Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Happy Home Paradise is fantastic — even if some villager requests are ridiculous

It’s been a couple of weeks since Animal Crossing: New Horizons Update 2.0.0 dropped in and made sweeping quality-of-life improvements for players. Along with the update came the Happy Home Paradise DLC, which is essentially the island version of Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer on 3DS. Here, you get to design the most perfect vacation homes for villagers who want to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life on their home islands per their request. It’s a fantastic DLC for players to sharpen their interior design skills — even if some of the villagers you serve are completely unreasonable. 

In Happy Home Paradise, your villager embarks into a new territory: working at an island resort with Lottie. Once you open the base game after downloading the DLC, Tom Nook recommends you to Lottie, commending you on your work ethic in making your home island as beautiful as possible for your fellow villagers.

From there, Lottie takes you on and puts you to work as a Paradise Planner along with Niko and Wardell, who will assist you in making the vacation homes align with the tastes of villagers who come to visit. You’re paid in Poki for your efforts, which sadly you’re not allowed to take back to your island to convert into Bells; however, you will be able to spend the Poki on merchandise in the souvenir shop within the Paradise Planning department to take home with you.

As I watched my boyfriend play through the Happy Home Paradise DLC last weekend, I witnessed the beauty and outrageousness of some of the designs the villagers requested for their vacation homes. Deirdre, being the kind and peaceful deer that she is, wanted to have “A Little Slice of Fall” in her vacation home. For this one, my partner scattered fall foliage all over the front yard, complete with a fall mountaintop. On the inside, he made Deirdre feel at home by designing the entire room to make it look like a forest straight out of Bambi, but with mushroom chairs and table, plus a hammock bed and log furniture everywhere. 

Claude wanted his vacation home to look like a giant arcade, hence the name “Home Game Hideaway.” The first picture that came to mind with that request was the arcade I used to visit at the Mall of the Americas in Miami as a kid — not to be confused with the gargantuan Mall of America in Minneapolis. But unlike that arcade, my boyfriend created a labyrinth of metallic partitions — which are actually wooden — to separate the traditional arcade game machines from the PC gaming stations and Nintendo Switch stations, and hung LED lights with flashing hearts, stars, and whatever other shape he wanted, making it resemble the modern arcade bars we see today. Plus, he put bubble blowers by the front door so that bubbles will greet Claude’s guests, if they ever come to play.

With every fantastic vacation home comes some homes that are too ridiculous to design in the real world. Take Pudge, for example. He wanted his getaway home to be just as opulent as it is back at his actual home, calling it “My Pretentious Palace.” The pieces of furniture he requested for his vacation home — the lucky gold cat, a pile of cash, and a safe — laid the foundation for showing off his luxurious lifestyle. To say that he has enormous wealth and privilege is an understatement. 

Outside Pudge’s house, he planted two Bell trees, stationed two golden knight statues by the front door, and littered gold bar stacks all over the front yard. He gave the interior the Midas touch, making it gold from the floor to the ceiling, installing a square bathtub in the middle, hanging a chandelier precariously above it, planting a gold toilet in the corner, and placing the safe in another corner with the lucky cat sitting on top, and putting the money pile on a desk like Pudge is a kid mobster who conned his private school classmates out of their lunch money. The finished model appeared like a mansion straight out of MTV Cribs.

Lionel gave an even weirder vacation home request: “Restroom Refuge.” He believes that you can never have too many bathrooms when you have company over. Most people have between two and four bathrooms in their home, but Lionel wanted his vacation home to look like a public restroom at the Hilton Hotel. Other than the toilets and sink Lionel requested, my boyfriend installed seashell-themed sinks, fountains, and had some difficulty putting up partition walls to give him and potential guests the privacy they need to do their business. 

Just like Happy Home Designer, Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Happy Home Paradise lets players’ imaginations run wild with design ideas they and their furry clients come up with together — even if the home design ideas from the third party sound wildly unorthodox in practice. So no matter how amazing or ridiculous the vacation home requests are, decorating their homes to line up with the guests’ aesthetic turned out to be a fun and positive experience — perhaps even hilarious at times.