Curbed, a network of neighborhood-focused blog sites featuring quirky, often celebrity-related, real estate trends, launched a new national site Thursday.
Manhattan-based Curbed National has taken over the Curbed.com domain name, previously held by the network’s flagship site, Curbed NY, which now lives at ny.curbed.com.
The new national site will take Curbed’s fascination with what it calls "real estate porn" indoors.
"We’ll be chronicling higher-end home design and decor, from Malibu dream houses to Wyoming ranches to Maine cabins, and all residences in between. We’re also launching a daily e-mail newsletter featuring one great piece of real estate porn each day," said Lockhart Steele, who founded Curbed in May 2004.
Steele was formerly a managing editor at fellow gossip site Gawker. (Gawker Media is a Curbed investor. Inman News Publisher Brad Inman has also invested in the network.)
Real estate porn is "sexy shots of real estate. The sort of stuff that you see that makes your mouth water, makes your jaw drop. Some of the aspirational stuff. (It also means) covering stuff on the other end (that is) so hideous that it’s beautiful," said Josh Albertson, the network’s general manager.
"Our aim is not to bore anyone here," Albertson said of the network’s coverage of celebrities and gossip. "Some of that is just because it’s fun, giving the people what they want. That doesn’t mean that Curbed is trying to be frivolous either. When there’s a serious matter to cover, we cover it. But none of the blogs aim to take themselves too seriously. "
In addition to Curbed’s New York City blog, the network also has blogs covering San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Hamptons. Other sites in the network include international urban traveling blog Gridskipper, the restaurant blog Eater, and the retail and fashion blog Racked. The latter two went national in the past year.
"The national play on the other sites was a little more obvious," Steele told Business Insider. "We were thinking about Curbed National for a number of years but weren’t sure what the site should be. Our local sites do such a good job of covering the real estate market stuff, and real estate is so local. On the other hand, design and interiors is very universal."
Editors in the Curbed network are generally the sites’ main bloggers, Albertson said. Curbed National will be headed by new editor Sarah Firshein and associate editor Rob Bear.
Content themes for the site will include "beautiful interiors, the pop culture side of design, anything relating to HGTV and design in movies or TV, things having to do with big name brands and little-known designers, amazing shelter photographers, and incredible real estate listings from coast to coast," Firshein said.
"It is really approaching design from a very news-oriented perspective. Certainly the topic has been covered on countless design blogs, but we’re trying to cover it with a certain immediacy that you don’t always find as it relates to a topic like this," she added.
Curbed National started off its debut with a challenge for the editors-in-chief of six major "shelter" magazines: Operation Dollhouse. The site delivered six dollhouses to Martha Stewart Living, Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, House Beautiful, Lonny, and Dwell, along with some magazine-specific dollhouse accessories.
The magazines have until noon on Friday, Oct. 1, to redecorate and redesign the dollhouses as they see fit, photograph the results, and send them to Curbed. The challenge is to see what these major publications will do with such a small space.
"Curbed is not necessarily an online shelter publication, but is covering some of the same stuff they are — beautiful interiors, architecture, spaces people want to get inside," Albertson said.
The Curbed Network as a whole gets about 1.2 million visitors per month, 80 percent of them from the U.S., according to audience analytics company Quantcast.
The network plans to launch new blogs Curbed Chicago in October and Curbed Miami by the end of the year. Other cities are on its radar for next year, including Washington, D.C.
