Sydney Sweeney and "SNL" Took On Bland Airbnb Design

If you spend enough time in Airbnbs, you might start to notice a sameness to rooms that have no formal or geographic connection. If a hotel room looks like another hotel room in the same chain, that’s one thing; if two rooms on opposite sides of the country have nearly identical aesthetics, that’s another. Clearly someone on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live has spent some time thinking about this — and on this weekend’s episode, it made for an especially memorable sketch.

The sketch featured Chloe Troast and guest host Sydney Sweeney as interior designers dedicated solely to working on Airbnbs. “We can make your rentals pop with plain furniture and art for nobody,” Sweeney declares early in the sketch. If you’ve ever been baffled by a lockbox or overwhelmed by k-cups, you’re likely to shudder with recognition as you watch the sketch.

The sketch feels like a spiritual sequel to the faux hotel commercial that aired when Billie Eilish hosted two years ago. It’s also worth mentioning that the phenomenon underlying this sketch — Airbnbs beginning to have a shared design aesthetic — is something memorably documented in Kyle Chayka’s recent nonfiction book Filterworld.

Elsewhere in the episode, Sweeney worked in a number of different registers, from an absurdist conversation with Please Don’t Destroy to an attempted seduction of Air Bud. Not a bad appearance from the second star of Madame Web to host the show in the last six weeks.

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