If you hadn’t already noticed art deco knocking pounding at your door, you certainly won’t be able to miss it now. In July Nordic Knots launched a tennis-themed campaign to announce their newest collection of limited-edition rugs, appropriately named “the Grand Open.” The campaign launched with a short film directed by James O’Connor, filmed at Eltham Palace in London.

The film is littered with almost pornographically sensuous, ultra-wide shots of Eltham Palace’s striking deco interiors. The book-matched paneled rotunda boasting inlaid designs of Venice. The floor-to-ceiling Australian blackbean veneer. The geometric domed skylight. The indoor porthole windows. The classic black lacquered Greek fret doors. The lime green carpeting. Swoon.

The setting for this campaign is no random coincidence. Nordic Knots has capitalized on what they’ve likely (and astutely) identified as the next big wave in interior design.

If you think about how we arrived at this current moment, with art deco cropping up as the most momentous next frontier for design in the 21st century, it makes a lot of sense. Let me show you.

Mid-Century Modern (how long she did reign, rest her soul) celebrated gorgeous wood, geometry, and clean lines. Her strength: restraint and craftsmanship. Her shortfall: color, contrast, and shine. MCM’s palette stayed muted, its surfaces matte, its mood cool. And then there was MCM’s violently expressive, unflinching younger Gen-Z girl cousin, and that was Maximalism. The correction: eclectic decor, liberal use of color, layered pattern, and a proclivity for a collected atmosphere built over time rather than one purchased in a set.

Maybe “maximalism” in its most colorful form wasn’t for you, but it certainly reminded this generation of the duality that defines good interiors: a rich mosaic of old and new, of those things that don’t necessarily match but bring us joy to look at nonetheless.

To me, art deco is a perfect synthesis of these two. Deco was always doing a little bit of both MCM and maximalism at once: geometric discipline and structure, luxurious shiny surfaces, and a smattering of eclectic global reference. Deco is (arguably) the style that did “layering” most seamlessly, which is why it reads so fluently right now.

What we’re seeing now is the result of a very natural progression toward the rebirth of a certain Neo Deco. A synthesis of MCM's geometry and craftsmanship with the reintroduction of color, shine, and the material richness that maximalism proved people wanted (in doses).

To understand this rebirth, and specifically why now, we have to go back 100 years, to a time that predated even the Modern Movement: the 1920s.

While art deco more literally emerged after the 1925 Paris Exposition on des arts décoratifs, the genre was born from a rare and hopeful moment of interwar reinvention that sparkled with opportunity and yet had not been aesthetically beaten down by the traumas of WWII. Deco was the graduation from ornamental Art Nouveau in favor of a streamlined emphasis on utilitarian and industrial materials, art as an instrument of every day life, technology as culture. There was no more appetite for whimsical flourish, but there was still room for glamor. The excitement of technology was everywhere, and everyone wanted a piece of it.

Not so different from now. Art deco is the perfect form of escapism today — oh what we wouldn’t give to go back in time, to when the next big frontier in technology was the invention of the radio, rather than AI. (And that, my friends, was a perfect example of why the em dash will continue to live on in my heart as the most fabulous punctuation mark of them all. Proof-of-AI-copy my ass.)

There are so many reasons deco makes sense in 2026, and you can see it in many of the iconic deco/rationalism interiors that remain permanently tattooed on our collective consciousness today: buildings like Villa Necchi, Villa Cavrois, the Saarinen House, and Tokyo’s Metropolitan Teien Art Museum.

So what does art deco really look like, you might ask.

Villa Necchi: The iconic 1930s rationalist home designed by Piero Portaluppi for the quickly-ascending industrial manufacturing Necchi family, just outside Milan.

What’s special about Villa Necchi?

• The walnut floors inlaid with pink veneer. Pairing rich dark wood with soft color is classic deco. Warm materials get a modern pop of accent color to keep them from feeling stuffy/traditional.

• The German silver sliding door separating the winter garden from the main salon. Deco loved metal as functional sculpture, not just ornament.

• Exotic material references: zebra hide, ivory, lacquer, steel, and aluminum are always used side by side. Deco prized imported “exotic” materials… probably as a status symbol, but the end result is a gorgeous mosaic of cultures and patterns.

• Round Deco accents soften straight Rationalist lines — this tension (strict geometry vs. curved, decorative flourish) explains how Deco and Rationalism cross-pollinated in Italy. The long, orderly lines in deco give your eye a path to follow, while circular elements provide a playful distraction.

• There’s so much else to point out it won’t even fit. The black marble door trim softened by the warm yellow paint. The spring green sofas and walls that bring the gardens inside. The Hollywood carpeted stairs! (You should be Hollywood carpeting your stairs.)

Saarinen House: The 1930 Cranbrook studio and residence of Eliel Saarinen, first President of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, designed by him for himself and his family. Much of the furniture, textiles, and decor were designed by artisans at the Academy.

What’s special about Saarinen House?

• Long, vertical lines to decorate room transitions with curtains and pilasters

• Brass hardware and light fixtures

• A gold-leafed domed ceiling in the dining room

• Exotic wood veneer

• An octagonal dining room carved from a square foundation

Villa Cavrois: The 1932 modernist estate Robert Mallet-Stevens designed for textile magnate Paul Cavrois in northern France.

What’s special about Villa Cavrois?

• Green Swedish marble in the dining room, yellow Siena marble in fireplace

• A blackened, varnished pear wood dining set and chrome cladding to hide the radiators

• Color wheel triad magic playing out in the desaturated sage, violet and red living room

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Teien Art Museum: The 1933 Tokyo residence built for Prince Asaka after his return from Paris, with interiors designed by French Art Deco masters Henri Rapin and René Lalique.

What’s special about the Teien Art Museum?

• The ever-present material trifecta of carved stone, wood paneling, and etched glass — on full display in the grand staircase

• The wrought-iron floral balustrade panel backed by frosted glass

• René Lalique’s frosted glass chandelier

• A frieze of a forest scene that stretches over almost golden, inlaid sliding doors

• Henri Rapin’s freestanding Perfume Tower, an object built purely for atmosphere with no practical function

So you want to bring art deco home with you. Let’s recap with some practical tips.

• Stainless steel, brass and chrome: Shiny metals have a huge place in any art deco room. Think Wassily-inspired dining chairs, articulating floor lamps, lacquered dressers or nightstands decorated with brass trim. Remember to soften cold metal finishes with warmer painted ones or warm-colored textiles nearby.

• Marble: black/dark gray marble is your friend here. Again, it’s all about styling cold things next to warm ones. An onyx coffee table on a white rug is going to read cold and contemporary. An onyx coffee table on an olive green rug? Yum!

• Wood: walnut, burl, even oak. Whatever you can get your hands on since, well, beggars can’t (always) be choosers. Coffee tables, end tables, nightstands, reading chairs, armoires, credenzas. Where metals will benefit from a warm contrast, a wood-heavy room will need a cool one. Think pale sage walls or throw blankets.

• International decorative motifs: antique lovers will thrive here. Inlaid wood and marquetry detailing, geometric metalwork, Chinoiserie ceramics, hand-painted lamps, Japanese lacquerware.

• Layered, but not cluttered: Less objects in the room, more space to let them shine. If you’re rocking a high-volume amount of decor, see if you can weed a few things out and think of intentional places to spotlight your favorite items.

• Color palette: If you’re working with wood floors and wood paneling, your room is already warm. If not, then the classic deco color sensibility we saw in Villa Necchi (olive greens and honey-gold yellows) could be a perfect fit for your space. But remember that cool pops of color are important for evening things out. Think pale sage, dusty lavender, royal blue. If you’re a little nervous to go full-force color drench with green and yellow, consider a triad instead. It’s almost like I posted about this one time.

Remember that gorgeous living room from Villa Cavrois? This room is a perfect example of how to build your deco color scheme. Warm wood, a little bit of black lacquer, and a cool paint job to round things out. You might already have a lot of this stuff in your home, it probably just needs to be rejigged.

The truth is, any space can make a subtle nod to art deco. Trade a couple of your French antiques for an MCM dining set, and suddenly, we’re in business.

Xoxox,

Julia

This trip in particular felt like time traveling between the ancient past (Morocco) and the distant future (Madrid and Mallorca), meanwhile none of these places were more than a 60 minute shuttle flight away from one another. Morocco felt like a full-tilt celebration of old-world opulence; this country is an economy of textiles and bespoke craftsmanship. OTOH, every retail and commercial space in Madrid and Mallorca felt like a fully functional, open-air modern art display, tucked away inside those big, heavyweight facades that remind you Spain is over 1,000 years old. This kind of contrast all over Spain was the through-line that created some of the most masterful examples of design I have seen in any of my travels to-date.

Admittedly, sometimes the one thing we want to do most — bring pieces of these beautiful places home with us — is the one thing that’s not possible. Sometimes concepts don’t translate when we return to where we live, materials that make three hundred year-old houses look like they simply rose from the earth they sit on in one part of the world look fake and contrived in another. Cough cough, the Spanish style McMansions trademarked by Californian cities like Los Altos and other wealthy suburbs of the Bay Area. And no matter how hard one might try, nowhere in the world will ever look like Mallorca except Mallorca.

Nonetheless when I get back from a trip I like to bottle everything that stuck with me into one big moodboard on every place I saw. I’ve word vomited my thoughts here, all my notes and half-baked ideas so I can’t forget them or forget what made these places feel so other-worldly. So without any further context and with little to no explanation, here’s all the inspo I’m bringing back from this trip.

MOROCCO…

Fleur de lis, clashing patterns, colorful tile

No wall, no floor, no headboard in Morocco is spared of color or pattern. None of the colors match, clashing patterns are often superfluously layered, and somehow it always works.

The fleur de lis was technically a colonial influence, but it became one with Moroccan design during the mid 20th c, when French Art Nouveau and Deco design fused with local craftsmanship in cities like Casablanca and Tangier (where I saw this motif everywhere). Some of what reads as “old world Morocco” is actually this specific 20th-century collision of Paris and the Maghreb.

Decorative towel hooks

Someone, for the love of god, remind me why we took to using such unremarkable and utilitarian hardware in American residential design.

Riad hardware in Morocco descends from a much older tradition of Andalusian and Berber ironwork — hand-forged hooks, grilles and lanterns made by artisans in Fez and Marrakech, where even the most functional object was expected to carry ornament. I really enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of hanging up my towel after a shower in our airbnb, where almost every bathroom and bedroom door was decorated with one of these brass hamsa hooks.

Colorful pleated sconces

Pleated lamp shades like these date back to the Art Deco café culture the French brought to coastal Moroccan cities in the 1920s and ‘30s — think Casablanca’s white Deco boulevards. The pleat was a period signature, a way to bring Parisian tailoring logic into lighting design. And the colorful tendencies toward bright reds, pinks, and greens, well that’s just Morocco.

Rusted sterling silver cafe lamps

Stay with me on the lamps for a minute…

I learned on this trip that Morocco’s silversmithing tradition runs quite deep, which explains some of the unbelievable sterling pieces I found for for next to nothing in Tangier, from what looked like the junk drawer of some guy’s grandpa’s garage. Berber and Jewish artisans in towns like Tiznit and Fez worked silver for centuries using techniques originally developed for jewelry and dowry pieces. Eventually the craft made its way into lighting and home decor, and lamps became a new object for this art form to live on.

I saw these gorgeous patinaed sterling cafe lamps with delicate ivory shades all over British designer Jasper Conran’s hotel Villa Mabrouka, and ever since I’ve been obsessed with finding the perfect pair to style atop my kitchen counters.

MADRID…

Cherry red EVERYTHING.

I don’t know much about auras but let me just tell you, I know Madrid’s aura is red. Bold use of color as a design statement in Spain is not a novel phenomenon — after decades of Francoist conservatism, the Movida Madrileña of the late ‘70s and ‘80s used bold, unapologetic color as a visual language of liberation. Everywhere I went I saw cherry red, especially in restaurants and coffee shops where you might not typically expect to find yourself sitting in such a dark and moody, yet warmly saturated interior setting.

Stainless steel for retail

Steel’s return to hospitality feels like an echo of the raw-industrial instinct that shaped Spain’s brutalist civic architecture boom in the ‘60s and ‘70s. What was once purely structural and utilitarian now reads like a finish worth showing off — big stainless coffee bars and counter tops were the tell-tale signs that whatever you were about to eat or drink was going to be good. Kind of giving a return-to-art-deco vibe.

Verde Macael marble

This is a serpentine green stone quarried specifically around Macael, in Almería — a marble region that has supplied Spain since Roman and Moorish times, most famously the white marble columns of the Alhambra’s Court of the Lions. While this characteristic stone is not new to the architectural landscape of Madrid, the hospitality industry there has seemingly trademarked a gorgeous trifecta of a design scheme: green marble, walnut and glass. Everywhere I went, heavy verde macael facades were complemented by sleek, moody interiors blanketed in seamless walnut paneling and big glass retail windows.

MALLORCA…

British racing green and sand stone

Almost all of the shutters (persianas) on Mallorca are painted the same shade of British racing green. The shutters aren’t just pretty, they are also practical. This distinctive green hue (a piece of architectural identity now protected by municipal building code) was more durable to salt air and sun damage due to its original formulation with copper-based pigments like verdigris or copper arsenate. Some say this tradition started with cheap surplus military paint being sold on the black market in the 1800s.

Not only does the contrast on marès (the local calcareous sandstone) create a beautiful combination, the dark green hue seems to emulate so many natural phenomena that make the island so distinctively beautiful: the rugged green mountain ranges that flank towns like Sóller and Deià, and the warm shadows that start to make the sandy buildings glow when the sun starts to fall at 5pm.

Xoxoxox,

Julia

Writing on the Walls

When Michaela bought a dilapidated farmhouse in upstate New York — previously home to The Mountain Road Children’s School — she knew the property’s history was too rich to erase. Built in the late 18th century, the house had a 200-year-old history rooted in New Lebanon’s original Shaker movement, and Michaela was determined to honor this.

This goal of this project was never about preservation or replication, she told me, but about emanation — recreating a feeling of what was, while making space for design that still feels fresh. Her expert and discerning eye for high quality, elegant raw materials would be what made such a timeless redesign of a historic property possible.

Here’s how she did it, material by material and room by room.

WOOD — What to keep, what to correct, what to paint over

In keeping with Michaela’s ethos for the project, the entire foundation of the house was kept as-is: walls, ceiling heights, room proportions, and windows were all left untouched. In the same spirit, everything that had been painted over was left painted, and no natural carpentry was left unfinished. In a lesser designer’s hands this might have read as a limitation. For Michaela, it was a directive straight from the house iteself.

The floors were one of her biggest challenges. Dating back to the 1780s, the downstairs boards have been stained red so many times, the pigment had seeped irreversibly into the grain and multiple rounds of sanding still left a pink hue underneath. The fix: Rubio is the finish brand Michaela swears by. It has a green pre-stain tinty specifically designed to counteract red tones and bring wood back to neutral. The texture of the floors, however, was deliberately left imperfect — one of many quiet ways this house wears its age with dignity.

One practical note on managing a renovation budget: since refinishing is more expensive than repainting, Michaela prioritized the ground floor common spaces and painted the upstairs floors a deep mink purple instead — a decision born partly out of practically that would turn out to be one of the most striking design choices in the house.

The same tension that played out underfoot plays out in every room — between what the house was, and what Michaela needed it to become.

METAL — Old where it counts, new where it matters

Ten miles east of the house, Hancock Shaker Village (est. late 1780s) is still semi-operational, and someone still forges iron there. This lore was not lost on Michaela. For all the door handles and hardware, she specified real cast iron — not the powder-coated steel that passes for cast iron in most mass-produced hardware today. The difference is tactile and immediate: the dark black patina and a bumpy, uneven texture makes the house feels fundamentally native to its area.

The kitchen is the deliberate counterpoint. Michaela’s partner Anne is a professionally trained cook, so the kitchen was designed (as a nod to Anne) in the style of a serious chef’s space — all stainless steel, yet cozily tucked into the former schoolhouse’s IT closet with a hole punched through to the dining room and a tall bar counter bridging the two.

No farmhouse sink, no cafe curtains. The house already tells you it’s old; the kitchen tells you someone interesting lives here now.

With cast iron on the doors and stainless in the kitchen, Michaela creates a perfectly harmonious space where old and new are not fighting each other, but finishing each other’s sentences.

PAINT AND TILE — Color with intention, spending with purpose

One principle Michaela returns to throughout the project: always offset a painted finish with a natural or exposed one nearby. Leave something raw in every room — brick, a natural joist, unfinished metal. It gives a heavily painted space the visual breathing room it needs to feel layered rather than flat.

Her choice of color palette was shaped directly by the house’s Shaker heritage. Shakers made their own pigment from natural materials, which is how their signature palette emerged: royal and cerulean blues, mustard yellows, deep red oxides, pale pinks and creams. These also happen to be Michaela’s favorite colors, which felt less like a coincidence and more like confirmation that she was the right person for this project. The oxblood baseboards — a full 8 inches tall — and deep violet floors upstairs are the most dramatic expression of this, and the first thing you see when you reach the top of the stairs.

For the whites, Michaela used Benjamin Moore Pale Celery upstairs, which warms to a beautiful golden glow in afternoon light, and Celery Salt downstairs, where the cooler green undertones make for a calmer, fresher feeling in the morning spaces she and Anne spend most of their time in. A subtle distinction, but one you feel immediately when you move between the floors.

Another practical note on managing a renovation budget: tile is not the place to cut corners, Michaela says, and especially not for the wall surfaces. You’re looking at backsplash and bathroom tile every single day, and you can always tell when it’s cheap. Floor tile is a more forgiving place to save — Michaela’s bathroom floors were $8 a square foot. For the walls, she used Fireclay in the bathrooms and Subway Ceramics for the kitchen backsplash, chosen specifically for their white clay base, which gives the pigment on top a freshness and depth that mass-produced ceramic just can’t replicate. She also steered clear of anything designed to look artificially crazed or antique — these are new bathrooms, and she wanted them to feel like it.

Every material in this house — from the cast iron door handles to the clay-based backsplash tile — was chosen with the same governing instinct: that the truest way to honor an old space is not to freeze it in time, but to understand it so completely that every new addition feels like it was always meant to be there. That is Michaela’s gift, and it is rarer than it sounds.

If you’d like to get in touch with Michaela or learn more about her other projects, visit her website here.

Xoxoxox,

Julia

I’ve been thinking a lot about weddings this week, since I’m coming off a back-to-back double-header between last weekend’s in Rhode Island and this weekend’s in Madrid. I only spent a Thursday-Monday in Madrid, which I quickly realized for my first time visiting would not be nearly enough time to see everything I wanted to. The food, wine, shopping, architecture, art, etc. was all amazing but above all I was blown away by the warmth of the people.

I studied abroad in Paris and as my mom is French we spent a lot of time as kids traveling through France. No offense to French people or anything, but, warm is not the way I’d describe them, and the contrast I felt surrounded by Spanish people all weekend was remarkable.

As one of the few Americans at the wedding in Madrid this weekend, I was blown away not only by how personal and intimate the whole thing felt for a 200-person wedding, but also by how welcomed and included I felt throughout the weekend of events. All of the family members’ speeches moved me to tears, everyone was quick to include us in conversation, and it felt like the concept of “cliques” had somehow never made its way to Spain. The events were glamorous and yet unpretentious. The bride was comfortable, relaxed and humble at all times. Everyone was excited to celebrate with everyone. I took notes for future wedding planning purposes the entire weekend.

Here and there between the scheduled programming we did have time to see the city, and man did we pack things in as tight as we could. I wish I had another few days because there’s still so much I would have liked to do, but if you’re planning to be in town here are the can’t miss places I’d send you if you only have a few days in Madrid like I did.

Art and Design

Fundacion Fernando Hueras Diaz

Fundacio Francisco Giner

El Prado

Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia

Galeria Belmonte

Nave Oporto

Casabanchel

Sabrina Amrani Gallery

Naos Libros

Boutique de la Prensa

Coffee and Breakfast

CUADRA

El Gordito

CREMA The sound of coffee

Pan y Pepinillos

ACID Cafe

Gosto Cafe

Bars and Food

Devils Cut

Bar Luz Verde

La Capa

Bar Merinas

TonTon

GOTA

1862 Dry Bar for cocktails

Bar Trafalgar

Farah

Fismuler

Ficus Bar

Snake Bar

La Lloreria

Bodegas el Maño or Bodega de la Ardosa for real Spanish tapas

Honest Greens (many locations) if you need a salad or some veggies

SHOPPINGGGGG

Disco Cherry Vintage

Neare Clothes

Gafas Galore

Sinespacio Vintage 1 and 2

Number Three Concept Store

ANDRESGALLARDO

LA VESTE

Ragtime Work & Shop

Karen Hallam handmade jewelry

Ynésuelves

HI-IP

idò

MERCULES

Xoxoxoxox

Julia

It’s 11am in Madrid right now, 5am in New York, and 2am in San Francisco. It’s probably 5 o’clock somewhere. I’m about 12 hours into a 14 hour connecting flight to Tangier. I didn’t quite realize the JFK —> Madrid leg would be a redeye so I forgot to get any sleep. I’m basically running on fumes at this point, which means, what better use of a 60 minute shuttle flight over the Mediterranean than to begin documenting what I’d like to think was the most perfect way to begin a two-week summer vacation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how one can possibly capture the unique magic of being on vacation, since it’s so much more than just the hotels, restaurants, and beaches we’re all quick to post photos from. I think the real magic is in the feeling of abandoning all responsibilities for 14 days. It’s in the deliciousness of feeling completely untethered for a luxurious yet contained period of time, like you’re at the whim of whatever vacation decides to throw your way and also in the position of being able to say yes to it all. Coffees at 5pm, wine at 2, dinners at 10, naps whenever you want, nowhere specific to be.

Before leaving for the international leg of this trip, I spent the weekend bouncing in and out of New York for a best friend’s wedding in Jamestown, Rhode Island. It was the perfect summer weekend in New England, exactly like I always remembered them since growing up here. The return back to the city was a ghastly seven hour trip via Metro North (this part not exactly as glam as I remembered), and by the time we were back in Cobble Hill it was 8:30pm on a Sunday night and we still hadn’t had any dinner. The best part? I didn’t care. Because the best part of vacation isn’t the tanning, or the shopping, or the cocktails. It’s winding up somewhere perfect you never expected to be. And the most perfect place to wind up in Brooklyn on a summer Sunday night? Lonnie’s.

We kicked the vacation off with a very special dinner here. There’s not many all-time feelings for me that beat the sensation of walking north up Court Street and east through three lush, tree-lined blocks of Pacific Street on a warm summer night once it’s past dark but the neighborhood is still buzzing. As someone who has both lived in and left New York, coming back to visit in the summer once the city has started emptying out a bit always feels like a delicious taste of vacation.

Lonnie’s is a brand new neighborhood bar and restaurant in Boerum Hill by Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan, the duo behind Inga’s Bar in Brooklyn Heights. The restaurant took over a beautiful corner space on Pacific and Bond (previously Café Kitsuné) and the interiors do the location more than justice.

The mid-century globe lights and simple French bistro chairs are a classic nod to Parisian dining, while the sleek, floating rosso collemandina marble tables, the lacquered walnut banquets, and the pleated chartreuse wall sconces immediately transported me to a pasticceria in Milan. In the perfect way, Lonnie’s feels both old-world and mod at the same time.

The warm, round lighting that makes this corner restaurant glow from the inside out is a highlight of the candle-lit dinner experience. And yet, I can’t think of a place I’d more like to post up with a book at 5pm over a glass of wine than at the restaurant’s slightly quieter, more intimate back bar (the restaurant has two).

Perhaps the best part about this meal was the service, which I’d rate a 12/10. This team is doing everything in their power to make sure you have a wonderful night.

If you find yourself in the neighborhood and you’re craving a taste of vacation, or staycation, or whatever, I would highly recommend a visit. Go for a date, go with your mom, go solo. Whomever you bring, it doesn’t matter, just don’t sleep on the English pea salad.

Xoxoxox

Julia

Unlike some of my friends who are eternally on the quest to remain either ahead (or behind) the trends, or to simply reject them altogether, I actually love trends. Once or twice a year I love to feel like I’m really “in it,” like I’m plugged in enough to either replicate things I saw on the runways just a few months prior, or to riff off them in some original and creative way. Unfortunately for me, this rude awakening usually sets in roughly 10 days before a large vacation, which means once a year (and once a year only), I’m maxing out my credit card within a very short span of 72 hours.

Next week I am leaving for my annual summer pilgrimage to the East Coast, as I always do to spend a few weeks in New York catching up with family. A best friend is getting married in Rhode Island, then I’m off to Tangier, Mallorca, and a second wedding in Madrid.

Anyways, as a brief intermission from the regularly scheduled programming on interior design, here’s everything I’m shopping for this weekend and a curated list of my favorite (mostly secondhand) finds for summer. So sorry in advance that many of the shoes will be in a size 39.

Black cocktail dresses

Oddly enough, what has plagued me most in preparation for this trip is the pursuit of the perfect little black dress and the perfect pair of black heels for a special occasion cocktail party. Kind of a boring category(?), but nonetheless still one I’d ideally like to knock out of the park when the time comes. This feels like a staple capsule wardrobe ensemble I imagine chic women have perfected to a T, whereas I couldn’t feel farther away from that distant dream.

Black cocktail shoes

Special occasion summer dresses

This is where I had a lot of fun. The sad truth that the most comprehensive wedding guest dress inventory lives on Revolve is just… well, sad. These past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking, can it really be that hard to find the perfect summer wedding guest dress that says SEXY yet elegant, timeless and slightly 90s/Y2K leaning, bold and also effortlessly casual, and just plain fashionable? Well, let me tell you, it is that hard. For one of my black-tie nights coming up, I did end up buying new (in somewhat of a panic to get it all sorted), but these are some of the dresses I wish I had found sooner. #3 I’m still debating buying. #4 I thought was just so Carrie Bradshaw season three!

Special occasion summer sandals

Ok, I take it back, THIS is where I really had a lot of fun. Ever since my friend Carrie showed up to dinner last weekend in a pair of black patent sculputral wedges, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them. And yes, I know I’m late to this one since WWW wrote about this trend in December. I’ve also been watching a lot of Christina Kirkman’s shoe unboxing videos on instagram, and while usually her hypercolorful wardrobe feels a little bit… a lot… to me, I feel like summer is the perfect time to let a crazy colorful pair of sandals shine.

Hope you enjoyed and maybe let me know in the comments what you are shopping for this summer?

Xoxoxox,

Julia

We all respond differently under pressure. Some of us will crumble in the face of decision paralysis and buy the sofa first just to be done with it. The masochists among us will wait as long as it takes to find the perfect one (spoiler: this does not exist). In the wise words of one of my favorite Instagram personalities Ron Dadon: “I’m installing stained glass windows in my apartment… but I still don’t have a couch.”

Whether you’re shopping new at Restoration Hardware or stalking Facebook Marketplace daily in wait of someone’s used treasure for a steal under $500, it’s worth knowing what you’re looking at and what your options are, because you have more options than you may think. Besides just color and fabric, that is.

The big categories and styles of sofa include:

Chesterfield

This is a 19th-century English design featuring tight tailoring, a high back, rolled arms, and tufting. In leather, this couch is clubby and masculine. In a bright wool, it’s neotraditional. In linen, it’s elegant and refined.

I know what you’re thinking. The ugly version of this sofa in a rusty red-brown leather — or worse, black — might have you thinking “puke… dad’s office.” But in a fresh mahogany or even British racing green, this sofa has massively chic potential.

Camelback

This design dates back to the 18th-century British designer Thomas Chippendale, a London woodworker who designed furniture in the mid-Georgian, English Rococo, and Neoclassical styles. This arched-back sofa has an old-world sophistication but can also look surprisingly modern in a bright linen. I like this sofa in a white linen as an unexpected pick for a beach house, or a provençal living room, kitchen or bedroom I’m imagining with terra cotta floors. I love this one on Chairish from Drexel Heritage.

Slipper

This is a streamlined, no-fuss sofa that is more conducive to sitting than to laying. Great option for a loveseat too. The armless design makes this couch a good choice for small spaces.

Tuxedo

A Billy Baldwin signature, this is a timeless sofa that reads luxurious yet decidedly no-frills. The straight profile (arms and back are the same height) gives this sofa a clean, utilitarian charm. This can work in any room, modern or traditional. Incredibly versatile!

English two- or three-seater

Cushiony and comfortable yet aristocratic, an English two- or three-seater is a British country house staple with soft, deep cushions and low arms that make it ideal for lounging. Love the idea of dressing the three-seater or camelback down in casual settings for a nice bit of contrast. There are many kinds of three-seaters; most of the contemporary sofas we see today are three-seaters but not necessarily in the English style, e.g. this German style three-seater sofa and daybed that I’ve been obsessing over.

Knole

This one is totally nuts, but I love it to death. The knole is named after the Knole House of Kent and was originally designed around 1640 during the reign of King Henry VIII. Super classical and formal, but still quaint in a quotidien upholstery and cozy because you’re kind of cocooned in a shelter of sorts. The hinged sides of this sofa untie and drop flat, allowing you to lie down. I mean… come on.

Settee

A personal favorite. Often seen in a French Louis XIV or XV style, the settee is a beautiful antique option that is delicate, formal, and architectural. The exposed wood frame provides a natural material contrast in a room of heavily upholstered pieces. My favorite part of the Furniture and Decorative Arts wing at The Met is all the stunning settees in the French period rooms. Remember that this can be either a hyperclassical accent to a living room, or, upholstered in a solid linen, a contemporary take on an old-world classic. Perhaps impractical for a lounging sofa, but a great choice for complementary seating if you have the space.

Sectional

The overwhelming majority of sofas we see today. The sectional is a casual, 70s-style lounging sofa. Great for large groups, TV watching, and minimizes the need for other seating. This is an easy choice, but dare I say a low-hanging fruit. If you’re going for the sectional, make it snazzy! (Pro tip: a sectional with legs reduces the look of bulkiness.)

Modern

This is anything that leans more sculpture than sofa. Sofas by Vladimir Kagan and Mario Bellini are good examples.

This took up way more space than I expected so comment if you’d like a part two on upholstery fabric and color??

While I hope the focal sofa of my dream home will be some wacky striped and skirted thing from someone’s grandma’s estate sale, I am actually a huge proponent of the white sofa. I think a lot of people get bogged down in trying to decide if they should tie in living room color through the sofa, or they get freaked out that a white sofa will be dull. In my mind — especially if there are no kids (or adults) prone to spilling — a white sofa is the perfect blank canvas to experiment creatively with the rest of the room: art, decor, bookshelves, statement chairs, etc. But more to come on that! See inspo below.

Xoxoxox,

Julia

I had to start this series off (should I make this a series?) with an honorary nod to one of my favorite paintings of all time, Matisse’s Atelier Rouge. If you didn’t already know that you could buy affordable prints of all your favorite paintings from museum webshops, now you do. And there are no more excuses for any blank walls around the house! I love this painting as a print because it’s a wonderful (and impermanent) way to inject a bold pop of color into a room, without having to commit to a statement sofa you’re going to hate in two years. A small sells for $195, but I would blow this bad boy up to 31” x 36” and get the large for $425. And it’s pre-framed for god’s sake! Somebody get this!

2. Bob Mizer photographs (here, here, and here)

Bob Mizer (1922-1992) was an American photographer known for pushing the boundaries of “homoerotic” art with his work in the mid-20th century. He was widely known for his groundbreaking magazine Physique Pictorial, a publication that mixed photographs and illustrations with Mizer's vitriolic political meanderings. I first discovered Bob Mizer when I met Greg Roberts, an art dealer based out of Oakland, who had recently come into a collection of Mizer’s original 4x6 photographs. A lot of Mizer’s photographs are also for sale on eBay, and they are surprisingly affordable. I love how his photography depicts the erotic parts of the male physique in a still playful and wholesome way.

3. Funny horseback watercolor

Never sleep on Facebook Marketplace art! One of my favorite pieces of art in my house is an XL, original watercolor painting that I bought for $90 on FBM. It’s a perfect place to find original, whimsical art that was likely made by a regular person in your area! I love how personal it feels, plus the prices are unbeatable. This watercolor is for sale on Facebook Marketplace in San Francisco.

4. Any Robert Rauschenberg poster ever (here, here, and here)

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was a modern multi-media artist known for his exploration of the conceptual, abstract, and pop art movements. He also studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, as many other famous artists of his generation did in the mid-twentieth century: Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly, Anni Albers, to name a few. So many amazing Rauschenberg exhibit posters were produced by the Leo Castelli gallery in New York when his work was showing there in 1986 and a lot of them are still for sale. I’ve linked a couple here, in addition to a print of one of his most famous pieces, Rebus.

5. Joyce Dean mono print from Berkeley

Another native Bay Area artist spotlight! Joyce Dean (1945-2022) was a printmaker who was active in Berkeley between the 1960s and 1990s. Much of her art was sold off with her estate in 2022, and this print of hers is currently for sale on Facebook Marketplace in the Bay Area. It caught my eye because it reminds me of the way my grandmother loved to use red in her oil paintings while she was still alive.

Stay tuned for the next roundup of fabulous art that won’t break the bank.

Xoxoxox,

Julia

Lauren Sands recently wrote about “singular” spaces in her article At Home With Leonor Fini. Fini was a staple of the French surrealist art movement, and as in the homes of many other creatives, Sands writes, “the hand of a creator is felt in every corner.” Singular may be the closest I’ve come to hearing this thing, which I don’t have another perfect word for, described.

Layered is another word I’d use to describe the impression that a craftfully designed home leaves me with. Layered, not only in textiles and materials, but in memories made at home, memories made abroad from a family’s travels, memories from grandparents and those who came before, memories of excellent stylistic choices made around the house, and even poor ones too sentimental to do away with. Even within the realm of singular design though, there is still this reality that many people chasing the impossible of a perfectly coordinated home will have it so that everything in a room is the same color, everything is from the same store, the same time period.

I always come back to the text Suzanne Slesin opened her book “French Style” with, when she wrote, “a home should describe its inhabitants.” To me, this means a home should be diverse; it should not always match, it ought to be messy in some places, and certainly, no two homes could ever be exactly alike. But still, in many spaces we see today from top-talent designers of the AD100 and the like, this intimately personal quality is absent.

Occasionally though, there is a coup de foudre. This is more than a jaw dropper, even more than the direct English translation, “a lightning strike,” would imply. This is the feeling of a stirring inside, a sudden and palpable understanding in your body that you have found that thing you may not have even known you were looking for. Also known as, love at first sight.

One of the first times I felt this was when I discovered Frank de Biasi and Gene Meyer’s one-of-a-kind house in Tangier. Frank is an interior designer who began his career in the art world at Christie’s. He moved into a design role at Peter Marino’s architecture firm, where he worked as Director of Interiors for 12 years, then eventually left to open Frank de Biasi Interiors in 2006.

There are only so many words I have to describe what I find so enchanting and so right about the design of Frank’s Moroccan home. Perhaps above all else, it is a fearless dissertation on color. What I love most about the use of color in this home is that it seems there is almost no rhyme or reason to the palette.

Green is a focal color throughout the interiors, blending the indoor and outdoor spaces together in its reflection of the courtyard’s lush gardens, which can be seen from almost every corner of the house. There are too many shades of red to count — dark red browns in the entryway’s kilim, happy crimson in the blue floor tiles that lead away to the dining room, and blood-orange in the skirted bedroom curtains that Frank hand-fashioned from piecemeal fabric sourced at the Saint-Ouen flea market in Paris. Frank’s dressing room is doused in sunny, golden yellows, save for a pink, tufted armchair positioned at the window beside an end table just large enough to fit a book or a laptop.

The bedroom is my favorite of them all. Almost every color appears here, but somehow you hardly seem to notice. The room is so layered in art, pattern, and textile, it somehow achieves this wonderfully symbiotic sense of calm. It’s a perfect lesson in choosing such a variety of visuals that bring joy, until no single item has the power to stand out above any of the others.

The house is fresh and new, and yet very old-world at the same time. It’s a clear representation of who lives here, and Frank and Gene’s vibrant personalities are reflected in every room without a hint of insincerity.

I’ve continued to follow Frank’s work since first reading about the Tangier house in 2025, but I wasn’t overcome in quite the same way until I came across a recent Upper East Side project of his featured in this month’s issue of Frederic Magazine. Frederic calls this project a couple’s Upper East Side pied-a-terre, but if that term conjures images of a charming little crashpad or anything (square footage wise) on the smaller side, think again.

This spacious uptown three-bedroom is a tour de force in Frank’s unmatched skill for creating tastefully layered homes. It certainly didn’t hurt that his client on this project was a young and well-traveled couple of art collectors, but nonetheless leave it to Frank to synthesis a couple’s carefully accumulated collection of art and personal effects in a wonderful display of refreshingly modern, yet traditional Upper East Side design. And this coming from someone who grew up on the UES and has seen her fair share of soullessly designed Park Avenue duplexes.

What I love best about Frank’s homes is that they are well styled and yet still appear well lived-in. There is always art on every well, often whimsical art too, and no part of the house takes itself too seriously. There is always a rich mosaic of pattern throughout the home — stenciled wallpapers, Fortuny florals, velvety damask banquettes — all of which create a delightful sense of wonder and other worldliness, even in places where you’d least expect it. Even, against all odds, on the Upper East Side.

Xoxoxox,

J

We moved in February, and I gave myself six weeks to decorate in time to host a 30-person housewarming party in April. Afterwards, I gave myself a full year to do it right. I’m a firm believer that you can’t rush good design, since the most beautiful homes are those that describe their inhabitants. Naturally, a home should look like it has grown up with you, not like it was born yesterday.

Around the same time that we passed the one-year mark in the apartment, my boyfriend turned 31. We had a world-class dinner party at home with 14 of our closest friends, and for the first time in my adult life, as I was tidying up the house, preparing to host everyone, and taking stock of what I wished I had done differently with the design, I had no notes.

That’s not to say that the past 12 months weren’t chock-full of a borderline obsessive amount of buying and reselling, shuffling, reshuffling, rotating, rearranging, repainting, and endless refilling holes every time Lugg movers carried out an old credenza to make room for the new, gouging out yet another chunk of the very same drywall above the stairs in the process. I honestly grew kind of fond of those holes by the time the third credenza had come and gone.

So without further ado, here are five things I learned from the past year of furnishing what I would now call, without a glimmer of doubt, my dream home.

1. Move everything around, all the time

Within the arena of good interior design, there is no room for a set-it-and-forget-it mentality. Allow yourself the freedom to commit to certain choices, with the knowledge that you can and will change your mind later on.

There's nothing more empowering than the realization that on any given day you can pick up your sofa and flip it to face the opposite direction. Try this! I see a lot of people opt for the most obvious living room orientation, where the sofa sits opposite a TV, even if it restricts the natural flow of traffic or the socially conducive energy of the room. I love a sitting room format where two sofas bisect the length of a living room and face one another. However, if your space is small and you must have the TV in view, try moving the sofa off the wall, or framing the sofa with other seating so there’s another natural shape created besides Sofa <> TV.

At the end of various trials and tribulations, I opted for a conversation pit format with the TV hanging above a smaller sofa so it would be in view from the comfy sectional, but still not the focal point of the room.

Even after the furniture settled, I constantly moved decor around until I found what fit. I crowded the mantle, cleared the mantle, thought I needed big art there, and finally accepted it looked better without.

Other things I constantly iterated on throughout the year: swapped rugs back and forth between the primary and guest bedrooms, switched out the nightstands three (three!) times in the span of six months (I wrote here about my search for the perfect pembroke tables if you’re interested), and tried every piece of art I have on every single wall like musical chairs until one spot for each finally stuck.

It’s okay for things to be ugly for a little while. Get comfortable with filler items while you look for keepers, or better yet, shop from your own home! Odds are, you already have great stuff, some of these things just need a new place to live.

2. Don’t stop at the staples

I think many apartments fall flat not inherently because of bad taste, but because people are rigidly following this nonexistent quadratic formula for how to furnish a room as if we were living in Sims, the video game. I’m picturing people thinking, bed+dresser+nightstand=bedroom, or something. If you’re wondering why your room looks unfinished even though you’ve already put the requisite three things in there, try reaching for a couple accessories. And by this I mean, buy things that you don’t need!

First of all, please put a second nightstand on the other side of your bed. Secondly, consider a footbench or a couple of stools at the foot! Throw a reading chair and a nice floor lamp in the corner, and while you’re at it, get a couple more lamps in there because your overhead lights are probably gruesome.

Tldr; your bedroom deserves more than the bare minimum, otherwise it’s going to look like a prison cell a bit too utilitarian. The same goes for a living room. A couch, TV and coffee table does not a nice living room make!

3. Try weird things you’re inclined to think will look bad

A common theme that spans these recommendations is learning how to sit with discomfort. A lot of us get trapped making boring design choices because we are too afraid to make a decision that looks bad. If you learn to overcome this instinct, there’s a wonderful frontier of creativity that awaits you on the other side.

Try things you were raised to think won’t work. Experiment with placement, colors, textures, and contrast. Practical tips you can play around with: layer rugs, mix modern and antique furniture in the same room, and if there’s one tip and one tip only I could leave you with: mix colors and patterns that have nothing to do with one another.

Your duvet cover really doesn’t have to be white to be “neutral”. And you don’t need to match your bedding to your throw pillows! You don’t even need to complement your living room rug to the color of your couch. Pick pieces that bring you joy, throw them all together, and then figure it out later. I promise it will work.

I struggled with this in our bedroom for a long time since I knew that, unlike in the rest of the house where I like a busy, layered look to shine, I wanted the place I sleep to look and feel calm. I tried sticking to this ideology in the beginning, and guess what? It was boring. All it took? A red Persian rug on top of the one we already had. Was I nervous it would look bad when I drove an hour and a half to buy it from a guy in Hayward? Yes. Did it work out ok? Also yes.

4. Make your desk somewhere you’re excited to spend time

For those of us who work from home, I cannot stress this one enough. You know what’s unacceptable for someone working a 9-5 from the same spot every single day? This:

Especially considering that, at the ridiculous price a new standing desk goes for these days, it is not that expensive (relatively speaking) to design a beautiful workspace that actually makes you excited to sit down at your desk every morning with a hot cup of coffee and an optimistic outlook on the day.

I chronicled (in perhaps a bit too much detail) my long quest to find the perfect antique writing desk earlier last year. (Spoiler: the perfect desk does not exist). To my dismay, there was nothing on Facebook marketplace in my price range that struck the ideal balance of elegant and yet practical for a girl who likes a big monitor and is prone to spilling drinks.

In the end, I opted for a small dining room table with a surface area large enough to fit all the beautiful things I like to stare at when, inevitably, afternoon work begins to drone on and my eyes start searching for a little inspiration: a row of my favorite books, a big stack of magazines, two antique porcelain lamps, an obnoxiously large vase of tulips, my favorite mug-full of pens and pencils, and a big piece of framed art I like to get lost in between meetings.

You don’t need all of these things on your desk, but you should at least have one. Consider, even, a couple of framed family photos to start.

And maybe consider any kind of desk that isn’t a plug-in one from Wayfair, but what do I know.

5. Your walls cannot be empty

This one is not a recommendation; it’s a rule. If you’re wondering why your room still looks white even after you’ve added throw pillows, blankets, flowers, and other colorful decor, it’s probably the walls. Blank walls don’t blend into the background, they scream bloody murder for attention. They simultaneously leave a room looking barren while forcing everything on the ground to look heavier than it really is.

Only so much color and texture can come from your furniture and decor before you risk overcompensating. If all your furniture is neutral, but you want to make the room look colorful or dynamic without adding throw pillows… HANG SOME ART. Further, you may not want to hear this part, but every room needs more than one wall of art. You may not realize that by leaving enough walls blank, you are hand-selecting white as an overly dominant focal color in the room.

The good news is that art is way cheaper than you think. My advice on this one is quantity over quality. If you’re one of those people waiting years to save up before you think you can allow yourself to start investing in ‘nice’ art, I see you. This is a fallacy. Start buying now, and maybe even buy a new piece of art every month? It can be a ¢99 postcard that you hang in a ¢99 frame from Goodwill.

Goodwill, Facebook Marketplace, and flea markets are your friends here. Ask your parents for one of those drawings you made in the fourth grade and frame it. Frame receipts from memorable dinners, frame wedding invitations. Take your polaroids and your photobooth strips off the fridge, and frame them. But also… go see more art IRL and support small artists in your area. You can often find original pieces like sketches and small drawings for anywhere in the $100 range.

I took this one pretty seriously when I moved in, but only because I kind of wanted to get lost in the arts and crafts of it all. I bought a Logan mat cutter and basically went to town with any kind of sentimental paraphernalia I could find lying around inside old journals, packets of disposable camera prints, etc.

Other places I have recently sourced both prints and original artworks from: Artwise, Lost Art Salon, Greg Roberts Art, Arenskjold Antiques, Design+ Consignment, and Antique Warehouse.

I’m thinking of opening up my free subscriber chat for hands-on home design Q&A so leave a comment below if this is something you’d be interested in???? Dying to know who is reading and what kind of design dilemma you are grappling with this week.

Xoxoxoxox,

J

There are so many things I loved about the David Ireland house, but it’s hard to think of one that beats this impression you have as a patron that the sun is always upon you. This is a wonderful (perhaps unintended) consequence of David’s design, a trompe-l’oeil created by the thick layer of polyurethane he used to freeze the house’s disintegrating saffron-yellow walls in time forever. What was initially meant to be a preservative nod to the cracked walls and structural imperfections he inherited from the previous owner when David bought the house in 1975, has ultimately created the illusion that golden hour has been immortalized here.

In this dystopic era of the matte plum color drench (I’m still asking myself, HOW did we get here?!), the sunny interiors of the David Ireland house feel like a gasp of fresh air. When the plum thing began, I remember thinking: ok, sure, this is like a fringe millennial thing that is supposed to scream, ‘My house is moody’. But when Benjamin Moore announced their 2025 color of the year would be Cinnamon Slate, I was sure we had lost the plot.

I still can’t fully fathom how this many homeowners having been willing to hop on the bandwagon. Why bring darkness to your home (aside maybe from a home theater room) if you don’t have to? And if you are going to use this color, please, for the love of god, pair it with wasabi green, a periwinkle, or a lavendar (NOT mustard) and add some texture to the room using materials that lighten up the visual weight (chrome, veiny marble, glass, glossy cabinets, etc.)

Personal opinions aside, somehow the appeal of this trend did capture a massive market in 2025. But now I can’t help thinking that a shadowy, matte paint job is just a clear sign of a new-build with no soul (I’m so sorry in advance to the enemies I’m making today). Meanwhile, the David Ireland house, built in 1886 and over a hundred years old now, feels like a perfect example of the most refreshingly contemporary use of color I can think of. Can we please have a petition to bring yellow back??

Since I knew this would be a pretty hot take to defend online, I’ve contemplated whether it’s the plum thing or the matte thing that’s the biggest ick for me. Certainly, when done together, it’s the combination of both. I have a hard time understanding the decision to go dark, when bright or even pale hues of yellow, for example, have actually been proven to trigger feelings of happiness in the brain. But it’s the coupling of a dark color with the least reflective paint finish (matte) in existance (besides flat) that I think (can’t prove this one) may actually take on life-sucking properties when applied to all four walls and the ceiling of a room.

The beauty of the David Ireland house is not only in the yellow walls which playfully emulate sunshine, but in the compounding effect of the high-gloss finish that lets light refract and bounce around the room. The rooms are sunny, yes, but the entire house is alit. And while I understand that polyuerthane isn’t really a viable path to achieving this look (you can’t even buy polyuerthane in California in quantities larger than a quart anymore), I’ve been poring over images of interiors where designers used high-gloss paint on floorboards, accent walls, and ceilings to achieve the perfect synergistic statement look, while never taking light out of the room or forcing a space to look more claustrophobic than it really is.

But I’ll even go so far as to say I can appreciate a high-gloss look isn’t for everyone. Still, even with matte paint, there are so many interesting finishes you can use that don’t leave a room looking flat. Finally, a moment for an unsung hero, the lime wash:

I won’t go on since I feel I’ve made my case. And yet, I don’t doubt plum paint sales will still continue to skyrocket in 2026.

I will, however, leave you with one last unsolicited piece of practial advice. If you’re painting your house sometime in the next few years and you’re feeling inexplicably and inconsolably called to plum, you’re open to something else in the family but can’t be deterred more than 30 degrees around the color wheel, may I suggest a very qualified, eligible and timelessly chic cousin of the very same clan… for your consideration: red.

Yes, it’s a hair preppier than plum. It’s also lighter, brighter, and more full of life! Like a bold party dress, a good red conveys an electric confidence and uncompromising style. And to think that Benjamin Moore got it so right in 2023 when they made their 2023 color of the year Raspberry Blush, just to get it so wrong (!) in 2025.

Walking around the David Ireland house and reflecting on all the monochrome interiors I have seen and loved, I was reminded of my favorite Mattise painting, L’Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio). I always love remembering that, largely due to his most famous work, Le Bonheur de vivre (The joy of life), Matisse was known amongst the post-Impressionist artists as the “Giver of Joy” because his paintings depicted bliss. Doesn’t the Red Studio just make you want to waste a blissful day away in there, painting with the windows flung open and the feeling of a cool breeze gusting through the curtains?

It’s not the color drench that’s the problem for me. I guess it’s the plum. It’s the use of a color drench to douse your house in any kind of color that doesn’t ultimately impart or inspire JOY.

When I first set out to tour the David Ireland house and write this piece, I came expecting sunny yellow walls. What I didn’t expect to learn was that the David Ireland house was not only the house of David Ireland, but also his lifelong studio. As is written on the 500 Capp Street website, “Ireland’s art and life are so interwoven in The House that it’s difficult to distinguish between the art and non-art—distinctions irrelevant to him who, like many of his conceptual-art peers, sought to deliberately confuse these boundaries.”

If you are new to Conceptual art like I am — that is, you have an idea of what it is, but aren’t intimately familiar — I think this screenshot from MoMA’s David Ireland docuseries sums it up pretty well. Basically, David gathered all the dirty brooms, which, accompanied by other piles of junk, he inherited from the house’s previous owner (an accordion maker), and forged them into a sculpture. This one was called “Collection of Brooms with Boom.” The boom is the heavy thing holding them up.

No disrespect to “Collection of Brooms with Boom” or anything, but it wasn’t the sculpture that wowed me as I walked around. It was the realization that there’s almost no cooler venue to observe art through than the place where it was originally made. The David Ireland house is only one of 80 artist studios preserved by Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS), a program under the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I’ve already bookmarked another one of these sites for the next time I happen to be passing through Ukia, CA. While today we’re accustomed to seeing art on a white wall — in a MoMA or in a gallery — I racked my brain for the last time I actually got to see art like this from within someone’s studio.

My mind immediately went to my grandmother Rachel’s old studio in the Manhattan flower district, down in the 20s on Sixth Avenue. It was the only one I was ever old enough to see as a kid, and I still remember the first time she taught me to use oil paints there.

Before I was alive, she painted out of two different studios: in the 90s, one on Varrick Street in Tribeca, a space she took over after a printing factory shut its doors back when the corporate printing industry was still in Meatpacking, and before this, in the 80s, one on Greenwich and 14th above a still-operating meatpacking plant, wayyy back when meat-packing was still in Meatpacking. But the whole time my grandparents lived in Manhattan, they were always in the same one-bedroom flat up on West 62nd Street, a stone’s throw away from Lincoln Center and what would eventually become — my favorite — the UWS Rosa Mexicano.

The Upper West Side had been home to painters and artists long before my grandparents arrived in the 80s. One of the original “colonies” where large groups of artists lived and kept studios was the block of West 67th Street between Central Park West and Columbus. The most famous building on this block was Hotel des Artistes, which still sits grandly at One West 67th Street today. Frustrated by the need to pay two rents for both a living space and a separate art studio, Henry W. Ranger was the landscape painter who designed a new building concept in 1900 for studio apartments with double-height north-facing windows and duplex living areas for artists. Artists in the area (Normal Rockwell being one of them) pooled their resources to finance the building and it became one of the earliest models of the co-op.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that SoHo became the artist-ridden neighborhood people now know it (w)as. Not quite as intentionally designed for studio space as the 67th Street colony was, SoHo was more so commandeered by squatting artists. As commercial manufacturing moved out of Lower Manhattan altogether, artists attracted to these lofts for their low rents and large-scale workspaces began camping out illegally. In 1971 the city implemented "Artist-in-Residence" permits, legally allowing artists to rent the lofts that would have otherwise never been zoned for residential use. What ensued next was a little bit of what we like to call sweat equity. Artists were responsible for transforming these spaces, installing kitchens, plumbing, and walls, turning empty factory floors into studios, etc.

You’ll recognize these rare properties today as the 1100 square-foot apartments on Bleeker going for the low, low prices of anything between $7500 and $14k/month. Oh how the turn tables! But, hey. Anything to live in New York.

By the time I finally saw my grandmother’s artwork in a gallery, it was almost jarring to see those massive encaustic paintings hanging somewhere other than her studio. The studio was so closely intertwined with the artworks themselves in my mind, I couldn’t quite separate them from the visions of dirty aprons, stray paint splattered on the floor, and the electric hot plates that kept the colorful oil warm while she worked. Something about walking through the David Ireland house nostalgically brought this feeling back for me. It was marvelous to feel like I was standing right where it all happened, and even more marvelous to be reminded that art can really be made from anywhere at all. Because while every New York City loft may often be a studio (I’m not sure if that’s true), not every studio is a loft.

Before my grandmother ever kept a studio in the city, her original workspace was her and my grandfather’s house in suburban Riveredge, New Jersey. She started painting in the basement, until finally she converted the back screened-in patio into a proper art space. She only rented her first studio in Manhattan once my dad and his brothers all left for college. Until this point, her home was her studio and her studio was her home. As it was once again, when she became too old to commute to and from the studio downtown so instead opted to convert half the bedroom in her one-bedroom on West 62nd into a makeshift space for painting.

An artist’s studio is such a special place, and yet many of us will live a lifetime never seeing the inside of one. I suspect in today’s economy it’s increasingly rare for artists to financially afford standalone studio space in cities like New York, and that in ten years’ time, any of those double-height north-facing apartments still remaining in the city will be but a relic of twentieth-century art history and times gone by. If you can find an HAHS site near you, I highly recommend a visit. You never know what you’ll find.

Xoxoxoxox

J

—

Sometime last year, I started reading a shit ton of Joan Didion again in pursuit of a lofty sociological goal to finally understand ‘California’. This was spurred by one particularly unsettling experience I had at a dinner party in San Francisco last Fall: I excitedly raised the issue of the scandalous news that Pantone had announced Cloud Dancer as their Color of the Year, to which someone incredulously responded… “Who’s Pantone?” Prepared to rise above the scoff that came with, and to educate a harmlessly uninformed member of the male species with the help of my peers, I was shocked by what ensued next. His “Who’s Pantone?” got a real laugh, as it turned out no one in the room knew what Pantone was. Some of the quips that followed were, “Yeah, who’s this Pantone guy anyways?” and “How many colors even are there, isn’t it like, blue, green, yellow, red…?”

Paralyzed in disbelief, I didn’t know whether to fight or flight. For the first time in the five years I’ve lived in this city, I heard a very palpable chorus of “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore” sounding off in my head. Whereby Kansas is the island of Manhattan.

I left New York five years ago and have lived in San Francisco ever since, the first place I ever really moved post-grad. When I first arrived in 2021 and the pandemic was still in peak form, stumbling upon the Bay Area (I swear they don’t teach you about California in the New York City school systems) felt like escaping a concrete jungle hazmat breeding ground for a lush, picturesque utopia where all your most self-indulgent dreams can come true.

The city of San Francisco is quietly nestled between some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, ones we often like to say rival those you’d find in Hawaii, Scotland, or New Zealand: on one side, a big, beautiful bay that runs 60 miles south to Palo Alto and onto San Jose; the southern part of Marin county where magical redwood forests gently roll into a dramatically green, cliff-ridden coastline; and the ever-powerful Pacific ocean. Like so many others who came before me, the prospect of this natural splendor is what drove me west.

It’s no secret that the prospect of B2B tech sales is what drove many other people west. There’s so much to say on all of that, none of which I’ll even try to do justice. I thought Adina Glickstein put it perfectly in her article on current-day Silicon Valley, “The Californian Ideology,” when she wrote,

“San Francisco’s Highway 101 is lined with billboards bearing words that do not appear in the Bible… ‘Ever since I was young I wanted to transform data into actionable business insights.’ ‘Use workflow.’ ‘You can just ship things.’ … [The city] is situated on the San Andreas Fault, a tectonic plate boundary that threatens constant earthquakes. The climate here is threatening, but the weather is predictable and relatively unchanging, so the banal social choreography of making small talk about the weather has been replaced by the banal social choreography of making small talk about the AI bubble…. That is the price to be paid for the perspectival privilege of being on top of the world.”

And also when she wrote that Palo Alto is the new Dimes Square (I always hated Dimes Square even before it was really called that). All of Adina’s article is true. She cites an original “The Californian Ideology” essay from 1955, seemingly implying that ours is not the first generation attempting to deconstruct the mythical forces that govern life in California and where the culture comes from.

After I hit the one-year mark living in San Francisco, I would not shut up about the place. You can eat outside all year long, the running and biking are world-class, there’s an amazing live music scene, and the major international airport is 20 minutes outside the city center. But mostly it’s just so goddamn beautiful everywhere you look. Like… freakishly beautiful. I’ve started to wonder if this is a blessing or a curse — the quality of life here is almost too much. Or maybe that’s just the cynical New Yorker in me showing, as I was raised to believe it’s natural to be stressed and overstimulated at least 60% of your day, but that’s what forces you to develop a personality.

A couple years ago, I was in a Lyft heading to SFO when I fell into a conversation with my driver that has vividly stuck with me since. He exclusively referred to San Francisco in the “she” form, and in complete earnestness told me he thought of the city as his one true love. He was so overwhelmed with appreciation for this place, you could actually hear the hurt in his voice when, as it always does around these parts, the conversation veered towards Tech. He seemed to appreciate and accept the Silicon Valley phenomenon as a simple truth of the city’s DNA: for hundreds of years, people had always come to San Francisco for one thing — to find fortune. “Everyone comes to San Francisco to mine, but no one stays to cultivate,” he told me.

I think back on this Lyft conversation all the time now. In Joan Didion’s book Where I was From, she too writes of the opportunistic spirit in those who first came to California:

“They had no love for their land. They worked their racnhes as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines…. To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it. When, at last, the land worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then they would all have made fortunres. They did not care.”

When I first moved to San Francisco and I was only 22, I’m not sure I could have told you exactly what it means to “cultivate” in one’s city. There are so many culturally rich and diverse groups in the Bay, it would be completely dishonest to say there aren’t people cultivating community here every single day and in many, very cool ways.

We all know rents in San Francisco have skyrocketed and that regular people are being priced out by the day, but that’s happening in New York too, and in so many other increasingly expensive cities. I’ve been struggling the last few months to understand what makes San Francisco so different.

Last week I wrote about an amazing antique store on Divisadero Street called Galerie d’Edmond, whose owner Nancy and I got to talking about the slow decline of the design scene in SF. Previous to running the antique business, she was an Interior Designer through most of the 90s and early 2000s. I asked if most of the store’s customers now are individuals shopping for their own homes or designers shopping for client projects, and she gave me a weird look. I don’t remember how she put it, but it was something along the lines of ‘Oh honey, what designers?’ She regaled me with tales of the old San Francisco design scene, wherein businesses and designers used to physically congregate and operate out of a small neighborhood, the Design District, on the east side of the city near what’s today known as Mission Bay. The design center is still there, but it’s not quite the hub it used to be.

Nancy thinks that with the inflow of Silicon Valley wealth coming into the city, “founder” culture has somewhat undermined an age-old appreciation for art and design in the city. “They all think ‘if I can build a multi-billion dollar company, I can obviously design my own house,’” Nancy says. Cue the sterile all-white kitchen with two Wolf ranges, either of which is seldom used, and a living room cut and pasted from the RH catalog.

The conversation with Nancy was kind of a bummer, but I can appreciate that there are many other arts besides interior design that, for all I know, could still have industries and ecosystems operating at full throttle in San Francisco. In September I decided to start seeking more of them out, and committed myself to the goal of visiting at least one art-related exhibit/installation/historical site in SF per month. I wrote a review of the Manet and Morisot exhibit, which was on at the Legion of Honor through March 1st. This weekend I am touring David Ireland’s house at 500 Capp Street and could not be more excited. There’s definitely a ton of art in San Francisco, and I know there are a ton of people making art. And yet, the haunting chorus of “Who’s Pantone?” still rings in my head from time to time (every day) and I can’t quit this idea that the young generation in SF is not here to live, breathe or appreciate art, in even the smallest ways.

Earlier this week at my Monday night sketch class, our teacher followed her regular introduction to the group with an acknowledgement of the tragic news that CCA, the last standing arts school in San Francisco and her alma mater (and David Ireland’s alma mater at that), will close its doors following its 2026-2027 school year. She took a moment to share a couple of mournful comments, and then class began. I didn’t catch the first set of instructions to the group, I was so stunned. It felt like we had just been told that San Francisco’s last brick-and-mortar bookstore was closing. This isn’t like, Oklahoma City for god’s sake! Art is a massive pillar of any international metropolitan area! No offense to OKC or anything (except f*ck the basketball team).

I’ve read all the articles that followed this news, about the increased costs of higher education, etc etc, but I still struggle to fathom how this happened and, worse, how the students must be feeling. In his article for Broke-Ass Stuart, “Why Losing CCA Hurts so Much”, Jake Warren aptly wrote,

“Losing the last remaining art school in a city once renowned for its defiant creative spirit is more than disappointing. It’s a dismal sign that San Francisco no longer knows itself.”

Though this may sound extreme to some, I’m afraid to admit he’s right. That’s not to say that urban cultures can’t change and evolve with the times, but what city doesn’t evolve with art?

Earlier this year, I went to see the Ruth Asawa retrospective at the New York MoMA and was surprised to learn she was a native Californian who spent much of her career in San Francisco. In 1950, Ruth left Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied art for three years, to move to San Francisco for the vibrant arts community. While in the beginning of her career as an artist Ruth struggled to make ends meet, I was moved by the idea that her entire career (and all of the wealth she had amassed from commissions over the years) ultimately culminated in the founding of a public arts high school in San Francisco. The school opened in 1982, but even before this, Ruth welcomed kids and families from the community into her family’s 1908 Arts and Crafts–style house and studio space in Noe Valley to explore their art-curiousness. She was always telling her kids, “Go make something…” if anyone dared complain of boredom.

I suppose this article hasn’t struck an incredibly positive tone, and I don’t have a particularly promising assurance to leave you with. Except to say that the inspiration I’ve taken from Ruth’s career and permanent fingerprint on San Francisco history has really stuck with me, and I hope her wonderful story has hereby made its mark on someone else’s consciousness. I also hope that one day we’ll see art and philanthropy rebound in San Francisco, to a degree where they both enable one another in a compounding and cyclical way, that wealthy people in the Bay might again begin to use money or celebrity for good, like Ruth did, to democratize art. Most of all I hope that the arts are not really dead in San Francisco, or dying, that is.

It’s hard for me, coming from New York, to avoid comparisons and to hold all of this knowledge as true, and simultaneously to not think any less of San Francisco for it. And I don’t, for the record, if you can believe it. I won’t be able to fit it all here, but I do believe deeply that there’s an incredibly unique and culturally rich undercurrent to San Francisco that most of the world (cough cough, most New Yorkers) has, shockingly, yet to discover. Aside from, of course, those who have spent real time or lived here. For another article, though, as I’m sure I’m butting up against the email-only character limit. Happy Sunday.

Xoxoxoxox

J

Aftwards, I gave myself an unlimited amount of time to do it right. My feelings on decorating an apartment are that you really can’t do it in a rush, it’s best to live with so-so filler items while you try to find the one, and that good things come to those who wait. (In the wise words of Ron Dadon: “I’m installing stained glass windows in my apartment… but I still don’t have a couch.”)

My journey with this space, of course, began on Pinterest. I knew I wanted to source almost everything secondhand (as with many other things in my life — clothes, books — I often find it hard to justify any purchase new if I can find it used) so for the next six months I averaged 3-4 hours per day across Craiglist, Marketplace, Chairish and local consignment store sites. Aside from the more obvious ethical and financial arguments for buying secondhand, I also in all honesty can’t think of a single place I’d even go to buy new furniture I actually like. (Is anyone out there really still shopping at Wayfair?!)

To my dismay, I began to realize that a handful of the highly specific pieces I was still holding out for at the six month mark were nowhere to be found for less then $1,000. Now that I have found them all… below, please read for five pieces/looks/aesthetics I was coveting and where I found them/how I brought them to life.

1. The perfect antique desk

The week I moved in, I drove thirty minutes south to Noe Valley to buy a really fugly standing desk from someone off Facebook Marketplace for $80. It did the job while I searched and searched for the perfect desk (spoiler: it doesn’t exist). I was daydreaming about all kinds of desks, but I felt it had to be a writing desk: an elegant Queen Anne, a more traditional federal or english regency style in a rich mahogany, or literally anything made by Baker Furniture in the ‘50s — especially desks like this one that I thought could double as the most adorable bar cart. I spent so many months agonizing over the style, the price point, the size, that the vision of what I was looking for started to become less and less clear. (This was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a lesson I would come to learn many times over: if you’re trying too hard to make it work, it’s probably not going to work.)

I finally bought an antique writing desk for $250. It was a Louis XV style desk in a high-gloss black lacquer made by Drexel Heritage. I drove an hour and fifteen minutes to buy it from someone in Santa Rosa. My first mistake: it was kind of harsh looking and gaudy (not really a mistake, but). My second mistatke: not measuring the legroom. The desk was short to begin with, but coupled with a row of 5” drawers I didn’t anticipate taking up so much height, I could not sit at this desk with my feet flat on the floor. I tolerated it for three months, at which point the chronic back pain that had set in from spending 9-5 every day in a cross-legged pretzel and a disgusting weekly bill from the accupuncturist together drove me to get rid of it. My third mistake — less defensible — was reselling the desk for the same $250, as I’ve since found out this bad boy retails on Chairish for $1,500.

Finally, enter: the executive desk. By returning to the drawing board (this was the Pinterest board for my current apartment) I was confronted with the realization that the writing desk didn’t really mesh with my envisioned design scheme. The one I purchased had a leather top for god’s sake, an iced coffee could leave a water ring just by being in the vicinity. Instead, I started to realize what really mattered in my dream desk: I wanted a surface area large enough to fit a lamp (or two), a monitor, a vase of flowers, a pile of magazines, a couple of framed photos, and I also wanted to be able to set my damn coffee down. I didn’t know I was looking for an executive desk at the time (more on the history of these later), so I started looking for small dining room tables instead.

I first found the Drexel Heritage burl extension dining table on Ebay for $1,800. To my amazement, a store called Design+ Consignment in San Francisco was selling one locally for $700. Then two weeks later — just my luck — someone listed one on Marketplace for $400, and I pounced.

2. The perfect pair of Pembroke nightstands

Perhaps the most heavily iterated upon item in my home has been my bedroom nightstands. I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit I’ve cycled through three different pairs of nightstands next to my bed in under 12 months. The whole time, I was holding out hope that a pair of secondhand Pembroke tables would miraculously appear in my area for a fraction of the prices I was seeing on Chairish (anywhere from $750-$1,400 for two or sometimes even one?!).

The first stand-ins I bought were big, art deco, three-drawer chests in — again — a glossy black lacquer finish. Really have to stop making that mistake. They did the job because they matched my six-drawer bedroom dresser so it was kind of giving a cute three-piece set vibe. Unfortunately, I realized that these too, were ugly. I love an art deco moment but these were not it. I finally moved past my irrational fear of clashing woods with hardwood floors, and the next set I pretty much only bought because they were $20 for the pair and also because they kind of had a Nancy Meyers vibe. I was pretty excited for these since, given the price point, I thought I had struck gold (read: “effortlessly homey and lived-in looking but make it cheap”). Again I drove an hour to get these, south to Los Gatos this time, and when I moved them in, dusted them off, and put all my personals inside, I was struck with… meh. I finally resorted to Photoshop. I found a pair of burl nightstands by Michael Amini for sale at the Design+ Consignment store in SF that at least looked kind of interesting when I photoshopped them into my room, so I blocked my lunch break the very same day and went to pick them up. At this point the only pair of Pembrokes I had found online all year for less than $1,000 were a nine-hour drive away in San Diego, and even I’m not that dillusional.

I got to the Design+ store and discovered the only thing that could have possibly deterred a very desperate and at-her-wits-end me from pulling the trigger: they were covered in laminate. Aka, they weren’t really made of burl, they were wrapped in a stick-on sheet of plastic made to look like burl. Not to be picky or anything (as if), but for this price point laminate was just a plain rip-off. I was prepared to leave in total defeat, and then.

Finally, enter: my Louis XVI style rose marble-top and walnut bedside cabinets. I saw these as I was leaving the store, and the rest was history. I haven’t been able to pinpoint when they were made because the listing was actually for the wrong item, but they’re either original from the late 19th century (highly unlikey) or they are a 1940s replica in the style of the historic French cabinetmaker Grohé Frères. They are a little small, and they don’t allow me as large of a junk drawer as I might otherwise like to keep, but they bring me a limitless amount of joy every time I walk into or even past the room.

3. A one-of-one tiger ottoman by Jose Cortez with custom Brunschwig & Fils upholstery

Now this one is just indulgent. One of my favorite antique stores (and I mean antiques proper, not consignment) in San Francisco is Galerie d’Edmond. They don’t have a website. The store is owned by a fabulous couple, Edmond and Nancy, who opened the storefront in 2016 after 12 years of running a previous antiques business. The shop is just next door to my pilates studio, so I must have walked by at least a dozen times without noticing before I finally went in. At the time, I was actually searching for an engagement gift for a friend, when BAM, there it was. I mean… have you ever seen anything like it?

Naturally, still sweaty in my workout clothes, I struck up a conversation with Nancy and Edmond, and we chatted for about an hour. About their backgrounds, about the design world in SF, and about the chair. Er, ottoman. Am I the only total sucker for a good bit of vintage lore? Previous to running the store, Nancy was an interior designer in San Francisco. When an old client of hers was vacating a home Nancy had helped design in the 90s, she asked if she could buy back one of the custom ottomans she had made for the project. This is a one-of-one ottoman with custom tiger upholstery by Brunschwig & Fils. Pieces like this remind me how sad it is that people have largely done away with tassels and other trims in pursuit of a less “fussy” minimalist home aesthetic. Naturally, I had to have it, but it was $3,600.

To the internet I went, and this time I’ll keep it short. Since I’ve basically been a walking ad for cheetah print everything since circa 2014, I already knew what I was looking for. I didn’t know if it would be a chair, or a sofa, or a bench, but I knew it would be cheetah.

Heartbreaking as it is to say, there aren’t as many cheetah lovers out there amongst the Marketplace shoppers and sellers as you might think, so these items don’t come around all that often. Secondhand shopping does get tricky in this sense, as the market is usually more saturated with things ‘on-trend’ right now, like red light masks and Dyson air wraps. Cheetah print upholstered ottomans? Not so many. And as the story always goes… when I finally stopped looking, I found it (them).

Thank you for reading this far! If there are any of you who did.

Xoxoxox

J

Not far into my research I was struck by a post from Margot Lee, where she expanded on the inspiration she felt watching Eileen Gu’s viral interview on neuroplasticity, sharing a series of journal prompts called “How to rewire your brain in 90 days using neuroplasticity.” Um… mic drop? The very first one stopped me dead in my tracks: When something goes wrong, what is your automatic explanation? In what must have been one one-hundredth of a second, my brain answered: that I did something to deserve it.

While I know in my answer that ‘deserve’ only meant, ‘some preceding event may have unconsciously enabled this one’ and not that I believe I ‘deserve’ some sort of ill fate, it was still a shock to find this kind of laissez-faire attitude in myself. I thought on what this meant in the context of being in an accident last week — is harping on the ‘why’ really saving me from undue danger the next time around? Or is it just more comfortable to arrive quickly at an explanation than to float in the possibility that crashing out was just a plain statistical inevitability?

I am chronically one to chime in with a good old refrain of ‘everything happens for a reason,’ both in good times and bad, but I am starting to wonder where and why I picked up this conviction, and if carrying it forward this long has had any real benefit. I wonder if others struggle with this phrase, or if it’s annoying to be on the receiving end of being told this. Because the fact is, not everything happens for a reason. Sometimes we are faultless, we don’t deserve what came to us, and there is no good explanation. Where is the line between superstition and self-punishment? Is anyone else out there unconsciously keeping tally of all their little mistakes and missteps throughout the week, just to have this pretense of an explanation handy if and when something tragic inexplicably goes wrong?

I find that one of the hardest parts of life is accepting that anything in the world could possibly be ‘random.’ It just seems impossible! Like, you’re telling me it’s completely random that the day before I crashed my bike I treated myself to an uncharacteristically expensive purchase at Pas Normal Studios? (In my head: no, that must have been GOD telling me to tighten up the purse strings.)

Neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity, is the brain’s “remarkable ability to reorganize its structure, functions, and connections in response to new experiences, learning, or… injury”. When Eileen Gu shared why she uses the same analytical "tinkering" approach to personal growth as she does to freestyle skiing, she mentioned that in many corners of life she is always trying to deliberately strengthen positive, calm, and high-performance neural pathways while weakening fear-based ones. The problem is it can take us so damn long to learn which pathways serve us and which ones are fear-based, and which ones are fear-based pathways disguised as ones that serve us. Maybe injury is a great time to reconsider all of this.

A similar version of this narrative my friend Liddy coined years ago was opting for “high vibration” choices over low ones. Leaving your unfulfilling job or getting bangs could be high vibrational, but so could staying in on a Saturday night just to be up early the next morning for a solo powerwalk on the West Side Highway. Projecting your insecurities onto your significant other and picking arguments were always low vibrational, she would remind me. Sometimes it feels like fear-based, low vibrational pathways are just habits of the mind we all picked up so long ago, we’re either permanent prisoners to them or we’re spending years in therapy trying to abandon them. But then Eileen Gu put it so plainly in her interview — “you can control how you think, and therefore you can control who you are.”

So no, maybe everything doesn’t happen for a reason. And maybe when something goes wrong, it’s likely that those trusty explanations we tend to default to are more like antiques from our past selves, nuggets of old fear responses that no longer serve us.

If you need me you know where to find me! I’ll be here, tinkering away and probably still coveting a pint of the new Reese’s Puffs ice cream flavor at Salt and Straw this month.

Xoxoxox

J

If you’re an Overoptimizing Maximalista like me, you’ll appreciate that the scary part of a truth like this has nothing to do with physical pain and everything to do with FOMO. Not the social kind of FOMO — god willing I’ll develop that one day but for now I’m still a textbook introvert — but the kind that makes you question ‘will I still like what I see in the mirror after I’ve been sitting still on my ass for ten days? For a month? Two months?’

Sitting still is not my forte. And it’s not an ideal time to be immobilized right now either, seeing as Spring Summer has sprung in San Francisco (thank you climate change for the second-shortest California winter on record since the ‘50s) and it was just getting to be that time of year when all feels hopeful again. The kind of hopefulness you only find in a shoulder season — like, maybe I’ll start my expensive gym membership back up again and finally learn how to do a push-up, or, maybe I’ll take that art class and finally learn to oil paint like I always said I would. Spring was feeling ripe with opportunity, until it wasn’t.

This isn’t my first rodeo in the pelvis-breaking department, so luckily I feel somewhat mentally prepared for what comes next. Week one: pure, extreme discomfort; opioids to help you sleep; awkward house visits from people who feel obligated to stop by; oscillating between a deep spiritual acceptance of what has come to pass and a blind, stubborn rage for something you clearly didn’t deserve. Week two: finally your first day without pain, then the soul-crushing experience of experiencing pain again the next one; the emotional roller coaster that is ‘one step forward, two steps back.’ Week three: letting yourself fall into a groove at home; noticing your mind become more and more present by the day; appreciating the parts of life that start to move in slow motion, resenting the world for flying by at lightspeed without you. Etc.

It’s a funny thing, always using time as a currency to value your days spent. On one hand we always want more time, but on the other we are glad when a day is finally over so long as we got “a lot” done. This is me. I am chronically at risk of losing sight of the real reasons I love something; I become so distracted by the intrigue of “completing” my things, and by the reward associated with packing a million of them into a single day and being able to mentally pat myself on the back like, “ah, all in a day’s work.” Anything to not sit still….

In any case, this time around I am setting out to use my convalescence creatively and to try a whole bunch of things I don’t love, I’m not good at, and I have no real incentive to get better at. I do have a few goals — chiefly, I promised myself I’d write something (anything) every day for 30 days, delete instagram, and make a quilt — but I’m open to being redirected or just kind of floating in time for a little. Otherwise, I thought I’d finally get around to framing some old family photos, finishing the Joan Didion book that’s been on my nightstand for six months, and learning Spanish. (For anyone interested in the latter, there’s a wonderful little school in Ronda that offers a pack of 10 virtual one-on-one Spanish lessons to anyone in the world for €90).

Mostly I’d like to practice sitting still with the understanding that life can still be meaningful and the world can still be a fascinating place, even when you’re not able to show up physically how you’d like, or to possess the same body you’re accustomed to.

If you have any good books, articles, albums, recipes, or movies to recommend — you know where to find me!

Xoxoxox

J

Sometimes I regret not absorbing more from them, but in my defense the history lessons in our household could grow quite dark quite quickly as they always came back to either the 1492 Spanish expulsion of Jews, or the Holocaust, both of which we had family ties to, sadly for (thirteen-year-old me) us. No one died, everyone was fine, and there are just so many times a pre-teen can sit through family war stories, despite how they may connect back to art and art history.

In my adult life, however, I’ve made a considerable effort to immerse myself in world history in ways that feel more authentic to me and less forced in the ways I associate with childhood. One of my favorite ways to do this is through art.

Today I went to see the Manet and Morisot exhibit showing at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and I found myself redefining everything I thought I knew about impressionism. I always thought impressionism was all about the light this, the light that. Sure I thought the water lilies were pretty, but really I just loved to go see them at l’Orangerie in Paris. The space was spectacular, but the paintings never made me feel anything.

I found it interesting, the way the museum chose to juxtapose the works of Manet and Morisot on my guided tour. Even the intentional staging of each of the paintings, perfectly alternating between Manet and Morisot works, asserted Manet as the celebrity, Morisot the amateur; Manet the portraitist, Morisot the landscape artist; Manet the loyal Salon devotee, Morisot the avant-garde impressionist.

An entirely different dichotomy came to me as I moved through the exhibit though – one of a publicly revered realist’s body of dignified portraiture (which frankly I think falls flat), and a series of ephemeral glimpses into the intimacy and poignancy of the private female experience. It is perhaps quite obvious to note here that Morisot could have captured the fleeting sensations, pangs, and stolen glances associated with womanhood far better than Manet ever could have. But I found it so ironic that most of their adult relationship was based on Morisot’s apprenticeship under Manet ‘the great’ (!) and Manet’s commitment, often with Morisot there as his model, to mastering portraiture with a special eye toward the female disposition.

The subtle dissimilarities between Manet’s and Morisot’s paintings of women grew into echelons of difference as I moved through the exhibit and became especially evident to me as Morisot progressed in her career, seemingly outpacing Manet by a landslide by the time her career was climaxing at the end of the nineteenth century. While critics often wrote that Morisot’s paintings appeared “ready to vanish like a wisp of smoke” citing her messy brushwork, I refuse to believe this was anything but intentional on behalf of the painter. This was impressionism at its core, something profoundly simple yet revolutionary: to convey what the eye perceives in the flash of a moment, before reason or convention steps in to refine it. What amazes me about Morisot’s work is that I feel she did succeed in capturing her very first impressions of a scene, but somehow they were never truly trivial and above all else, her images feel relatable and personable even now.

While Manet spent the better part of six years painting Morisot as a model and the caliber of his female portraiture would surely grow as their time together unfolds, the beautiful end result is nowhere close to the kind of work Morisot will finish her career making – paintings that speak volumes… and volumes – just before dying in 1895.

This exhibit has stuck with me as I found Morisot’s complete works to be a miraculous assertion of artistic autonomy in a milieu that restricted women’s access to formal training, public space, and critical legitimacy. Her paintings – often centered on a woman’s most quotidian scenes, quiet domestic interiors, and ordinary lived experiences – were some of the most meaningful contributions to the expansion and thematic reach of Impressionism, as they challenged the art world’s assumptions of what subjects were worthy of artistic inquiry.

Maybe every generation has felt this, but it seems like ours is being beaten over the head with the consumerism thing. Our currency is clicks, the pathway is built into Instagram so you don’t have to waste a second thinking any better of your decisions, and there is always something new we are supposed to buy – or supposed to want to buy, but not be able to. Amidst all this noise and pressure to partake in Black Friday, there is also an overwhelming resentment of all the packaging, the waste, and the emptiness of these fleeting trends. There is an immutable desire to throw the phone away and just say NO. That’s why to me, there is almost no gift more special and no purchase more rewarding than something old and used.

This year I have sworn it all off and am practicing a No-New November. I made the proposition to my family to attempt a No-New Christmas, so all gifts would ideally be secondhand, antiques, etc. I can’t say anyone else has agreed to partake thus far, but I’m still going to do my part.

Conveniently we are shopping in Hudson, NY today while visiting my sister who lives upstate just east of the Hudson and west of the Berkshires. Those who frequent the area will know the small town of Hudson is home to an incredible economy of antique dealers, vintage furniture stores, secondhand kitchen and homewares, artists and art collectors, restoration craftspeople, etc. There is only one street, but it can take an entire day to make your way through all of the riches.

We left home early in time for coffee and scones at Bartlett House and started the day at Regan & Smith Antiques, where my mom found two 1950s Woodard Sculptra Chairs in a beautiful, high-gloss green lacquered iron and complete with their original pinstripe cushions.

Nextdoor at Arenskjold Antiques I found a small oil painting of two girls dancing. I thought it was just too charming to leave behind.

We stopped at Hudson Diner for chili, BLTs and tuna melts and continued onto Red Chair, where the real damage of the day was done. I was in the market for a few engagement, bridal and wedding gifts – for anyone else shopping in this category, looking for something a little bit more special, and located in the tristate, I cannot recommend this store highly enough. Jocie Sinauer is the owner — she specializes in French and Belgian antique homewares (think silver cutlery, tea sets, linens, serving platters, etc.) and exudes well-traveled shopkeeper.

(Since the wedding/Xmas gifts I bought are semi-secret and now wrapped I can’t share photos, but might consider a full Red Chair profile piece/haul sometime down the line as this store well deserves…)

Our last stop on Warren st. was La Maison Supreme, a store that sparkles like a diamond on the inside from all the glass and crystal for sale. Although everything looks wildly expensive and there is indeed a good amount of baccarat on the floor, I found a gorgeous set of six glass champagne coups with elegant gold rims for $90. Despite some of the flashier price tags I would still recommend a stop inside.

We ended the day at the Antique Warehouse, home to 40,000 square feet of antiques and a hundred or so vendors. You can spend an entire day in this place and still only skim the surface, but we did our best to keep this visit to a couple hours.

My favorite vendor there is Bardin Palomo, who also sells a limited set of their inventory on 1st Dibs. I found this incredible pair of green, beaded, silk-pleated table lamps of theirs that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

By this point I was wishing I hadn’t spent an arm, a leg and my first born at Red Chair becuase these lamps were $1200 and I could not afford them. Instead I vowed to attempt a DIY version of these shades at home which should make for an… interesting project.

Those are all our Black Friday finds! Oh and last but not least this coffee table book becuase, how could I not?

Xoxox

With a cunning new eye for old things,

Julia

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