The Set-Jetting Kitchen: How We're Recreating the Kitchens We See On-Screen

You’ve seen the hotel. You’ve Googled the airfare. Maybe you’ve even contemplated spending your entire vacation budget on a pilgrimage to Sicily because The White Lotus made it look irresistible. Welcome to the age of “set-jetting,” wherein the places we see on screen become the places we want to go in real life.

As HexClad reports, the phenomenon is powerful. Expedia reports that two-thirds of travelers say movies, streaming services and television shows have influenced their travel choices. After Emily in Paris streamed online, searches for Paris jumped 200 percent. The White Lotus has spiked reservations for the resorts it features after each season airs. 

But you don’t actually need a plane ticket to set-jet.

Increasingly, the worlds we binge are influencing the ones we build at home. And nowhere is that more apparent—or more fun to copy—than in the kitchen.

Why TV Kitchens Have Become Lifestyle Aspirations

TV kitchens used to be sets where characters grabbed a glass of water on their way out the door. Now they’re where the action happens, which tracks: Food culture has moved steadily toward the center of popular culture, and the kitchen has followed. Cooking can reveal ambition, class, family dynamics, cultural identity and personality without a character having to say a word.

It’s why the kitchen in The Bear is frenetic, obsessively organized and filled with stainless steel. It’s why the interiors of Succession communicate enormous wealth without resorting to gold faucets and crystal chandeliers. And it’s why the world of Emily in Paris can make drinking coffee or noshing on a baguette at the kitchen table feel like a lifestyle choice. The kitchen has become both a storytelling device and an aspirational backdrop.

Meanwhile, we’re paying more attention than ever to our own kitchens. Houzz found that 54 percent of U.S. homeowners renovated in 2025, with a median renovation spend of $20,000. Kitchens remain among the biggest-ticket projects in the home. In other words, what we see on screen is arriving at exactly the moment many of us are willing to invest in the rooms where we cook, eat and hang out.

And you don’t need to knock down a wall to get in on it.

The Kitchens Everyone Wants to Copy

Different shows sell different fantasies. Your streaming history might be quietly determining whether that fantasy involves a gleaming sauté pan, an antique copper pot or an enormous slab of Calacatta marble.

‘The Bear’: Yes, Chef

Few shows have made professional cooking look simultaneously more appealing and more stressful than The Bear. Its kitchens aren’t pristine showrooms. They’re workspaces.

The aesthetic is utilitarian: stainless steel, open storage, sturdy cookware, sharp knives and tools chosen because they perform. Everything has a job. Everything needs to be within reach.

For home cooks, that translates into a chef-inspired approach to outfitting the kitchen. Instead of collecting gadgets designed for one hyper-specific purpose, think durable pans, versatile knives, restaurant-style storage containers and equipment that can survive serious use.

You may not be breaking down whole animals before dinner service, but you can certainly steal the mise en place.

‘Emily in Paris’: Make Dinner Romantic

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the romanticized European kitchen.

Emily in Paris doesn’t just sell viewers on the city of Paris. It sells the idea that everyday life can be beautiful. Coffee is a ritual. Dinner is an occasion. A trip to the market is practically a montage.

The kitchen version of that fantasy favors character over perfection: vintage-inspired pieces, cookware worth displaying, open shelving and objects that look collected rather than purchased in one enormous late-night online order.

The real lesson isn’t necessarily to make your kitchen look French—it’s to treat cooking as part of the pleasure of the day rather than another task to complete before turning on Netflix. (Although, naturally, you can still turn on Netflix afterward.)

‘Succession’: Money Whispers

If Emily in Paris celebrates charm, Succession perfected the art of looking expensive without appearing to try.

The show became practically synonymous with the “quiet luxury” conversation in fashion, but the same principle applies to its interiors. Think: natural stone, beautiful wood, architectural lighting and surfaces so uncluttered you may wonder whether anyone in the Roy family has ever owned a toaster.

You probably don’t need a kitchen the size of a Manhattan studio apartment to borrow the idea. Quiet luxury is less about filling a room with expensive objects than it is about choosing fewer, better ones.

For cookware and kitchen tools, that can mean pieces that perform beautifully and look good enough to leave out. Consider it the culinary equivalent of a perfectly tailored cashmere coat, minus the dry-cleaning bill.

What These Shows Make Us Want to Own

Here’s where set-jetting gets interesting. Screen inspiration can start as an aesthetic preference and quickly become a shopping list.

A restaurant drama can make professional-grade cookware suddenly seem essential. A beautifully styled apartment might inspire open shelves filled with ceramics and pans. A dinner-party scene can convince you that what your life has been missing all along is a proper serving set.

Cookware sits in a particularly interesting place because it can be both equipment and décor.

A beautiful pan doesn’t have to disappear into a cabinet after dinner. Neither does a Dutch oven, knife block or sculptural pepper mill. In a kitchen with open shelves, hanging racks or glass-front cabinets, the tools become part of the room.

That helps explain the appeal of kitchen products that marry performance and aesthetics. If you want the chef credibility of The Bear but would prefer your kitchen not to look like it’s expecting a health inspection at any moment, cookware that’s built to work hard and still looks sharp sitting on the stove bridges the gap.

It’s TV fantasy meets Tuesday-night dinner.

Why Kitchen Design Is the New Fashion Trend

For decades, TV fashion has offered a relatively easy way to try on another identity. You see a character wearing something great, find your version and suddenly your Tuesday commute feels a little more cinematic.

Now the home is doing some of the same work.

Social media has accelerated the shift. Kitchens appear in the backdrop of cooking videos, morning routines, party photos and casual glimpses into everyday life. A range or backsplash isn’t simply part of a room anymore. It’s part of the frame.

That has made the kitchen a surprisingly powerful identity marker. Minimalist? Maximalist? Serious cook? Sourdough person? Cocktail person? Someone who somehow keeps fresh flowers next to the sink at all times?

Your kitchen is your backdrop not only for social media content, but for your everyday life. It’s where you define your own personal main character energy.

There’s also a practical reason to spend on it. Unlike an outfit inspired by a character, a kitchen tool might be used hundreds of times. Homeowners are still putting meaningful money into renovation projects, and the best kitchen investments can change not only how a room looks but how it functions.

The Psychology Behind Screen-Inspired Spending

There’s a psychological layer to the set-jetting phenomenon. After all, we don’t simply admire fictional spaces in isolation. We connect them to the characters who inhabit them and the lives those characters represent.

That’s aspirational consumption at work. We may not literally believe buying a gleaming skillet will transform us into a Michelin-caliber chef—but objects can give us access to a small piece of a lifestyle we admire.

It’s the same reason set-jetting works in travel. Visiting Paris after watching Emily in Paris offers the possibility, however fleeting, of stepping inside the fantasy. Recreating a little of that Parisian feeling at home proffers a much easier commute.

The emotional association can be just as important as the object itself. A beautiful espresso machine doesn’t just make coffee. It can represent the slow, sophisticated morning routine we’re absolutely going to start having. A professional pan doesn’t solely sear a steak. It can represent becoming someone who knows how to sear a steak properly.

Where Function Meets Fantasy

There is, however, a danger in designing your life entirely according to the streaming algorithm. Some screen-inspired trends translate beautifully to real kitchens. Others are better left on set.

Open shelving looks fantastic when every plate has been selected by a prop stylist. In real life, it also means everything you own is visible. Vast marble countertops are gorgeous, but certain natural stones require more care than their screen appearances suggest. A restaurant-style kitchen might look impressive, but restaurant kitchens are designed for cooks working at restaurant speed—not necessarily someone making pancakes in pajamas.

The trick is to steal the feeling, then make it functional.

If The Bear inspires you, invest in a few hardworking pieces rather than converting your kitchen into a commercial prep station. If Succession is your north star, prioritize materials and tools with longevity instead of simply buying whatever looks expensive. If you want the romance of Emily in Paris, display the pieces you love and make a ritual out of using them.

The best screen-inspired purchase is one you’d still want even after the series finale.

The Next Set-Jetting Destination May Be Home

Streaming services have given us access to more fictional worlds than ever before. The next big interior design trend may be sitting inside a show no one has started talking about yet. And when that show arrives, viewers won’t just be watching the characters. They’ll be studying the tile, Googling the glassware and trying to identify the pan sitting on the range.

That’s because set-jetting was never only about travel. At its heart, it’s about the desire to step into a world that made us feel something.

Sometimes that requires a passport. Sometimes it requires a renovation budget.

And sometimes all you need is a great pan, a good dinner and a kitchen that makes everyday life feel a little more worthy of the screen.

Conclusion: Bringing a Little Screen Magic Home

Television has always influenced what we wear, where we travel and what we order at restaurants. Now it’s increasingly shaping what we want our homes to look—and feel—like. The kitchen is a natural place for those fantasies to take hold because it’s where so much of everyday life happens.

And we’re not simply copying a backsplash. What we’re really borrowing are the rituals and lifestyles those spaces represent: the precision and confidence of a professional kitchen, the romance of lingering over dinner in Paris or the understated polish of a home where everything seems to have been chosen perfectly.

The most compelling set-jetting kitchens aren’t exact replicas of what we see on screen. They’re our own kitchens, with just enough of the fantasy brought home.