Want to live in Barbie’s Dreamhouse? This all-pink N.J. home is up for sale for $500,000.
This New Jersey home went viral on the popular social media account Zillow Gone Wild.
![Gabrielle bought her home in November 2022 and furnished it with items she made and bought on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Ikea. The NJ home is currently up for sale for $500,000.](https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/VRCkb5Z5KQVXGoSpCSWGej8eiwo=/760x507/smart/filters:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/235AEGUSNZH2ZOUX6WFMQ3VRJ4.jpg)
Kate Gabrielle’s favorite color is pink.
When she bought her first home in 2022 on an unassuming street in Hamilton, N.J., she decided on a pink kitchen. Soon, pink started creeping into each room until her home became a version of Barbie’s Dreamhouse, with the color covering nearly every inch of the home.
“Everything becomes pink eventually,” said Gabrielle, 37.
The pink accents on her shutters and front door show just a glimmer of what’s inside the two-bedroom and 1½-bathroom home. Down the hall from the foyer is her cinema room, with two rows of recliner seating and a carpet decorated with popcorn and film reels. Vintage movie posters, such as for Dante’s Peak and While You Were Sleeping, cover the walls. DVDs and VHS tapes are stacked behind the movie screen.
Walk past the 1970s floral hallways covered in retro and pop culture memorabilia and head back into Gabrielle’s childhood bedroom, or a recreated version of it. Her time-travel room is made up of years’ worth of collected items from eBay that she owned as a kid, like an Easy-Bake Oven and a Mall Madness board game.
Yet after personalizing her dream home, Gabrielle has listed it for sale at $500,000. (The house last sold for $340,000, according to Zillow.)
The listing was recently picked up by Zillow Gone Wild, a social media page showing unique real estate listings. On Instagram, the post has garnered more than 102,000 likes.
“Tons of people sent it to me, so I knew it would be special,” said Zillow Gone Wild creator Samir Mezrahi, adding that the next owner will be “so lucky to have it.”
Wouldn’t change a thing in this Hamilton, NJ home, would you?
— Zillow Gone Wild 🏡 (@zillowgonewild) July 18, 2024
Currently listed for only $500,000 pic.twitter.com/5ZuAtgff0C
Built in 1977, the home had a special charm when she initially toured it, Gabrielle said. Despite its dull, brown appearance, Gabrielle said she was already brainstorming plans to renovate before she bought it.
“I’ve been imagining what [my] house would look like for a lot of my life in my head,” Gabrielle said. “Once I finally had a house, it was like all of those plans and dreams I had, I could finally implement them.”
A retro enthusiast, Gabrielle owns an online store where she sells original handbags that can hold Hydro Flasks or Stanley Cups, in addition to selling lapel pins, patches, and stickers.
Her designs are based on classic movies that bring her back to her childhood or the “colorful, groovy, kitschy style of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”
@misskategabrielle Big bags, small bags, ITA bags, spooky bags, bags built just for your Stanley! Find all of them at kategabrielle.com (link in bio!) 😍 #fyp #fypシ #bagalert #dopaminedressing #watergirly #tumblersoftiktok #waterbottle #cuteandhydrated #stanleycup #stanleytumbler #hydrated #pursecollection #purseshopping #tiktokmademebuyit ♬ Little Bitty Pretty One - Thurston Harris
Gabrielle’s purses are popular online: She has 121,000 followers on Instagram and 112,000 on TikTok. But as the attention grew, so did the knockoffs on site like Amazon and Temu, in a practice called dropshipping, leading to a significant decline in her own sales.
“You keep trying to get one taken down, and then another one just pops back up,” she said. At a certain point, she realized there was nothing else she could do.
In the past six months, she has considered options to make ends meet but has resorted to letting go of her house and moving into an apartment.
Gabrielle has already received several offers, with some asking to keep some of the furnishings and decor, giving her some hope that the home won’t revert to an average one. Her home has become the talk of the town, both in real life and on the internet, she said.
It’s a bittersweet ending, but a blank canvas awaits for Gabrielle. She said she’s planning to design her apartment as closely to her house as possible, especially her time-travel room.
“It’s really hard to leave what I already made,” Gabrielle said. “But I’d be lying if I said getting to decorate a whole apartment wasn’t kind of exciting.”