About

Black and Pink Meme Houses, also known as the Sherbet Homes, Barbie's House IRL or the Santa Monica Meme Houses, refers to a pair of neighboring beach houses in Santa Monica, California in which one is painted black and the other is painted in a pink and purple color scheme. Multiple photos of the homes have been used as an object-labeling meme and in image macros since as early as 2016, usually to make comparisons between two things due to their contrasting appearances.

Origin

The homes, located on Palisades Beach Road in Santa Monica, California, are known as the "Sherbet Homes." Zillow^[2] estimates the "Barbie house" at around $6 million (additional photos of the pink house shown below).

On September 7th, 2015, Redditor u/zenaidnog90 posted a photograph of the Sherbet Homes to /r/pics^[1] captioned, "Voldemort and Barbie are neighbors!," garnering over 11,400 upvotes in six years. This is one of the earliest popular memes using the Sherbet homes.

Spread

On August 4th, 2018, Twitter^[3] user @divermylove posted an image of the homes captioned, "the sexual tension between these two beach houses???? lmao," gaining over 79,600 likes and 15,000 retweets in three years (shown below).

On September 3rd, Redditor u/lookaroundewe posted a photoshop of the image to /r/pics,^[4] making it resemble the Piper Perri Surrounded meme, gaining over 1,000 upvotes in three years (shown below, left). On April 17th, 2020, Tumblr^[5] user webskylar posted a meme using the image to compare Kingdom Hearts' plot (black house) to its character design (pink house), gaining over 6,000 notes in a year (shown below, right).

A rendition of the Sherbet Homes appears in Grand Theft Auto V (shown below).

The homes became particularly popular on Reddit throughout 2020 as users made memes out of them. On September 5th, Redditor u/Nelle830 posted a meme to /r/funny^[6] using the homes to compare the lyrics to the music of the song Pumped Up Kicks, gaining over 18,500 upvotes in a year (shown below, left). On the same day, u/RebelGirl1323 posted a meme saying the houses are dating to /r/memes,^[7] gaining over 42,500 upvotes in the same span of time (shown below, right).

On August 7th, 2021, TikToker @__simba_23 posted a video set to the Questions I Get Asked sound with the text "QUESTIONS THE MEME HOUSES GET ASKED," followed by the "houses" answering two questions via text, gaining over 5.7 million views in three weeks (shown below).

On August 22nd and 23rd, @__simba_23 posted two more videos of the meme houses, showing off the interiors of them, gaining over 81,000 and 50,000 views respectively in roughly four days (shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References