Why Design Lovers Are Obsessed With Apple TV's New Series "Home"

A family home inside a greenhouse in rural Sweden. A bamboo treehouse in Bali. A 344 square-foot Hong Kong apartment that transforms to infinite layouts. These are just a few of the boundary-pushing buildings featured in the new AppleTV+ series Home. Although the houses featured are some of the most unconventional and innovative in the world, this is not your average home show. "We knew we weren't making a series that was just about incredible architecture," Doug Pray, a director and executive producer on the show tells House Beautiful. "The series is just as much about the homeowners and the concept of innovation and big ideas and solving problems creatively as it was just the house itself."

Tellingly, neither Pray nor many of the show's producers have a background in home or renovation television—but that just may be what makes the series so compelling. In each episode, viewers are introduced to a home, yes, but, more important, to the people living in it—often the ones who created it, too. Over the course of each 30 minute episode, you can't help but become enraptured by a Swedish family trying to find a safe space for an Autistic son, or a Chicago artist bringing his community together through a new space. "Nobody is going to just watch a show about the home," Pray says. "Even the remodeling stories are out the characters. In any good show, that’s essential."

Through the homes, viewers also come to understand the ideas that went into these structures. "We wanted to find homes that are innovative and forward-looking, that speak to design today," Pray explains. His hope is that homeowners in any type of home can be inspired by these ideas. "I don’t want this series to be something viewers would watch and just think, 'Oh, that’s nice but I can’t have that. I don’t live in Sweden, or I don’t have money, or I’m not an architect,'" Pray says. "I want the opposite. I want people to think, 'You know, maybe we could do that in our house to a small degree. Maybe we could put plants on our balcony in Brooklyn; maybe we can’t put a greenhouse around it, but we could get the benefit of these plants. Maybe we can recycle our gray water."

See the homes from the series below and watch all nine episodes on AppleTV+ now.