Woman can’t get into her pink house because of influencers

Eleri Morgan didn’t expect her brightly-coloured home to become an attraction for Instagrammers

Influencers have flocked to a pink house in Cardiff to take pictures in front of it, says homeowner Eleri Morgan (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

A woman who painted her house pink has said she can’t get into her home at times due to influencers using it as a background for pictures.

Eleri Morgan, 32, painted her terrace house in Cardiff pink during lockdown to bring a streak of colour to her neighbourhood, but didn’t expect it to become an attraction for Instagrammers.

Morgan told Wales Online that she and her sister moved into the house in 2018 and had been planning to update both the interior and the exterior, which she said hadn’t been decorated since the 1960s.

She chose pink because it was “a really strong colour with purpose, it’s bright and colourful”.

But after the facade was painted, Morgan began noticing people standing outside her window. She didn’t realise the reason people were hovering until she received messages from her friends asking her why they had seen pictures of her house on social media.

As lockdown restrictions lifted in Wales last month, Morgan said she began noticing small groups of people taking pictures of her pink house and posing in front of it. It now happens around two or three times a week.

If she is out of the house when people are taking pictures, Morgan, a professional comedian and joke writer, said she waits in her car or nearby until they have finished, careful not to let them notice her in case they get embarrassed.

Morgan detailed one of these experiences earlier this month on Twitter. She posted a picture of her house and added: “This is my house. I painted it bright pink and I love it. My only problem is that influencers keep taking photos in front of it.

“Today I had to sit and wait in my car for 10 minutes until two women finished up fake laughing at a camera.”

She added in another tweet: “One was fake leaving my house as if she was stepping out the front door… Whilst I pretended not to exist.”

The first time she saw people taking photos outside her house, Morgan told Wales Online she “cackled” but then “felt awful” that she had embarrassed them.

“I try not to walk towards my house until they haven’t noticed me because if it was the other way around I think I’d die of embarrassment,” she said.

“I don’t want to embarrass them, so I just wait until they’ve finished off and they are around the corner and then I scurry in and then I close the curtains.”

Morgan added that the situations make her feel like “an awkward Welsh person having to say ‘I’m so sorry to have to go into my own house!’”.