A bedroom is a person’s most personal place. Entering someone’s bedroom is a voyeuristic experience, placing you in their physical, emotional and mental space.

So, to connect people with Van Gogh we gave them the ability to enter his bedroom. Now for the first time, instead of just looking at a painting, people could live inside one.

To help people immerse themselves into the life and art of Van Gogh, we built a replica of his 1888 Bedroom painting, then through a first-of-its-kind partnership with Airbnb, invited people to book a night inside it.

The room is listed by Van Gogh himself. “Just to keep myself in paint,” the artist explained.

People enjoy looking into other people’s rooms and when it’s a bedroom as unique as this one, they share it.

AirBnb has over 5 million visitors each day and featured it prominently on their blog and social channels. Their users, along with the AIC’s social following shared the room across the internet. Other blogs, newspapers and TV stations picked up the story and amplified it. This amplification scaled exponentially around the world, reaching a global audience and making them aware of the exhibit.

Because of demand, guests were limited to one-night stays. Rooms were made available three or four weeks at a time, with each of these blocks selling out within minutes.

By leveraging AirBnb, we amplified our paid media reach by 950%, scaling it globally.

The room cost $31k to build, and generated over $6M in earned media.

Van Gogh BnB has been covered in more than 100 countries, gaining 623 million earned media impressions.

Online pre-sale tickets for the exhibit were up 250%.

On average 4700 people visited every day over the first six weeks. Total attendance during this time was over 200,000–beating business targets by 73%.

“Van Gogh Bedrooms” was the Art Institute of Chicago’s highest-attended exhibit in 15 years.

AirBnb is one of the world’s most popular websites, with millions of visitors each day. So we turned it into a media channel. Starting with one post on the accommodations site, our message about the Art Institute of Chicago’s Van Gogh exhibit reached around the world.

The target audience was people living in and around Chicago. We knew art-enthusiasts would already be interested so we aimed to communicate with the wider public. People are familiar with Van Gogh’s painting and the tabloid-esque stories of his life, so we wanted to demonstrate that this was a way to experience Van Gogh in a brand new way.

A painting can only get you so close to an artist. And the stories of Van Gogh’s exploits only reveal so much about the man. We thought the truest way for people to experience Van Gogh’s life and art was to spend a night inside this room.

Airbnb proved itself the perfect platform to facilitate that connection. It’s known for allowing people to immerse themselves into the life of their host. AirBnb gives the 1888 room a modern twist, amplifying the museum’s message and maximizing our audience.

The Art Institute of Chicago was introducing a new Van Gogh exhibit. It wasn’t a wide retrospective, and it didn’t contain many of Van Gogh’s most famous works. Instead it was a sharply focused show, concentrating on the artist’s two years in Arles France.

The show brought Van Gogh’s three “Bedroom” paintings together for the first time in North America. This appealed to art-enthusiasts, but meant less to the general public.

The intent of the exhibit and the brief were the same: Bring people closer to Van Gogh, not just as a painter, but as a person. The objective was to create interest and attendance for this very focused exhibit.