Tips & Talk

Who's Story is This?

Sometimes people just collect beautiful things, no questions asked. Don't you want to know where they came from? Every object has a history. What happened to make this worn edge? Who made this hand...

The Empty Corner

When did every empty corner become something to fix? For years, we've treated space as something to fill. Fill it with another chair, shelf, or object. It starts to feel like a cram session. Here's...

The 9 Most Common Complaints About Residential General Contractors

Hiring a general contractor is one of the largest purchases most homeowners will ever make, and it is also causes worry. Year after year, home improvement and construction rank near the very top of...

The $40 Find That Anchors the Whole Room

Every room has a gravitational center. It's a piece that everything else orbits. In most rooms, people assume it's the sofa, or the rug, or the statement light fixture. Sometimes it is. But other t...

THE THREE KINDS OF OBJECTS IN EVERY ROOM

When we begin working on a room, we read the existing space before we recommend a single new thing. We're looking for three categories of objects. 1. Objects That Are Speaking Clearly These are t...

Objects are not just things

Objects are the material form of how we understand ourselves. The ceramics you collect on the windowsill are an autobiography. The way you arrange books by color, by subject, horizontally, in delib...

Tchotchkes in Action

WHAT OBJECTS (tchotchkes) ACTUALLY COMMUNICATE Walk into any room and read it the way a curator would. Not: Do I like this?  But: What does this say? The oversized sectional pushed against three w...

HOW TO READ YOUR OWN ROOM

Look at your room as if you've never seen it before, not as the person who had arranged it, but as the person encountering it for the first time. This is genuinely difficult because familiarity is ...