Rent a Recreation of Van Gogh’s Bedroom and Other Artistic Airbnbs
Odd houses and intricately designed bedrooms are a staple of short-term rentals
Looking to rent a room with a view is one thing, but for the next few months the Art Institute of Chicago is offering patrons of Airbnb the chance to experience a night in a life-size replica of Vincent van Gogh’s iconic painting, The Bedroom. For just $10 a night, visitors can stay in the installation, which takes up a single bedroom in a larger apartment outside of the museum’s River North campus.
From the colors of the furniture to the skewed angles of the room’s walls, the real-life rental faithfully recreates van Gogh’s masterpiece to a T, but it’s only part of the Art Institute’s new exhibition, “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms.” Alongside dozens of van Gogh’s paintings, the museum is hosting three of van Gogh’s paintings of his “Yellow House” in Arles, France in the same space for the first time in North America, Kate Sierzputowski writes for Colossal. The exhibition is running through May 10, and new dates for those interested in spending a night in a van Gogh painting will be posted to Airbnb each month.
“Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” may offer people a unique chance to live inside a famous painting, but over the years Airbnb has become a hotbed for silly, surreal and even, occasionally, thoughtful listings that could be considered forms of art, themselves. In January, a resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, briefly listed a backyard igloo he built during a blizzard for $200 a night as a joke after discovering Airbnb listed “igloos” as a housing category, Gwynne Hogan reports for DNAinfo. Others have listed houses shaped like dogs and boots— and one user in the United Kingdom even posted a rental inside an inflatable dome.
“For us, it’s more from an artistic perspective,” artist Tom Galle, who lists a “Netflix and Chill”-themed bedroom on Airbnb, tells Parker Richards for the Observer. “We’re all artists and we view our medium as our subject. That was our primary goal: to do a project that does something with internet culture and gets the attention of people.”
For some adventurous travelers, a stay in one of these surreal and artistic rentals would certainly make for a unique experience.