Laura Bayne was ready to start a new chapter. After a divorce and the pandemic, which made working from anywhere a real possibility, she decided to make a move from Winchester, Massachusetts, to her favorite place in the country: midcoast Maine. She envisioned a cozy hideaway in a friendly community somewhere near Harpswell or Rockport that valued the arts and the outdoors, and a hub for her two grown children and their families. But there was one major issue with this plan: Laura didn’t like any of the homes she toured in those areas.

“I was driving here frequently to check out listings, and during one of those trips, my son turned up one for land and we stopped by and fell in love instantly,” Laura says of a property they found in St. George, closer to Rockport. “On my second visit, a neighbor walked over to say hello and offered to answer any questions, which helped make my decision easier.”

The land has a gentle slope and is surrounded by trees that change colors in the fall. The calm currents of Cutler Cove, off the St. George River, are visible through the branches. Laura, a chief information officer, imagined kayaking and paddleboarding after work and hosting Thanksgiving dinners against a backdrop of vibrant leaves. But then a second issue came into play. “I was naive in thinking that building would be less expensive than buying a new house, or at least not more expensive,” she says, having seen one estimate. “So I started the process with a different architect and builder, but their estimate was 50 percent higher than the original, so I canceled the project.”

The premise of the critically panned 1996 film Bio-Dome is closer to our reality than I’d like to admit. In it, the planet has become so polluted it’s rapidly becoming unsuitable for human life. (Sound familiar?) With the backing of a powerful investor, a group of environmental scientists seal themselves in an enormous enclosed terrarium for a year as part of a climate experiment. In true ’90s slacker comedy fashion, the two stoner protagonists accidentally get themselves locked inside the Bio-Dome, and, of course, wreak havoc.

Though the film’s plot is fictional, its premise is loosely based on the real-life Biosphere 2, a $150-million hermetically sealed environmental system in Oracle, Arizona, with wilderness biomes including a rainforest, desert, grassy savannah, mangrove wetlands, and a 25-foot-deep ocean with a coral reef, in which eight researchers actually lived between 1991 and 1993. The experiment famously ended in disaster when rising carbon dioxide levels and crop failure threatened the participants’ lives. While geodesic domes with controlled environments designed to replicate Earth’s ecosystems seemed eccentric in the early 1990s, when climate change was just starting to enter the mainstream discourse, in the decades since, multimillion- or billion-dollar developments that bring the natural world—or simulations of it—inside have become increasingly common. In some cases, like with “the world’s largest indoor desert” in Omaha, Nebraska, or Montreal’s Biosphère (housed in the Expo 67 geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller), these attractions are centered around education and research. Then, there’s a slightly different iteration developed purely for recreation. As global temperatures rise and “unprecedented weather events” occur with increasing regularity, there might be a future where more of our outdoor recreation will be relegated to indoor simulations. In some ways, these built environments are case studies for how successfully (or unsuccessfully) natural environments can be replicated to facilitate the human pastimes—like surfing or skiing, even hiking—that rely on them.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Group’s Seagaia Ocean Dome was an early example of the over-the-top-faux-natural-environment-as-amusement-park phenomenon. Opened in 1993, the $1.8 billion facility, which was situated less than .2 miles from an actual beach in the coastal city of Miyazaki, Japan, was a Polynesia-themed marvel with a 129,166-square-foot man-made beach with sand from crushed marble and a wave machine capable of 200 surfable variations (in unsalted, chlorinated water). It closed in 2007, faltering under steep ticket prices and operational costs, but that wasn’t the end of the road for artificial beaches. There’s one at the colossal New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, with space for more than 6,000 beachgoers to lounge under its fake sun. At Berlin’s Tropical Islands, which is housed in a 1938 airfield hangar, a massive screen with a photo of a blue sky hovers above a “sea” made up by three Olympic-size swimming pools. The indoor air temperature is kept in the high seventies.

On the other end of the weather spectrum, there are indoor ski resorts like Ski Dubai, a 242,000-square-foot “snow park” in the Mall of the Emirates, where 30 to 40 tons of new snow are produced nightly to blanket five imitation ski slopes, or Big Snow American Dream, North America’s only indoor ski resort, in New Jersey. Ironically, the environmental impact of many of these climate-controlled facilities is significant; a 2013 report, for example, estimated that Ski Dubai’s annual greenhouse gas emissions equate to 900 annual round-trip flights from Dubai to Munich. Massive developments like Ski Dubai or Paradise Island Water Park that simulate natural environments in contained spaces pump tons of carbon into the atmosphere, only exacerbating the factors that increasingly threaten those places and make their conditions more hostile.

Christiana Moss of Studio Ma, an award-winning architecture and environmental design studio in Phoenix, Arizona, has some ideas about the way we should be approaching buildings that bring the outdoors indoors. As temperatures increase, especially in places like Phoenix, Moss believes more structures need to be suited to not only controlling contrasting indoor climates, but tempering them with the heat outside. “Increasingly, the realm of what you would consider indoors and what we consider outdoors needs to be expanded and blended to temper exterior temperatures,” she says. “It’s about the layers of interior and exterior space…. It’s a huge opportunity for really rethinking and redesigning what we consider to be indoors and outdoors, what we consider to be responsible cities, and how we think about access to shade in daylight.”

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s June 2001 issue. 

Sinuous, 60 feet long, and the aqueous blue of a Siamese cat’s eyes, the Donnell pool floats at the top of the world—or so it feels as you stand gazing across a 30-mile vista toward the Golden Gate shining in the distance. The ur-kidney, designed in 1948, is the progenitor of all free-form pools in the country, the one that knocked the right angles right off the American swimming hole and inspired scores of biomorphic imitations that pale in comparison.

But isn’t that the nature of icons?

So archetypal was this garden, that for years when you flipped open your Encyclopedia Britannica to “Landscape Architecture,” a photograph of the pool wrapping around its own curvaceous sculpture dared you to dive in and join the party—the hedonistic California dream of barbecues and endless summers.

Of course, El Novillero—the ranch owned by philanthropists Dewey and Jean Donnell and now maintained by their children—had an icon of its own in landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church. Two icons, when you consider that Lawrence Halprin—the 85-year-old landscape architect whose projects include Sonoma’s Sea Ranch and Seattle’s Freeway Park—worked for Church at the time and was intensely involved with the design of both pool and garden.

While Church attributed the pool’s singular shape to the patterns made by the meandering creeks in the salt marshes of the valley below, others see the influence of Jean Arp and Joan Miró. “No matter what he says about the salt marshes, it reflects a time when everybody was on the same wavelength artistically and these influences were unleashed,” argues Cleo Baldon, landscape designer and author of the book Reflections on the Pool.

“Well, yes, we were all very much influenced by people like Arp, Miró, and Kandinsky,” says Halprin. “We grew up at a time when they were major artists—and what they did has a great resemblance to the gardens of California. Kandinsky influences me more every year. But all this stuff about influences…you cannot tell the specifics of why a line is drawn a certain way.”

Like Isamu Noguchi’s 1944 glass coffee table, Eva Zeisel’s free-form Museum Shape dinnerware from 1946, and Morris Lapidus’s palette-shaped “woggles,” which began migrating to the ceilings of department stores in the early 1940s, the Donnell pool was both an organic product of its time and an unwitting ancestor to the mass-produced, self-conscious progeny—from amoeboid pools to patterned lunch pails to amorphous vanity tables in the Sears catalog.

America’s first kidney pool was also the result of a technological breakthrough. Gunite, a stiff, fast-setting blend of concrete and sand that’s sprayed onto pool framework and hardens almost on contact, allowed Church to shape his pivotal pool with ease and later enabled manufacturers to churn out kidneys like they were going out of style (until they did).

But it takes more than a kidney to create an iconic landscape. With an acre of oak-studded land in which to sprawl, this body of water is exquisitely scaled to its surroundings, like some modernist rendition of a mountain lake. And its shape, far from being arbitrary, is intimately connected to the nine-foot arching sculpture within, the meandering lines of the deck and lawn without, and the rolling hills and salt marshes beyond the clipped juniper hedge that contains the composition.

To Halprin, the pool’s design is as important from the perspective of the swimmer as from that of the viewer: “A rectangle is a simple, rigid geometric form—there’s not much you can do but go back and forth, over and over. But this pool of ours is much more interesting—you swim around things. The sculpture is like a boulder in a Sierra mountain pool: You can circle it, swim through the hole, or stop in the middle to sunbathe and socialize.” And, adds Baldon, the pool has real geometry. “It may be free-form, but look—it contains a swimming lane! It was done with great intent.”

Whatever its inspirations may be, the Donnell pool has doggedly resisted becoming just another Jetsonian cliché. “Arbitrary shapes—amoebas, zigzags, etc.—used without reason or apparent forethought, can be disastrous and become constant irritants in the scheme,” wrote Church, whose 2,000 gardens designed during a 40-year career employed all such shapes without a whiff of irritation.

Born in 1902, Church enjoyed the outdoor life in Ojai and Berkeley, where at the age of 12 he designed a garden for his mother. He shunned law for landscape architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and received his master’s from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design with a thesis that compared the Californian and Mediterranean landscapes, finding the latter “delightful and livable because of scale and imagination—not magnificence.”

It was, as he said, a prophecy. For not only had the Depression made a dent in people’s ability to hire legions of help to tend lavishly planted gardens, but California was screaming for an idiom of its own—one of drought-resistant plants appropriate to the climate and simplified schemes suited to an informal, alfresco lifestyle.

Out with the Palladian pavilion and in with the pool house.

The California garden offered an ideal canvas for a composition of terraces, cabanas, pools, and companionable gathering places for soaking up the sun and the martinis—and the plant life helped support the good life with shade, windscreens, and minimal maintenance. “How well it provides for the many types of living that can be carried on outdoors is the new standard by which we judge a garden,” wrote Church, in Gardens Are for People.

More concerned with functionality than horticultural ornamentation (he once jokingly commented that his favorite ground cover was asphalt), Thomas Church is the man most credited with releasing the California garden from its Beaux-Arts spell and English aspirations.

Church did look to Europe for inspiration, but it was the Europe of the present rather than the past. In two trips taken a decade apart, he was drawn to the architecture of Le Corbusier, Arp’s dreamscapes, Miró’s Cubist paintings, and Aalto’s undulating glass objects, although in Renaissance Italy he did find a potent parallel with California: “In both there is a class of people with the wealth to demand comfort and luxury, and the intelligence to demand beauty—a combination that, wherever found in the history of the world, has resulted in the planning of beautiful gardens.” The dream client defined.

Church’s style was secondary to the goal of marrying the wishes of the client to the possibilities of the land. His many projects include Pasatiempo, a planned community near Santa Cruz, the garden for the Sunset magazine headquarters (which consummated the love affair between the magazine and its favorite son), and the formal twin allées of pollarded sycamores planted beside the San Francisco Opera House.

During his second European tour, in 1937, Church visited the steel-and-glass pavilions of the International Exposition in Paris and went to Finland to meet Aalto, whose modernist Villa Mairea, then being designed for industrialist Harry Gullichsen and his art collector wife, Maire, has its own amorphously shaped pool—something between a kidney bean and a boomerang—nestled into the pine forest.

“Those days there was a headiness…as if it were a crusade we were on, not just something new or different. It was a social movement, the breaking of the box,” recalled former Sunset editor Walter Doty, in an interview conducted by U.C. Berkeley’s Regional History Office. Church got a chance to blow up the box in 1947, when he was hired to design the gardens and outbuildings for the Donnell’s 4,000-acre Sonoma ranch.

Living comfortably off money from family oil interests, Dewey and Jean Donnell not only appreciated contemporary design, they embodied the active, outdoor California lifestyle suited to a horticulturally restrained garden that blurred the boundaries between indoors and out. “My parents loved the modern aesthetic. And they were clear in wanting single-story ranch-style structures—nothing fussy, and no stairs,” recalls daughter Sandra Donnell. “That’s what drew them to Church in the first place.”

Although building materials were restricted just after the war, the pool was allowed to proceed as a fire-fighting resource. “Usually it’s the architecture that leads the symphony,” said Halprin, “but this was a wonderful opportunity, because it was the landscape that conducted. The pool and the gardens set the tone and everything else followed.” An architect on Church’s staff, George Rockrise, designed the lanai and cabana, which look of a piece with the main house, designed a few years later by architect Austin Pierpoint.

Jean, an enthusiastic gardener, was given a kitchen garden for herbs and roses and a greenhouse to raise exotic orchids, as well as three paved outdoor rooms. But the main expanse, set some distance up from the house in an oaken knoll, was to be a place for swim parties, ice cream sodas, barbecues beneath the trees, and cocktails under the stars. After Church chose his site, he selectively removed enough live oaks to frame the view over the valley yet retain a windscreen.

Today, El Novillero has been impeccably preserved by the Donnell children, who reunite at the ranch during holidays. Relying on memory and photographs, they’ve kept the house and garden as true to the original as possible, which includes replacing oak trees as they succumb to root fungus. “We had so many good times here,” says Sandra Donnell, “so many wonderful parties. Because our parents died fairly young, we decided to keep the property as it was when they were alive, and to share it with others.” Landscape architects and students make the pilgrimage each year, greeted by caretaker Neill Whitman, who lives on the property with his wife and two cats.

The pool, glazed lanai, and cement cabana are like a diorama of life during that period of postwar bliss when social unrest was a rumble so low that it was barely audible. Shapes borrowed from a Calder mobile sprawl across the wallpaper in the guesthouse, where monogrammed towels are poised for a post-dip dry-off. Period upholstery covers the studio-style couches and back issues of Holiday magazine (from 1954) are scattered on the vintage tables alongside angular lamps and glazed ceramics. All that’s missing is Chet Baker or Shirley Horn crackling on vinyl.

“It’s the same feeling you get from visiting the Truman House or Graceland—as if the place is still inhabited,” says landscape architect Charles Birnbaum, editor of Pioneers of American Landscape Design. “I feel like I’m walking into a Technicolor movie from the fifties—including the shade of blue in the pool.”

In his autobiography Becoming a Man, the late writer Paul Monette describes the otherworldly experience of encountering the Donnells’ realm, where people ate off Picasso-patterned plates and peacocks strutted by the pool. Brought up in a New England colonial prefab, he first met the family when visiting the nearby home of a Yale roommate in the early 1960s: “I was in a state of near hallucination from the moment I set foot there. Rich, where I grew up, meant old polished wood in high-ceilinged houses silent as churches. This was a sybarite’s pleasure-dome instead, the California good life raised to the nth degree. A stallion ride before breakfast, oranges right off the trees.”

To visit the ranch today is to enter a kind of time warp, quite apart from the period trappings and not because the landscape feels particularly dated (though some of the materials betray the era). Rather, one has a sensation of being transported to a distant time, when getting a piece of the “California good life” was as easy as plucking an orange from a tree—and being “modern” meant something. In 1968, the Sears Point Raceway was carved into the Sonoma foothills below El Novillero, proving that even money is no protection from progress. On calm days, the distant whining from the track intrudes upon the dreaminess of the setting and very nearly drowns out the ghostly sounds of ice tinkling against highball glasses.

For caretaker Whitman, the garden is most magical and meditative at night: “On a clear evening I like to sit on the end of the diving board, with the stars a few feet away and the lights of the city sparkling beyond the oak trees. I tell you, it’s like being right in the middle of a Maxfield Parrish painting.” 

Related Reading:

From the Archive: The Rise of the “Exurban House” 

The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Architect: Ludwig Godefroy  / @ludwiggodefroy

Footprint: 2,691 square feet

Photographer: Edmund Sumner / @edmundsumner

Photographer: Paul Raeside

From the Architect: “My wife and I started this project in the middle of the pandemic, when we suddenly desired to live close to a garden—so we decided to renovate this house for us and our daughter. Casa SanJe was an ordinary Mexican house from the ’80s, without any style, with tiles on the floor and texturized plaster finishing on the walls called tirol.

“The main idea was to reconnect the house with its garden by opening large windows everywhere on the ground floor. Inside and outside are always connected in this house. We wanted to reverse the space, for the garden to become more important than the house itself. Then on the inside we cleaned up and streamlined all the finishings. We worked with just a few materials: concrete, wood, and red volcanic stone, called tezontle, to calm down the atmosphere of the house. Even the furniture, like the table and the sofa, is made out of concrete.

“We wanted the space to be timeless, existing outside of any trend, relying on simple materials that are able to age instead of getting damaged over time. We wanted the house to have a very simple and quiet ambiance, in order to create a place to rest.”

Location: 4529 Orchard Avenue, San Diego, California

Price: $2,695,000

Year Built: 1962

Renovation Date: 2019

Renovation Architect: Steven Lombardi

Footprint: 2,345 square feet (3 bedrooms, 3 baths)

Lot Size: 0.13 Acres

From the Agent: “Tucked into a peaceful pocket of Ocean Beach, 4529 Orchard Ave is a refined contemporary retreat where modern design meets coastal serenity. Extensively remodeled in 2019, the home features clean architectural lines, high-end finishes, and seamless indoor/outdoor flow. Sunlit living spaces open to a tranquil deck that is perfect for morning coffee or alfresco work. The versatile lower level is ideal for guests or multigenerational living. Outside, a lush backyard oasis flourishes with fruit trees, fragrant wisteria, and vibrant greenery. Evening sunsets here are pure magic, from fireside gatherings with ocean views to the distant sound of crashing waves. This is a rare find in one of San Diego’s most beloved seaside enclaves.”

A couple of years ago, when I was shopping for a new couch, I spent an hour or so a day, every day, for weeks, until I found the right one, on Facebook Marketplace. It took another week or two to pester the seller enough to actually meet me, and then a day to figure out the logistics of moving a couch when you drive a Fiat. “When I was buying stuff, I organized my life around it. I would borrow people’s cars, and that’s how I’d spend my days off,” says Sami Reiss, a Dwell contributor who runs the excellent newsletter SNAKE, which scours the internet for interesting furniture and home goods for sale or on auction. Reiss says Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace also constituted a large part of his furniture education. “It was almost like liner notes in an album or something,” he says. “You’re like, oh, wow, the guy selling the Chiclet chair says it’s like Kartell. And you think ‘Hey, what’s Kartell?’ And then you look it up.”

In addition to being an educational source, Facebook Marketplace is a messy and anarchic vision of e-commerce. It is accessible through a tab within Facebook, though sometimes it will try to get you to download Messenger, a separate app, to communicate with sellers or buyers. It includes sponsored listings which may or may not have anything to do with terms you’ve searched for, and which range from petroleum-based underwear from Temu to just, like, a link to Ikea’s Lack coffee table’s page. You can purchase some items directly from Marketplace and have them shipped to you, either from a corporation or a person. But most people use it as a local consumer-to-consumer listing: a classified ad.

Facebook Marketplace has somewhere over a billion active users, and Business Dasher reports that around 474 million log into Facebook solely for Marketplace, though it’s not clear exactly how they came to that number. (Does it count if you scroll through the main feed for 15 seconds and Marketplace for an hour?) Because it relies mostly on local transactions, it is invaluable for home goods. It enables you to go see, touch, and (importantly) smell furniture before you buy it. You can sit on it! You can see what the color is like outside the studio lighting! You don’t have to wait for shipping, which for furniture and appliances can often stretch out for weeks or even months. And you can search for, and create alerts for, what you actually want, rather than relying on one of the six couches at the local thrift store being exactly what you’re looking for. For bargain hunters, reuse advocates, or those who simply know what they want (and it’s not an Instagram couch), Marketplace is one of the most vital resources online.

It’s not just garage sale leftovers, it’s how people sell cars, designer goods, and (at least here in Los Angeles) a large variety of creatively shaped avocados from their trees. And yet it stinks! How did this happen?

As a modern evolution of the classified ad, Facebook Marketplace takes a relatively simple concept (I would like to sell, buy, rent, work, or hire; please contact me if interested) and pushes it through a Play-Doh extrusion hole of market pressures and general Facebook weirdness. Like Mark Zuckerberg after a meeting with his stylist, it comes out the other side recognizable, but altered in sometimes inscrutable ways.

The basic classified ad is some kind of short advertisement of a product or service. You could view guitar-teaching lessons nailed to telephone poles in this category as well, and that sort of posting likely goes back as far as writing systems do; announcements scrawled on walls, that kind of thing. According to Strange Red Cow, a history of classified ads written by Sara Bader, the first newspaper classified ads began appearing in the 17th century in England. The first in the United States, or rather the Province of Massachusetts Bay, as it was called at the time, was in the 1704 Boston News-Letter, and was, appropriately enough, a classified ad about classified ads. The lister wrote (SIC, as best I can):

“This News Letter is to be continued Weekly; and all Persons who have any Houses, Lands, Tenements, Farmes, Ships Vessels, Goods, Wares or Merchandizes,&c. to be Sold, or Lett; or Servants Run away; or Goods Stoll or Lost, may have the fame Inserted at a Reasonable Rate; from Twelve Pence to Five Shillings and not to exceed.”

Initially, some newspapers chafed at the idea of advertising of any sort in their product, seeing it as potentially cheapening or inappropriate, but the concept soon proved far too lucrative to deny. Classified ads were a massive part of how newspapers made money; in 2000, they made up around 40 percent of the average newspaper’s revenue. A decade later, that was down to 18 percent, courtesy largely of Craig Newmark and Craigslist. Craigslist operates with a quaint 1990s tech-utopian worldview, with the current CEO repeatedly voicing that he views the platform as a public good and that the company has actively chosen not to maximize profit. It hasn’t really changed its layout in decades, it retains a small staff, it shows no interest in expanding beyond its core product, and it makes far less money than it probably could. (Craigslist’s revenue comes from charging a small fee for job listings; that’s about it.)

It’s in the best interest of the classified ad provider to maintain a clear, useful system in which goods and services are exchanged, so that users and customers—who are, in their case, the same thing—are encouraged to return and purchase more ads, which provide more value for more customers, and the cycle continues.

 I would never have Facebook on my phone if not for Marketplace. They won! 

Facebook Marketplace, which launched in late 2016, is the first classified ads system that discards that framework. On Marketplace, as in the rest of Meta’s properties, customers and users are not the same: users are the people posting, buying, and selling, but the customers are advertisers. Meta’s challenge lies in the balancing of retaining those using Marketplace to buy and sell local items without losing what makes Marketplace valuable to the advertisers which actually pay the bills.

Marketplace has a few advantages over past versions of classified ads. It has a gigantic reach, thanks to the near-ubiquity of Facebook accounts. But activity on the platform overall is decreasing. According to a recent ExpressVPN survey, nearly a quarter of those surveyed in the U.S. either deactivated their account or have one but rarely use it, a number even higher in France and Germany. For many users—about 18 percent in the U.S., per that survey—accounts often linger on, semi-forgotten, like the T-shirt that stays at the bottom of your drawer that you do laundry to avoid wearing because it’s two sizes too small. This also makes it exceedingly easy to post listings. You probably already have an account or, maybe even the app on your phone already.

Marketplace is also free to use, with a couple of niche exceptions most users won’t encounter. It has rapidly increased in size and reach, now easily outpacing Craigslist. According to Statista, Craigslist has about 142 million monthly active users, compared to Marketplace’s aforementioned billion-plus. In terms of safety, this sort of local consumer-to-consumer exchange has long been a topic of terror for local news (“Instead of a half-price Vitamix, the seller opened the door holding a BIG GUN”) which Meta says they can mitigate by linking seller profiles to actual human profiles, though this doesn’t prevent sellers who include little identifying information, listings with inaccurate or misleading information, or profiles that aren’t real at all. Meta itself says it shut down about 1.4 billion fake accounts between October and December of 2024. (That also hasn’t stopped those local news reports.)

Meta also says that Marketplace is a tool for meeting people and forming community connections. That’s unusual in a world where we purchase beds and couches on our phones without having ever touched them.

Marketplace is also highly unprofessional. When you list something on eBay, Poshmark, or Depop, it finds the exact product line and name of your item, suggests appropriate prices based on past transactions, and fills out fields like size, weight, and age. Facebook Marketplace offers none of that. This means that the platform is mostly full of people’s garbage—but it’s one of the last places online where you can really find a bargain. “You could find, like, an original Corbusier LC2 chair for like five bucks,” says Reiss. “Your business model can’t be dependent on that, of course. But if you go on Facebook Marketplace enough, you might find it within a couple years.”

We don’t know what Meta is trying to do with Marketplace, only what it’s already done.

Marketplace’s value to Facebook is not directly financial. The only exception: Meta charges a 10 percent fee on the purchase price of shipped Marketplace items only, which go through the company’s own payment system, but this is a very low percentage of the total commerce conducted on Marketplace. There are no seller fees, which is where eBay makes its money; even advertisements are not separated from Facebook’s main feed, meaning that you can’t purchase an ad only for Marketplace.

Given how little direct financial benefit for the company comes from Marketplace, we have to look a little more obliquely to figure out why it exists at all. Meta’s goal is to get users on the site. As users spend decreasing amounts of time (reportedly 20 percent less than five years ago) on Facebook, and in decreasing numbers, Meta can keep their active user statistics high with Marketplace. Theoretically, users might also spend more time on Facebook’s main social media product, since they’re already on the site. (Meta did not provide much help when it came to this line of questioning.) This is perhaps why Facebook hasn’t spun Marketplace out into its own product the way they’ve done with Messenger. In addition to the active user count boost, of course, users spending time on the site allows Facebook to accumulate massive amounts of shopping and demographic data, which can then be used to sell ads.

Facebook can also use Marketplace as part of its narrative of connecting people to build communities and make the world a better place. Though it’s fundamentally different from Craigslist in many ways, this story feels just as quaint as Craigslist’s ethos of making a resource free and available for all. 

We don’t know what Meta is trying to do with Marketplace, only what it’s already done. The fact that it hasn’t been spun out indicates that it has value to Facebook. We know that it’s an essential service and growing rapidly. We also know that the user experience is not optimized to facilitate efficient trade, and that alone means that it stinks to use.

Say you want a couch, in like-new condition, located within 20 miles of you, and priced at under $800. Now say you change that search to “gray couch.” All the filters reset, forcing you to spend time filling them out again. Unlike Craigslist or eBay or really anywhere, Marketplace does not support Boolean search terms, which allow you to, say, exclude all items in your gray couch search that have the word “leather” in them.

Results are similarly incompetent, sometimes showing products well outside your included search radius while burying ones that are right next door. “Results from outside your search” often include results that actually are well inside your search. Sponsored results, which look exactly like actual results, litter the page with nonsense. A search for “coffee table” gave me sponsored results from Temu for a weather-resistant, galvanized steel retaining wall and a large pillow with an anime character printed on it.

And yet this chaos is, to me at least, both charming and comforting. Through conscious effort, rank incompetence, or some combination of the two, Facebook has made something that I use constantly, despite having not used the Facebook social media app in five years or more. A CNBC report from early March spoke to many people, most of them young, who don’t use Facebook (either out of moral conviction or, more often, because Facebook is for old people) but who still use Marketplace. I have the app on my phone. I would never have Facebook on my phone if not for Marketplace. They won! 

And yet this begs some hard questions about the future of this product. We know that Facebook’s user base is older, and that each younger generation uses it less and less. Research firms have speculated that Instagram already produces more than half of Meta’s revenue as Facebook’s impact continues to shrink. Yet it’s clear that of those who use Facebook, Marketplace is a bigger pull for Gen Z than it is for Gen X or Boomers. Modern resale and hustle culture, budget awareness, lack of disposable income, some desire for reuse, whatever it is, younger people are using Marketplace. I suspect that a significant portion of the 32 percent of American teens who use Facebook are using it exclusively or almost exclusively for Marketplace. (Facebook would not provide figures for this.) Teens have always loved to thrift, and Gen Z is no different. Marketplace, like Groups, is a side feature that may have to become the main product.

This leaves Facebook on unsteady ground. If Marketplace truly is a loss leader, Charles Lindsey, a professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo, says it’s very unlikely that it can be turned profitable. “After five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, we might need to monetize it because the other areas of the business aren’t fundamentally sound anymore,” he says. Facebook does have its other properties like Instagram (which does a fair amount of e-commerce itself) and Whatsapp. But if Marketplace doesn’t provide enough value why would Meta continue to support it? Would it be spun off into its own property with its own ad sales team? Shut down entirely? Folded into Instagram in some way? How does this jibe with Meta’s stated goal of creating AI profiles on Facebook? Can you, in the physical world we occupy, purchase and pick up a wobbly-legged coffee table from a bot?

If Marketplace does suffer in some way, getting shut down or dismantled or changed to something unusable, consumers will have a familiar problem. Marketplace grew incredibly quickly and boxed out its competitors by, at least in part, not needing to directly make money. When the time comes that it does have to make money, well, Uber is a few years ahead of them in this process and just now started posting a profit (though it’s much less than expected, and the company still owes at least ten times that amount in debt). And yet Marketplace, for all its issues, is great and weird and messy. It’s also a type of market that I think needs to exist, a fundamental internet utility. “It’s just like a garage sale,” says Reiss. “Most of the stuff there is always going to be bad, but all you need is one win in a blue moon to keep it worth it.”

Related Reading:

How to Navigate the Wild World of Facebook Marketplace

The Magic of the DesignMyRoom SubReddit

Starting over is a tedious, character-building process, a lesson that artist Thomas Rodehuth has had to relearn again and again in the nine years since he moved to the States from Cologne, Germany. His most recent reset was spurred by the dissolution of his marriage, which left him without a place to live in the summer of 2023. 

He spent the next eight months crisscrossing Los Angeles on dog and cat sitting jobs—”a month here, two weeks here, four weeks there,” he recalls of this transient period—before finally landing upon a quirky basement-level property on a dead-end street near MacArthur Park.

The interiors were dark and empty, covered up by dingy yellow curtains, and there was a “damp towel” smell permeating the place which Thomas was never able to fully get rid of—even with a Flamingo Estate tomato candle burning all the time. 

But he was charmed, not repelled by the peculiarity of the place. “I immediately fell in love with it because it was weird and very funky,” he says. Part of its offbeat appeal was due to its layout, which has a small, lofted nook where Thomas would sleep right off the open living area, accessible by a narrow trail of tile steps. 

Location: 307 South Chadwick Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Price: $3,300,000

Year Built: 1895

Renovation Dates: 1953 – 2003

Renovation Architect: Frank Weise

Footprint: 2,698 square feet (3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths)

From the Agent: “Experience a unique opportunity to own a piece of Philadelphia’s architectural heritage at 307 S. Chadwick Street. This historically designated home, reimagined by architect Frank Weise between 1954 and 2003, exemplifies midcentury-modern and postmodern design. Upon his death, the building was completely restored, updated and maintained by his heirs. The central brick section showcases rationalist elements, while the prominent batten-seam, terne-metal mansard (replaced in copper in 2005) introduces a bold, postmodern touch. A deeply projecting metal cornice adds a distinctive flair, and even functional features, like the furniture hoisting boom, are thoughtfully incorporated. Configured as a duplex, the property features Frank Weise’s studio/offices on the lower levels, while the upper floors, accessible via a private entrance, comprise the main residence. In total, the property offers three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms. A one-car carport adds convenience in this central location.”

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Dilbeek, Belgium

Architect: Madam Architectuur / @madamarchitectuur

Footprint: 2,583 square feet

Structural Engineer: Paridaens

Landscape Design: Frederik Cassiman

Photographer: Olmo Peeters / @oooolmoooo

From the Architect: “Sofie is a house full of character, located in Dilbeek, Belgium, in a very green environment. The house needed to be completely renovated but also partly extended. There were many beautiful elements present that we wanted to preserve: wooden floors, moldings, decorative wooden elements around windows and doors, and stairs—but above all we wanted to restore the existing volume.

“Madam chose to create an extension on the north side relative to the house to allow east and west sunlight to enter the home. That side also offers the best view to the fields in front and the garden in the back.

“Both the extension and the terrace are constructed using a green pigmented polished concrete, so inside and outside appear literally flow into each other. In terms of materiality, the existing house is very austere, identical to its former condition. The extension is clad in glazed green tiles for a captivating contrast between existing and new. Inside the house there is an interconnection of smaller spaces, resulting in cozy places with their own character, different views, varying light, and distinct atmospheres.”

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

When a Washington, D.C. couple with four small children approached Cedar Architecture about designing a passive home, architect Deborah Buelow knew that her first job would be to orient the house towards sunlight. She quickly realized that sighting the house towards the sun might mean putting the largest windows in public view—which neither she nor the family wanted—so Buelow created an eye-catching, sun-catching workaround.

“We ended up turning the house inward and backward a bit,” Buelow explains. “That way, we could bring in the southern sun through a central stairwell.” The home has two main levels plus a basement, and the wide, open stairwell allows sunlight to reach all three floors. “We were really trying to bring light deep in,” she says.

The stairwell also unifies the home while dividing the space into its different functions—the downstairs living area, the upstairs sleeping area and so on. However, the clients were concerned that their little ones might not be safe around the stairs.

“There was a certain amount of insecurity about the handrails being insufficient,” Buelow says. “This was more of a mental issue. The handrail would keep them safe, but psychologically they felt like it might not.”

Many of us have felt nervous climbing a wide, open staircase, and Buelow knew it was her job to make everyone who spent time in this home feel as comfortable as possible. When the owners suggested working with Treenet Collective to build a net that could hang within the staircase and break a fall, Buelow was ready to start collaborating.

“I thought it was brilliant,” she said. “We had this high-end architecture, but we were also building a family home. We wanted an element that could engage the kids on a humane scale.”

Treenet Collective worked in the space for a week and a half. They took the homeowners’ idea of building a colorful net and expanded it into what became a rainbow whirl—or, as it’s now called, the “Rainbow Tornado.” The piece is sculptural, colorful, and dynamic. It also provides the necessary psychological relief to anyone climbing up or down the stairs. 

How they pulled it off: A home that provides peace of mind for parents and children

• The stairwell was partially under construction when the homeowners became concerned about the possibility of someone falling over the railing. Cedar Architecture solved this problem by raising the railing from a standard 36″ to a full 42″ high, but by that point the idea of the net had already been proposed. Buelow understood that the net could serve as both an additional layer of safety and a fun design element, so she decided to explore the possibilities.

• The homeowners initially wanted Treenet Collective to create a climbable net that the children could play on. The architects considered this but ultimately decided that a functional net wouldn’t be feasible, and Treenet Collective was brought in to create an art piece instead.

• The Rainbow Tornado was constructed out of a thinner version of the paracord that is used for rock climbing. The space it was designed to cover is 16’ high and 30″ wide, but the structure itself only spans from the first floor to the second, making it 11’ high. The gaps between paracord elements are variable, but the anchors were placed approximately 2 ½” apart. This makes the netting fairly compact and ensures that very little can fall through.

“We are a collaborative design firm and love working with other design-oriented thinkers to come up with solutions,” Buelow explains. “The Treenet Collective approached the project in the same way. By the time they came on board, we had already decided it wasn’t possible to do a net, so they knew they were coming in to do something a little different than they normally do.”

Thinking carefully about peace of mind may also generate some unexpected benefits. The Rainbow Tornado has never had to break a human’s fall, but it has caught a toy or two that might otherwise have tumbled to the basement. Most importantly, it’s brought joy to the entire family by helping them live more comfortably in their space.

As Buelow explains, it, “A home is a safety net.”

Project Credits

Architect: Cedar Architecture
Builder: Thorsen Construction
Interior Decorator: Madigan Schuler
Net: Treenet Collective
Passive House Consultant: Peabody-Fine Architects
Passive House Rater: Chris Conway
Structural Engineer: APAC Engineering
M/E/P Engineer: MaGrann Associates
Civil: RC Fields
Geotechnical: Geotech Engineers 

Related Reading:

How They Pulled It Off: A Twisty, Floating Staircase for a 14-Foot Ceiling

How They Pulled It Off: A Secret Stair Hatch That Seals Off the Living Space