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.
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Summer Safety at the Short-Term Rental: What a Good Host Thinks Through Before the Season Starts
Summer is peak season for short-term rentals — and for the amenities that make them memorable. The fire pit. The kayak on the dock. The hot tub at dusk. These are the things guests photograph, mention in reviews, and plan evenings around. They are also the places where a host's preparation matters most.
This post is not a liability checklist. It is a guide to the particular quality of attention a good host brings to a property before summer arrives — the same care that goes into the design of a space, the tone of a house manual, the small decisions that make a guest feel genuinely looked after rather than merely warned.
The host's obligation to a guest's physical safety is older than Airbnb by several centuries. Innkeeper law has long recognized what experience teaches: guests are vulnerable in unfamiliar spaces, without local knowledge, dependent on the host's preparation and judgment. Your guests do not know that the grill runs hot, that the pool depth drops sharply, that the path to the fire pit is unlit past a certain point. You do. That asymmetry is where the host's responsibility lives.
What follows is a section-by-section guide to summer amenities — fire pits, grills, hot tubs, pools, kayaks, and more — with ready-to-use safety language you can copy directly into your house manual or house rules. Each list is written to be specific and human rather than generic and defensive, because clear instructions given in a warm voice produce actual behavior change in a way that boilerplate never does.
If you're opening your property for the season, adding a new amenity, or simply doing the annual reset that good hosting requires, this is a useful place to start.
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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