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Rehab Diaries: Rescuing a 100-Year-Old Garden
Joel and Diane Schatz have photos (circa 1927) of their Mill Valley, California, house that show a garden party in progress under a great canopy of wisteria, with guests in party hats posed against a...
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DIY: How to Stop Killing Your Indoor Succulents
I've killed every succulent I've ever attempted to grow. Things start off well enough, but a few weeks after I bring succulents into my home, they start to look spindly and sad before giving up and...
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DIY: The Magical Powers of White Cherry Blossoms
Every March growing up, I watched my mom wield a large pair of hedge clippers and go at the forsythia that edged our front yard. She'd fill a tall cut glass vase with the naked branches and a little...
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Pillow Talk: 7 Secrets to Making a Perfect Bed
If you count all the hours we allot to plumping pillows, smoothing sheets, straightening shams, and fussing over how the whole thing looks, we spend as much time on our beds as in them. Yet the results...
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Calke Abbey in Aspic
A desire for seclusion was a great preoccupation among the heirs to Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. Solitude from the outside world as well as a passion for taxidermy. From the 1880s until the 1980s when...
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Harris Tweed: A Landscape Translated into Fabric
When you wear Harris Tweed, you are wearing a piece of the Hebrides. Its beaches, sky, rocks, pools, and heather are all ingredients of tweed. As are the sheep, of course. The island weavers put it all...
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DIY: Winter Finery, Foraged in Brooklyn
Making your own wintertime corsage is less about having a particular way with plants and more about your tolerance for braving chilly temperatures to do your foraging. Inspired by Akiko Seki's festive...
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DIY Seed Starting: Newspaper Pots
Late winter is the time of year when gardens in New York look their worst, but when hopes for their future are at an all-time high. It’s the season of seed catalogs and bed planning, and when we get to...
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A Great Gatsby Garden: The Lavish Long Island Estate That Inspired a Movie's...
There was a girl who grew up in the Phipps mansion on Long Island's Gold Coast and she was named Margaret but went by Peggie, and she married young and divorced. Her second marriage lasted longer and...
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DIY: A Glamorous New Year's Eve Ceiling
When we spotted these balls dropping from Cecilia Fox's ceiling, the symbolism didn't escape us. Hang a few overhead at a New Year's Eve party and no one will notice when you don't turn on the TV to...
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My Dirty Secret, or How I Learned to Live with a Marble Backsplash
Always, it was about the marble. My platonic ideal—the house I would lie awake and fantasize about—involved carrara: countertops, mantels, thresholds, and backsplashes. Pretty much every surface except...
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Steal This Look: Black and White Indoor/Outdoor Terrace
When I moved from a big, rambling East Coast house to Northern California a decade ago, I was shocked by how small West Coast houses were in comparison. Then it dawned on me: California practically...
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Bouquet of the Week: Splurge on Black and White Anemones
The first apartment my husband and I shared had a tiny white and black kitchen. A huge white porcelain sink sloped gracefully into a black tiled counter top, and black-and-white checked tiles formed a...
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Considering the Fiddle Leaf Fig
You've seen them. They're everywhere. They're lush and sculptural and they make for excellent eye candy in photographs of some of the most beautiful apartments you see floating around the Internet. The...
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Domestic Dispatches: My Worst Design Decision Ever
The worst mistake I made was not when I forced my husband to spend all weekend painting the kitchen trim a sickly robin's egg blue. The worst mistake was not the $149 "deal" I got online on a wobbly,...
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Taking 'Bread and Roses' Literally in Brooklyn
A hundred years ago when some women workers used the rallying cry “Bread and Roses” during a strike at textile mills in Massachusetts, they were demanding basic survival plus the right to have beauty...
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DIY: Shade-Tolerant Herbs To Grow in Your Apartment
Buttermilk biscuits with chive butter, egg salad with ribbons of tarragon, iced tea with fresh mint. There are a lot of reasons to love warm weather, and the addition of fresh herbs to some of my...
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DIY: Alliums, Three Ways
Brightly colored and shaped like something from another planet, these cousins to chives and garlic and onions are cropping up in gardens throughout New York at this time of year. But more than being...
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DIY: The Ultimate Disguise
In the springtime, muscari—also known as grape hyacinth—can be spotted around the base of nearly every tree in my Brooklyn neighborhood. A florist's pot of the striking blue flowers is one of my...
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Domestic Dispatches: 5 Ways to Cover 50 Windows on a Budget
Curtains can go very, very wrong. If you go overboard, you end up with something heavy and expensive and claustrophobic, like one of those getups Sally Field wore in Lincoln. On the other hand, don't...
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