Inside Emma Roberts’ Dollhouse: A Quirky House Tour with Unsolicited Hot Takes

Welcome to my first unsolicited house tour.

I had every intention of writing about the end of the Dolls of Our Lives podcast this week, but then I saw Emma Roberts’ Open Door tour of her home, a house she compared to “a dollhouse.” Little did I know we’d be meeting her doll collection, and I’d be inspired to do a deep dive into interior decorators, cord covers, and more. So next week, I will share some reflections on wrapping up Dolls of Our Lives after five years. (You can get 20% off paid membership in honor of the show’s last episode here).

This week, however, I am starting a new series no one asked for - unsolicited house tours, where I offer my interpretation of spaces where I have not been invited to be a tour guide. 

There are many ways of knowing someone. If they’re an actor, I could seek out their trivia page on imdb.com (as I frequently do). If I looked up Emma Roberts, I’d find that her favorite actor is Rupert Grint (!), one of her idols is singer/actor JoJo (honestly, same), and her fashion idols are the Olsen twins (again, same). This page would not tell me about her love of dolls, however.

 For that, we have to explore her home. 

In a kind of meta way, I want to open my tour by questioning house tours as a form. What can we learn about someone from their space? Look around your own room, what could a stranger understand about you just with access to your space? Imagine you’re appearing on Room Raiders, and someone is evaluating your room for your dateability. Bypass the horror of this premise, and just imagine the objects and things you delight in sharing with guests in your home to communicate some sense of yourself. Maybe they are prized pieces of furniture or jewelry from a loved one, a poster of your favorite band, a tired but loved cookbook, whatever. I think the spaces where we spend our lives and keep our things can tell us a lot, not just about ourselves, but about the societies that made us. This is why George Washington’s house is interesting, for example. It’s not about celebrating the wealth of a person who claimed ownership over so many, but the casual domesticity and comfort of his life juxtaposed with the spaces of those whom he enslaved and what that says about his world. 

House tours can take many forms: artistic, biographical, decorative, etc. What style, you might ask, will Emma Roberts’ house tour be? The answer is “complicated.” 

We open with what I will call an insecure table setting. Taking us to her “quiet room” we get this tough offering about a fireplace she had redone. 

Personally, I would have kept the mirrored look and 86’d the stripes she had the fireplace recovered in. So many stripes in one space starts to feel carceral at some point. As we stay in this room and sit with her insecurity, I want to throw out to the group, “What is style in 2024?” Is it throwing pattern on pattern as her interior designers seem to believe, or is it functional? Quirky? Representative of personal taste?  As William Morris once said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I am choosing to believe this is what guided Emma. 

As we proceed through the living room, we encounter a tough moment for me personally. This is not what I thought “making a drink” involved. If it’s just pouring, I would like to nominate myself for official bartender of Polar seltzer. 

Staying at the bar, we meet some of her artwork in the form of bottle person Daniel Day Lewis. Stolen from a Vanity Fair Oscar afterparty, it is, as Emma notes, a “conversation piece.” If I didn’t know Lewis had retired from acting, I’d be wondering if this was actually him preparing for an as-yet-unwritten role as “bottle man in haunted dollhouse.” It would put Phantom Thread to shame. 

Please watch your step as we travel to Emma’s office area. I warn you, this may be triggering for some who are uncomfortable with dolls. First, we’ll be confronted with a vision board.

If you look closely, you’ll see the phrase “I’ve worn lampshades on my head” juxtaposed with photos of Emma herself, models, the original cast of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and a cartoon saying “Happiness is a peanut.” If this has you thinking “Is this how nightmares begin?” Or, “Are these the clues to an escape room?” No, sadly, you are mistaken. 

This is her inspiration board, a thing she loves because “it’s always in progress.” What kind of progress? This is a question I want an answer to. Does she want to be Ripley? Does she want to be like Gwyneth Paltrow? A peanut? I want answers! Historically, this part of the tour allows us to note the constant pressure on the individual in late stage-capitalism to relentlessly focus on self-development. As her hero Joan Didion noted often, such storytelling about our constant self-analysis, development, and its importance could itself be a delusion. I expect nothing less from a person who made her first professional appearance in Blow with Johnny Depp (bleak) and rose to fame on Nickelodeon as the star of Unfabulous (more bleak). Now, I’d be afraid her early childhood entry into acting could have harmed her psyche. If only she’d show us a sign she’s okay. 

Okay, so far, so good. Nothing weird about dolls! (says the host of a doll podcast) 

 Pardon? 

Here we meet Emma’s doll collection. Emma’s dolls include Leggy Jill, Blythe dolls, and drunk cowboy Barbie.

I love this for her. As connoisseurs of celebrity house tours may note, many can feel like sterile beige blah machines, seemingly designed by a bot to make all visitors think “she is an unproblematic person of taste.” Not this girl! I think we can all appreciate the commitment she has to her collection, showing it off with pride of place next to an arguably scarier vision board. I would particularly like to call your attention to her collection itself. Featuring Barbies, and dolls stemming mostly from the 1970s, I have to wonder if the dolls reflect her romanticization of the decade we see throughout the house, which also features prominent copies of books by Joan Didion and a shrine to Joni Mitchell. These dolls are a bit eccentric (respect), but I have to wonder why we aren’t seeing any popular dolls from her own lifetime. No Cabbage Patch or American Girl dolls? I would love to know the story there. 

We now turn to the most haunting moment of the tour for me. Emma shares that someone once asked her if she’s scared her dolls will come to life and haunt her. 

Her response, that she hopes they will every night and wake her up, is revelatory. Sometimes you don’t know what kind of house tour you’re on until you reach a foundational object or interpretive moment in the house where the guides bring up an important life event, etc. For example, at Hyde Park, home of FDR, standing in the long walkway in front of the house, a guide told our tour about his polio diagnosis which led to a lifelong fear of fire. To abate his own fear, FDR would practice crawling down the stairs, out the door, and down the long walk to prove he could save himself if necessary. Standing in the long drive before the house when we learned this, we can appreciate the strength it took for him to crawl such a long distance. For Emma, the dolls tell us a lot about her sense of humor (she has one), and that this is a tour that embraces camp and the absurd. There is also something haunting about a former child star who cherishes such strong symbols of play. It gives “Felicity doll in the Britney Spears Rolling Stone cover” levels of juxtaposition. It’s also refreshing to see a traditionally blonde het-woman not just lean into “Live, Laugh, Love” prints as decor (no offense to those reading this who bought one in Marshall’s, we all must do what we can to find peace in these times).

Perhaps my favorite moment in the tour is not doll-related. In the family room, we see a copy of Norwood by Charles Portis on a bookshelf. Emma notes  “This is a book I actually gave as a gift to my ex. But then we broke up. I saw how much it was worth and I kept it.” The honesty, the salt, the transparent thinking like a collector! I love it. Don’t be generous in a breakup! You take back your mix tapes, or in this case, an expensive book, and display it with pride. That is feminism. (?) 

As we continue the tour, we see Emma’s childhood “timeout chair.” Interesting to see a symbol of 90s discipline reimagined as fun interior decor enjoyed today by her son. Speaking of interior design trends, we are confronted with this “invention” in her bedroom.

Presented as a solution to a nagging problem, her interior designers created “cord covers” ($55 each) to prevent guests from being subjected to the ugliness of power cords. Instead, guests to Emma’s home can stare at these linen-covered cords that give equal parts “Does Lilly Pulitzer make snakes?” and “Tea cozy meets constant fire panic.” Frankly, this style choice speaks right to the low-grade anxiety of our age.  I’m sure Gatsby had several. 

We close in the bathroom, to offer guests perhaps a metaphorical cleansing. After learning this is where she conducts her Zoom meetings, reads magazines, and unwinds, she hits us with this moment of insecurity about her post-tour plans.

Once again, Emma upends our preconceived notions of the tour and its subject by confronting us with a very likable vulnerability after showing us a space that, on its surface, suggests someone who doesn’t care if we like her or not. 

Ultimately, Emma shows us that she is complicated, like her home, and a work in progress, not unlike her inspiration board. 

Thank you for attending my first unsolicited house tour. What do you imagine would be for sale in the gift shop? 

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Want to talk house tours? And suggest future subjects for unsolicited house tours? Hop in the comments or contact me.

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Have a topic you’d like me to write about or make a thread on? Email me at MaryMargaret.Mahoney@gmail.com with “Newsletter Idea” in the subject line. 

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