Liz Arnold is not a homebody. Or she wasn’t, until recently. She was—she remains—one of the bestest design and lifestyle writers around, a regular contributor to everything and a recently minted contributing editor at Surface. Liz’s peregrinations have taken her from her native Michigan to Los Angeles and now New York, with intervals in Australia and excursions to everywhere else. Arnold is no shut-in.

But she has, for all her travels, managed to develop a taste for the domestic sphere. Not surprising, perhaps, given her interest in classy interiors—but her latest project doesn’t have anything to do with Viking stoves or private wine cellars or any of the usual glossy gear. Liz has just launched a blog, Homebodies, dedicated to the lifestyles of the not particularly wealthy and largely anonymous. It’s a simple idea: In whatever town she happens to be in, she waltzes into the home of a certain acquaintance, takes a few digital snapshots, whips up some text, and voila! Found fabulousness.

This project appeals for two reasons. First, it acts as a mordant satire of cutesy interiors chronicle The Selby, giving us a look at creative homes without all the airbrushed bourgey pretense. (It’s about time.) Two, it has a conceptual component which is kind of thrilling: What happens when a lifestyle journalist turns her attention to the lives of ordinary people? The blog is a weird gloss to Arnold’s mainstream career, a parallel universe of interior design writing.

Which got us thinking: What if we started a second blog as an evil twin of this one? Post for post, the other blog would either comment on this one explicitly, or else present stories or viewpoints diametrically opposed to those featured here. There’s your thought experiment for the day. We can’t think about it anymore. It exacerbates our collective vertigo.

Image [Tara Derr Webb]