Ela Zawadzki
Ela Zawadzki covers real estate and design stories for Dwell, focusing on how architecture, landscape, and market value intersect in distinctive homes and domestic spaces. She is an editorial fellow at the magazine, and her work sits at the point where property coverage meets design news. Her professional experience includes interior design, which informs her attention to furnishings and spatial experience inside the homes and spaces she writes about.
High-End Homes With Immersive Settings
Zawadzki’s real estate coverage centers on striking residential properties that are defined by their surroundings as much as by their specifications.
In her feature on an $8M retreat on San Juan Island, she anchors the story in the experience of spotting whales from the living room, using the environment as the entry point into the listing rather than the floor plan. The emphasis on a single, vivid vantage point shows a preference for conveying what it feels like to inhabit a space, not just what it contains. By foregrounding price in the headline, she also makes the market position of the property explicit, pairing lifestyle imagery with clear signals about value and exclusivity.
Her beat is real estate, and she approaches it through detailed profiles of individual homes where views, wildlife, and landscape are treated as central features rather than incidental amenities.
Within this type of story, she writes in a restrained, descriptive style that lets the setting and the property’s characteristics carry the narrative weight. Detail is used to clarify why a listing stands out - its retreat-like qualities, its relationship to water and wildlife - rather than to overwhelm with exhaustive specification.
The overall effect is to position a home in both a physical and market context, showing how a particular piece of real estate offers a distinct way of living.
Design News and the Homewares Market
Alongside property features, Zawadzki contributes to Dwell’s design news coverage with concise updates on developments in the homewares and furnishings market. In a piece on Bonhams’s four-part auction of Diane Keaton’s belongings, she highlights the sale devoted entirely to home furnishings, underlining how domestic objects are treated as a coherent category within a broader collection. By calling out the structure of the auction and the dedicated home furnishings segment, she draws attention to how design pieces move between personal collections and the marketplace, and how they are grouped and valued.
This kind of story shows her interest in the business side of design - how auctions are organized, how categories are defined, and what that says about the place of furniture and homewares in contemporary culture. Her writing in this format is economical and fact-forward, organized around the key elements of the event: the type of sale, the objects involved, and the way they are presented to buyers. It complements her real estate work by extending the focus from houses themselves to the furnishings and artifacts that shape their interiors.
Clarity on Value, Context, and Design
Across both listing-style features and design news briefs, Zawadzki’s work combines clear signals about value with careful attention to context and design. In real estate stories, price and setting appear directly in the framing, making it clear how a property sits in the market and what kind of environment it offers.
In design news pieces, she isolates the relevant details of a sale - the format, the number of parts, the category dedicated to home furnishings - to explain how objects are grouped and sold.
Her style is direct and unadorned, prioritizing concrete factors such as location-driven experiences, auction structures, and the kinds of furnishings involved. The combination of a real estate beat, current work inside Dwell’s editorial operation, and prior experience in interior design positions her to handle stories that connect residential architecture, interiors, and the business of property and objects.
For subjects at the intersection of home design, high-value listings, and the market for domestic artifacts, her coverage is grounded in specific examples and organized around how spaces and things are actually lived with, viewed, and traded.
4 more real estate journalists.
Addie Morfoot
Addie Morfoot covers how real estate, culture and media meet, focusing on people, rules and the way homes shape a life. She reports for The New York Times on housing and lifestyle, from personal narratives about finding a home after loss to features on how short-term rental policy affects everyday owners and renters. She writes real estate stories that connect laws and regulations to the choices available to ordinary residents in specific towns and cities. She is a regular contributor to the Sunday Routine franchise, following actors, comedians and designers through a typical day and showing how settings like homes, studios and subway cars shape daily experience. She also has a long track record covering documentary film and the entertainment business, including legal questions around fair use, changing docu-series formats, festival premieres and financing. Her portfolio spans more than two decades of work for The New York Times, Variety, The Wall Street Journal and Crain’s New York Business.
Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider whose work is distinct for treating housing as a core economic system people must navigate. She covers how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions, connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories of people managing debt, multigenerational living, and moves abroad. Her beat centers on housing costs, renters, and household strategies, following renters pushing back against landlords and tracking “desperate home sellers” using concessions in unaffordable markets. A second strand of her coverage focuses on relocation, remote work, and cheap cities as everyday economic strategies. She regularly uses rankings and lists, such as best and worst states to buy a home and Rising Stars of Real Estate, and reads city housing and migration shifts as signs of broader economic change.
Alec Lazenby
Alec Lazenby covers how provincial politics and government decisions shape housing, real estate and the wider social fabric. He reports for The Vancouver Sun from the provincial legislature. His work examines HousingHub, middle-income rentals, affordability, stalled projects, empty condos, developer layoffs, municipal housing targets and land use. He also covers health, addiction, safer supply, involuntary care, water rights, resource management, Indigenous rights and Crown land. Lazenby connects policy language to specific buildings, rents, projects, services and people. He explains financial, regulatory and market pressures, then follows how institutions, professionals, developers, municipalities and affected communities respond. His reporting tests government goals against practical outcomes and shows how policy reversals, construction costs, interest rates and political accountability shape housing and public life.
Amir Ali
Amir Ali links housing, disputes, and oddball neighbourhood stories in case-based, street-level reporting for Daily Hive. He holds a senior editorial and writing role, listed on the masthead as part of Vancouver leadership and described as a staff writer. His core beat is real estate, especially the rental market and housing affordability, tracking rent ranges, market shifts, and how pressures land on people trying to stay housed. He also covers crime, civil tribunals, and mental health, explaining decisions and conflicts in plain language that focuses on timelines, behaviour, and outcomes. Ali writes offbeat hyperlocal features, traffic and transport disruptions, business, food, and general local news, often turning infrastructure, small businesses, and civic systems into tangible stories. A former radio producer, he brings tight pacing and clear stakes to written pieces and maintains an active social media presence as a broadcaster and writer.