demanding, unpaid, never-ending job—and one we’re still expected to do with a smile.

Let’s talk about those mothers.

The single parents who can’t take a break because there is no one else. The mothers of disabled children, drowning in paperwork, advocacy, and relentless caregiving. The women working two jobs who don’t get to “romanticise” housework because they’re too busy trying to keep the damn lights on.

So where are their stories? And why are the only ones we see wrapped in soft, digestible, privileged glow?

Busting the Myth on Stage

Reader, I know this game because I’m part of it. I get paid to stand on stages and talk about my work. People look at me—a mother of ten, a career woman—and assume I must hold some secret formula for balance.

It’s flattering. It’s also utter nonsense.

They see the curated version of what’s possible—not the chaos, the exhaustion, the reality that sits behind it.

But on stage, I tell the truth. I have a responsibility to bust this myth wide open, because if I don’t, I become complicit in the same glossy, aspirational fiction that is making so many women feel like failures.

And if these four images aren’t the most absurd case study in ‘highly curated illusion of effortlessness,’ I don’t know what is.

Confession time:
❌ Not my house.
❌ Hair took hours.
❌ Kids were bribed with sweets.
❌ And that bag? Let’s just say I’m not hauling triplet gear in a fake Birkin.

Motherhood is messy, unpredictable, and anything but effortless. But damn, hear me out.

Photoshoot Motherhood: One second, poised and polished. The next, flying limbs and absolute mayhem. Curated? Hell yes. Real? You bet your ass.

Crafting Beauty in the Face of Scarcity

I won’t lie. I do take pleasure in the domestic. I love crafting beauty from second-hand treasures, upcycled pieces that I rescue and restore. But I often ask myself: is this joy truly mine, or is it a skill I’ve been forced to master because resources don’t stretch far enough to buy new?

This is the paradox of domesticity: it’s both survival and self-expression, art and obligation. And the line between them is razor-thin.

Domestic Expectations and the Cage We Build

I don’t care about the perfect sourdough or the aesthetic pantry. My pressures are about nuance—the constant movement between home as a place of comfort and a place of crushing responsibility. The way it can feel empowering one day and like a prison the next.

And the question that lingers in every corner of my home? Who am I doing this for?

Women are still expected to create beauty in spaces that sustain others more than themselves. We are conscripted into unpaid domestic labour, not by choice, but by design.

The False Choice Revisited

So let’s quit pretending this is just about mindset. That women simply need to reframe home as a creative act, and suddenly, it all becomes joyful. For most of us, domesticity is not a curated project. It’s a grind.

The key isn’t to reject the domestic—it’s to reclaim it on our own terms. If we do take joy in it, it must be because it’s truly ours. Not performance. Not expectation. Not obligation.

And not a cage we decorate, calling it freedom.

PARENTS WHO THINK TO THE COMMENTS 👇🏻

Domestic life: a sanctuary or a beautifully decorated trap? What parts of home feel like yours, and what parts feel like they belong to everyone but you? Drop your survival hacks, small rebellions, and quiet (or loud) acts of defiance below. Let’s get into it 🫶🏼