Chip and Joanna Gaines’ five kids never asked to be public figures, so the former HGTV stars try their best to protect their privacy. For the most part, they refrain from sharing their children on social media. However, there have been rare times we’ve seen Chip and Joanna’s oldest daughter, Ella Gaines, over the years, which is true for her siblings as well. These little glimpses have given insight into the lavish lives of Chip and Joanna’s kids. Thanks to those, we know quite a bit about Ella’s personality, interests, and future goals.
The former “Fixer Upper” stars know they’re privileged, but that’s all the more reason to protect their children at all costs. That’s why Chip and Joanna bring up their kids in a social media-free household. “Our house rule is you get social media the summer before you go to college …. so 18,” she revealed on Today in 2024. It isn’t always easy to enforce the rule. “[It] is hard, I think because all their other friends have it,” she said. But they are committed to it.
As they get older, the kids are better able to understand the reasons for the rule and accept it better. “I feel like for us it’s kind of one of those things where we can say, ‘You have these other things that are really great. Our life is a little different and we care about this specific thing,” Joanna explained. However, the proud parents can’t always contain their excitement over their children’s accomplishments, offering us snippets that paint a pretty decent picture.
Ella Gaines wants to leave Texas behind
Ella isn’t the first Gaines kid to leave the nest, but she’s the first to want to spread her wings far and wide. While her brother Drake left home a year before her, he chose to attend the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, just a 45-minute drive from their hometown of Waco, Texas. Ella, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with her home state. “We can’t wait for her to decide. Ella has thought about Korea, she’s thought about sunny Southern California,” Chip Gaines told Today in May 2025.
Ella, who graduated from high school that month, wants to carve her own path, and that requires leaving the very long shadow cast by her famous parents behind. “She’s not going to be in the Central Texas area when she goes on to her next chapter. She seems excited to be able to spread her wings and do something very unique and outside the bubble,” he said. As hard as it will be to have her so far from them, Chip and Joanna Gaines support Ella’s decision to go bold. “It’s very the sky’s the limit with Ella,” Chip said.
Even though she’s already sent a kid off to college, Joanna is still super emotional. But that’s served as motivation for her to make the best of the last summer she has with Ella still at home. “I’ll be soaking up this season the best I know how—starting with this summer bouquet from the garden,” she wrote on Instagram.
Ella Gaines has plenty of creative hobbies
Ella Gaines takes after her mother in more ways than one. Joanna Gaines’ famous eye for turning any home into the coziest haven seemingly passed on to her eldest daughter. From a young age, Ella was into arts and crafts, a hobby Joanna often showed off on social media. In April 2016, Joanna revealed Ella, then 9, and Emmie, then 6, had been taking sewing lessons for a year. “For the last few weeks they have been talking about a surprise they are making. They finally finished this week and I just love this quilt,” she captioned an Instagram post that featured the girls reading to their stuffed animals while sitting on their masterpiece (seen above).
But Ella’s creative interests stretch into the kitchen as well. Joanna sometimes gushed about her daughter’s baking skills to her social media followers. In 2015, shared how Ella and Emmie often joined her for long baking sessions. “Their favorite part- the flour. Mine? The dough, eating it,” she wrote on Instagram, adding a picture that showed only the girls’ hands on the table next to some cookies. By 2018, Ella had turned her skills into a side business.
“Her new summer business is selling baked goods at the office when she goes to work with me,” the proud mama captioned an Instagram post. Joanna detailed that she and Ella had stayed up late the previous night making banana pudding and chocolate chip cookies. “She’s going to make a heck of a business woman,” Joanna gushed.
Joanna Gaines sees a lot of herself in Ella
From her hobbies and professional interests, it’s clear Ella looks up to Joanna Gaines a lot. It turns out Joanna also relates to her daughter on different levels. “We love to go to antiques shops, plant shops and go get coffee — that’s our rhythm,” she told People in July 2025. That’s why she feels Ella’s going away to college is harder than sending Drake off. “I kind of feel like I’m losing a friend in my everyday life,” she shared.
She has been trying to prepare the best she can, but she knows she’ll struggle. “It feels like what’s coming this summer will be a tidal wave of emotions, and I am not going to brace; I’m going to stand there and take it with him,” she said. This isn’t the first time Joanna opens up about how much of herself she sees in her oldest daughter. In 2019, she revealed that all four of her older kids had entrepreneurial interests in their own right, though she pointed out that her oldest daughter took after her more strongly.
While Duke was more interested in the production side, and Duke and Emmie were more customer-oriented, Ella was always more versatile. “Ella is like me,” she told People in a 2019 interview. “I think she’ll follow in my footsteps and have her hand in a lot of things. Right now she wants to cook, be a lead designer and have a donut truck.”
Ella Gaines interned for her parents
Ella Gaines may want to step out of her parents’ shadow, but that doesn’t mean she’s above using her time in it to make some gains. Before Chip and Joanna Gaines took a three-month break from Magnolia in mid-2024, Ella interned for them. “One of my favorite moments that was so pivotal for me as a mother, but also as a business owner, was my daughter, my oldest daughter, was in on a lot of these conversations before our break in June, that I was having with the team,” Joanna revealed on the “Business of Home” podcast in April 2025 (via House Beautiful).
In the May interview with Today, Chip revealed that Ella wants to go to college for business and digital design, a field that focuses on the design of interfaces. While she drew inspiration from her parents’ work in home reno and interior design, Ella’s interests suggest she wants to apply her knowledge in a slightly different area. Chip and Joanna have emphasized that Ella doesn’t want to bank on her last name. “She’s excited about going somewhere and just being known for her,” Joanna said in the People interview.
She continued: “She’s like, ‘I don’t want anyone knowing that you’re… I just want to go and be myself.” While she is glad she could impart her wisdom to her daughter during her internship on the Magnolia team, Joanna also looks forward to learning from Ella. “She’s about to see some stuff,” she said. “She’s going to teach us stuff.”
Ella Gaines broke the rules on prom night
Chip and Joanna Gaines are endlessly proud of Ella and her ambitions, but she’s still just a regular teenager. She proved that on prom night, when she broke the only rule her parents established for her: that she had to be home by midnight. “She blew past that,” he said in the Today May interview. He wasn’t super mad, though. “But what do you do? What do you do with this 18-year-old human being that is now legally an adult? She could serve in the army if she had to, and here I am explaining that she has to be back at 12 o’clock.”
Still, Chip was astounded that Ella thought midnight was too early a curfew. “When I was a kid, midnight was really late,” he added. “I thought that would have given her plenty of time to do everything she’d want to do at prom, but apparently, it wasn’t enough.” He mustn’t have been all that concerned, considering he fell asleep by 9 p.m. and took no notice of when Ella finally arrived home. “It was definitely in the wee hours of the next morning,” he said.
This wasn’t the first time he had a taste of the fact that his little girl is an adult. In 2024, Ella also exercised her first civil duty as an American citizen. “Proud papa.. #FirstTimeVoter,” Chip captioned an Instagram post (seen above) that featured him with Ella (with her face hidden by an emoji) with “I voted” stickers on their shirts.
