Why Are So Many Women Dreaming of Rustic Domesticity? --- These days, we could all use the respite of a patchwork quilt, a blazing fireplace and a perfectly set dinner table.

“The other day, I noticed that a surprising number of women I know are following the Instagram account of a woman in the Scottish countryside whose horses picturesquely wander into her cottage's rustic kitchen. There are tousled children in thick wool sweaters and copper pots hanging from the ceiling. What is the appeal of this old-fashioned home life? Why are so many busy urban people drawn to it?

 

There is something reassuring about these storybook images. No matter your politics, it is alarming to walk through New York City streets against an apocalyptically orange sky after the California fires, or to contemplate ChatGPT's ability to write our sentences and think our thoughts. As William Wordsworth put it, "The world is too much with us." No wonder there is an appetite for unchanging domestic interiors, for dispatches from a slower, simpler life. For me the most sublimely comforting of these domestic vistas is Victoria Wolff's cult Instagram account, ouramagansetthouse.

 

She and her husband -- the Trump chronicler Michael Wolff, whose involvement with Jeffrey Epstein has been in the news in recent weeks -- left the city over a year ago. They now live full time with their two children in a beautiful, drafty 1829 farmhouse. The account offers glimpses of their new life: There is a framed painting of a ship tossed in a stormy sea, pies made from blackberries picked in the garden, quilts strewn on couches, an American flag hanging on the front porch. We see a wood-burning stove, framed drawings of ferns.

 

Though the Wolffs' farmhouse is technically in the Hamptons, this is a Hamptons entirely without glitz, no $50 lobster salads or traffic snarls or Prada stores. Her version harks back to painters moving East for the light. There are wild tangles of black-eyed Susans and sunflowers. There is applesauce, made with an apple peeler you crank by hand, simmering on the stove.

 

These images are a bulwark against change at a time when things seem to be changing at an alarming rate. Dreamy photographs of baskets and exposed-wood beams and straw hats hanging on peg hooks quiet thoughts such as "Will my job be replaced by AI?" They may also be feeding a deep, childhood notion of home we carry in our heads, something we read in "Little House on the Prairie" or "Little Women," an idealized vision of family happiness. They connect with a mythic American past.

 

Victoria began her Instagram account after staging videos for her husband's political commentary. As he processes disturbing news cycles, holding a coffee mug while sitting, say, at the kitchen table, the house is telling its own story about what lasts and what matters. Victoria quickly realized that people were finding the setting reassuring, even if the political sagas and unsavory characters in his world were stressful. She decided to launch her own account that would just be about the domestic scene. "In times of upheaval, people turn inward," Victoria says. "People are nesting. Your home is the one thing you can control."

 

The hundreds of comments on Victoria's videos are peppered with words such as "tranquility" and "balm" and respite from "this messy world." One commenter said her videos feel like eight hours of sleep. They offer a kind of rest, a reassurance in counterpoint to everything else flowing through our phones.

 

This kind of aspirational domestic content is often associated with Red-State mindsets. But the allure is wider than it appears. In some sense, the "trad wife" is freed from political leanings, no longer coded conservative, but here available, as fantasy, for everyone. There is a timeless vision of domestic life that can be soothing and transporting even for the resolutely working mother or happily urban person.

 

The caveat is that most of us cannot afford the particular beauty we are watching here. Most of us can't simply uproot our life, quit our jobs and move to a carefully curated farmhouse in the country. For many of the gawkers and voyeurs, this is pure fantasy, a kind of calming, momentary escape. You may point out that it is a little ironic that these images of timeless, unchanging domestic life come to us through our screens, but you could also argue that we should take our bursts of comfort where we can.

 

An old friend, Aleksandra Crapanzano, who recently published a cookbook, "Chocolat," has had a front-row seat to the comforting ascendance of the domestic arts. At readings and events, people tell her, "We need chocolate now more than ever." On an airplane, recently, she noticed that when the stewardess came around offering coffee and tea, a surprising number of adults opted for hot chocolate. She tells me she knows lots of people who read recipes to fall asleep when they are anxious or jittery.

 

Another old friend, Deborah Needleman, left her high-powered job as a magazine editor and became an expert basket weaver. Over 47,000 people follow her Instagram account, which is checkered with beautiful baskets strewn across her peaceful workshop, peonies exquisitely arranged on a country table, fires in the fireplace, framed prints of flowers, whimsical wallpaper, ravishing gardens bursting into bloom. Who wouldn't want to escape to this place, even for three seconds on a crowded subway?

 

The tacit message of all this content is that we are still gathering with friends, baking a cake for a dinner party or laying out Indian-print cloth napkins, and so the world must not be burning down. The dreamy vistas of domestic arts, which may have once seemed frivolous, passe, even politically retrograde for some, become a source of deep allure for people of different political stripes.

 

Do they matter, these domestic rituals? I notice myself feeling disproportionately upset when I lose my matches and can't light the candles on my table for a regular weeknight family dinner. Dinner without candles? How can this possibly matter, or more precisely, how have I become a person this matters to?

 

But these small solaces take on more power in these uncertain times. The flickering candle may be a whisper from the universe: Life goes on.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Personal Space: Why Are So Many Women Dreaming of Rustic Domesticity? --- These days, we could all use the respite of a patchwork quilt, a blazing fireplace and a perfectly set dinner table. Roiphe, Katie.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 Dec 2025: C3.