Welcome! I’m glad you’re here.
I’m Elise Lauterbach, an artist and former college professor, who surprised herself by creating one of the most successful and beloved small short term rentals on Airbnb. In 2020, Airbnb tapped me as one of their 50 top-performing hosts and asked me to mentor new hosts for their platform. Since then, I’ve thought even more deeply about why hosting is important, how it is informed by history, and how thinking about the narrative of the guest experience can help build better businesses for hosts.
I hope Domestic Intelligence will help you cultivate a space that honors your unique vision. Whether you are welcoming guests into a short-term rental or opening your home to friends, you will find essays and insights that prioritize connection over hustle, and soul over spreadsheets.
This is hospitality design for the deliberate creator.
I hope you’ll subscribe to receive regular reflections, historical inspirations, and prose designed to help you host with purpose, depth, and your own distinct voice.
Airing the Guest Room: What Victorian Housekeeping Manuals can teach the Airbnb Host
Somewhere between the invention of the washing machine and the rise of the same-day Airbnb turnover, we lost an idea that the Victorian housekeeping manual considered so fundamental it barely needed stating: that preparing a room for a guest was not a cleaning task but a ritual, and that the difference between those two things was everything.
The Great Strip Tease: Airbnb & the Hot-Button Topic of Stripping the Beds
Airbnb announced they were going to prevent hosts from asking for certain tasks prior to check-out, like vacuuming, doing laundry, and stripping the beds. They call these “unreasonable.” I've never asked a guest to vacuum or do the laundry (though I have asked them to start a load of towels), but stripping the beds is a task that I would encourage EVERY GUEST who stays at an Airbnb to do. Here is why:
In Praise of Cleaning Fees: Or, why making your Airbnb Cleaning fee transparent and visible matters.
Cleaning short term rentals shouldn’t be “hidden” work. Let’s foreground its value rather than try to hide it.
Oh, potential Airbnb guest and/or stockholder, fret not. Cleaning fees are your friend. Allow me to explain.
THE best part of Airbnb, in my experience, is that the platform allows hosts to host in way that feels comfortable, safe, and worthwhile to them. Cleaning fees are one tool hosts (like me) use to make our space available to more people.
Gone but Not Forgotten: The Airbnb Living Wage Pledge & Airbnb Cleaning Fees
Airbnb Cleaning fees are a powerful tools for hosts, but cleaning fees also matter politically.
Most hosting advice is all systems and shortcuts.
But the stays people love? They’re thoughtful, intentional, and a little bit unexpected.
Domestic Intelligence is where you’ll learn how to solve real hosting challenges with creativity—not just copy what everyone else is doing.
Hosting well is a nuanced, thoughtful, and reaffirming process, and in my blog we get into its history and its complications.
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