I don’t shy away from making design edicts. An example would be my No TVs Over Fireplaces rule. I’ve also come out against faux candles (unless they’re on a Christmas tree), diagonal fireplaces, arches in the wrong context, and a whole bunch of other things that I think are bad. The reason I go so hard on these things is that there is so little left to make fun of these days that’s not going to hurt someone’s feelings or stir up negativity. Making fun of questionable design choices is fine because if we cannot have a sense of humor about how we decorate our homes, what can we have a sense of humor about? So, today I am going to make the bold statement about something I think most homes need.

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Entry: June 15, 2026

Editor’s Note: I started writing this on June 15, 2026. I stepped away from it for more than a month because the story was so complicated and filled with minutiae that I was having a hard time describing the chain of events concisely without getting too far into the weeds. In the interim, there was even more drama. Another note is that, while this story does involve some level of financial stress, I have been relatively financially stable all year. This is more a story about the ineptness of my lender than my own financial peril.

Sometimes you solve a problem, only to have it come back and haunt you later. At Londo Lodge, my Yosemite Country House/Forever Home/Vacation Rental, I have problems like this all the time. One example is the plumbing under the sink in my recently renovated kitchen. The kitchen installed by a contractor who wasn’t the most well versed with plumbing fixtures. Unfortunately, something about how the piping was installed under the sink led to a significant leak. That leak ended up destroying the MDF baseboard I had under the sink, which I fixed. I had an actual plumber come in to redo all the under-sink plumbing, figuring it was better to get it done right than to have to replace the entire baseboard again. However, after getting the under sink situation looked at by a legit plumber, the system kept leaking.

I’ve had that leak looked at five times, fixed three times. After the final inspection in which a professional plumber couldn’t find anything wrong, I just gave up and decided to put a plastic bin under the sink to catch any random drips. And guess how many times the system has dripped since I put the protective plastic bin down? ZERO.

There are lots of things about houses that seem like huge problems then sort of just go away. A mysterious leak that comes through a window and ruins a custom roman shade (then never comes back). The washing machine making a terrible screeching noise (that stops by itself). Things happen that seem like calamities, then go away on their own without fanfare.

I’ve been living in a state of dread since November, when I started to get behind on my mortgage. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you’ll remember this actually happened before. I already dragged my house out of a near foreclosure situation once. This time was different for a few reasons I’ll describe, but the main gist was the same. I got very close to my house being taken by the bank. The house went into active foreclosure.

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Something weird is going on with dating. I don’t know if it’s my age, where I live, or because we’re all being gaslit by the combo of a terrible economy and a thriving stock market. But it seems like everyone - including the straights! - has given up on dating. Straight women are tired of mens’ bullshit. Gay men are tired of mens’ bullshit. And men are tired of their own bullshit. In my light research, I found that many people report having a harder time dating post-Pandemic. People are feeling more frustrated, more lonely, and less hopeful about finding a partner.

I have all sorts of people in my life who have decided for various reasons that they would like to stay single, forever. I really respect that - I’m not convinced that we are all meant to have one partner that we keep forever. My parents had a lot of single friends and I have a lot of family members who have been mostly single my whole life. They lead interesting lives, are fulfilled, have chosen families, friends, and social lives. The notion that you have to be coupled up to be happy is stupid, especially given how many miserable couples we all know.

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I met Alexis when I was sixteen. We were fast friends when we met on the front steps of the CalArts dorm in 1999, where we were attending The California State Summer School for the Arts. I’ve written about CSSSA before and what a transformative experience it was. I credit it with not only expanding my creative horizons, but also introducing me to a wider section of kids than I would have otherwise met. Over the years, I lost contact with almost everyone I met there. But Alexis and I have stayed in touch (probably not as much as either of us would like).

It’s been said that our forties are the least happy period for a lot of people and while I am thankful for my physical health, I am definitely feeling this. One of the most frustrating parts about being this age is how hard it’s been to maintain relationships with friends and family. I have felt so overwhelmed by just staying alive and servicing all my commitments that there hasn’t been much time for much else. The last five years have been non-stop work, most of it in isolation, and keeping up with friends has often fallen by the wayside. A lot of my friends are women and those women currently have very young children. Sometimes it feels like we’re going to have to wait until we’re sixty to spend any real time together. It sucks, because I want to live my life now but it also is what it is. I’ve accepted that this is a challenging time of life.

Like me, Alexis moved to the east coast for college. Unlike me, she married young and eventually moved to Greece (she’s half Greek, grew up going to Crete every summer). When we met as teenagers, we couldn’t have known how we’d turn out, who we would become. Given that we met at art school, and that she interned at the Gagosian while she was at Columbia, I always thought Alexis would do something in the art or gallery world. Instead, she’s an incredibly active mother of four who lives halfway across the world and manages multiple businesses.

When we met up, she said something I’ve always thought was true and felt deeply.

“We are who we are, you know?” She told me over sushi at the LA Farmers Market, one of our favorite teenage haunts. “We kind of stay the same.”

This is something I’ve always thought about myself and definitely see in Alexis. Superficially, we are worlds away from where we were when we met. But weirdly she’s still the same person I met twenty seven years ago. We’re from backgrounds that are very different in many respects but were raised with a lot of the same values. Our circumstances have changed immensely but our voices, our humor, our high energy Type A personalities have remained constant.

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In high school, I used to come down to stay with Alexis and her family from time to time. Their house, on a meandering, wide, idyllic street in one of Los Angeles’ most beautiful, historic neighborhoods, was my introduction to this town. The guest room I stayed in was separated from Alexis’ by a Jack-And-Jill bathroom. At night, we’d hang out in her room, listen to CDs on her boombox, and leaf through Flaunt, The Face, Interview, and any other magazines we could get our hands on from the newsstand in Larchmont. These were the ultimate slumber parties and I love thinking about them because we were such kids, even though we thought we were so artistic and sophisticated.

Alexis smoked cigarettes, which I thought was so cool at the time. We’d drive around in her Volvo sedan with the windows down listening to Tricky, going to The Standard on the Sunset Strip to pretend to be cool, chic adults. We were under age, so just we got guacamole and Diet Cokes, but it still felt so glam. I was so impressed with and enamored by LA back then. I’m sure we looked like literal amoebas to the models who sat in a human size aquarium at The Standard, but we had no idea. We thought we were cool. I was obsessed with brands and shopping, so we’d go to the Beverly Center to check out Diesel, Dolce and Gabbana, and The Sunglass Hut (whose name has always made me laugh). We did silly teenage things at the mall.

For a time after college, we were both in Los Angeles. Alexis was the first of my friends to buy a house. She renovated it with her husband and we had a ton of fun parties there. Years later, her Greek husband got the urge to move back to be closer to his parents so they moved away with their two young kids (the younger two hadn’t yet been born). And since then it’s been harder to see each other as much as I’d like.

Friendships like this, while being logistically challenging to maintain, are irreplaceable. To sit across the table from a forty-two year old woman and see a fifteen year old girl I’ve known through so many different eras is somehow nourishing. We collectively look at each other, see each other, and say to each other “I see you, I see what happened, I see your life.” That kind of depth is impossible to recreate with a brand new friend.

After Alexis and I met up for lunch the other day, I went over to her house, to the house I’d spent so much time in over the years, to see her mom. As we get older, it becomes more and more important to see each other’s parents. They’ve been our guides, they’ve watched us wondering how and where we would land. They’ve seen us the way we’ve seen each other. We’ve grown and changed, but we’re still the same kids they met decades ago. In a world where we often feel like all we add up to is what we look like, what our successes are, who we know, and how much money we have, what a gift to be seen by the people who knew us before we were anything.

The house Alexis grew up in, purchased at a price that would be considered a bargain by today’s standards, looks almost exactly the same it did when I first set eyes on it. Her mother, a trained architect, renovated the home herself in the eighties. The kitchen still looks exactly the same, white square tiles, the same Subzero fridge I used to grab Fiji water out of before we knew bottled water was bad. The same giant modern art hanging in the stairwell.

Visiting with Alexis and her mom the other day was a reminder not only of the value of old friendships but also the luxury of being able to visit a house I’ve been visiting since I was a kid. In 2014, my parents moved out of the house where I was raised. And in my adult life, I’ve moved more times than I can count. I’m pretty sure of the main reasons I’ve held on to Londo Lodge, despite the difficulty of managing it from afar, is a desire for permanence. There just is something special about going back to a place you know so intimately. Where your muscle memory tells you where everything is.

Obviously, our relationships matter much more than physical spaces do. But places also matter. In a period of life where we’re beginning to understand the finality of our parents’ mortality, and thus our own, I find myself becoming more and more nostalgic for the people and places that tinted and flavored my life. It’s a weird feeling, I want to grab everything and bottle it up, somehow keep everything frozen in time so I never have to miss anything, anyone. I’m always waiting for a moment to stop time, so that I can catch up and finally be able to savor what is in front of me. That moment never comes.

As I left my visit with Alexis and her mom, I turned back toward the house and was filled with warmth, gratitude, and immense sadness. How many more times will I be able to come back to this place? It played a pivotal role in how I read, digested, and understood the city I have known as home the longest. Standing in the middle of the quiet street, time felt so finite and fleeting, twenty-seven years rushed past my eyes in the fuzzy blur of a street light. I felt a strong desire for reunion. To spend time with people who have mattered to me for so long.

It’s been a minute since I did a life update so I thought I’d come here today to tell you what I’ve been up to lately. Technically, summer doesn’t start until June 21 but with Memorial Day weeks behind us and in the light of LA’s perpetually warm weather, I feel like I’ve been living a Midsummer Night’s Dream for months now. Time, accented nearly daily with some of the most bonkers news stories of a generation, seems to be moving exponentially faster as the days pass. It’s sort of a good thing because nothing is ever boring. But it’s sort of a bad thing because nothing ever quite feels settled before something else happens to distract us from what we were literally just thinking about.

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I have a number of different furniture fetishes (meaning, furniture categories I go to over and over again). A prime example is the dresser. I love putting dressers in rooms that aren’t bedrooms because they are so functional for storage and because I like looking at them. Another fetish I have is tiny lamps. I love that they allow me to add lighting where space is limited and I love that their scale feels novel. Today, I’d like to talk to you about my newest home furnishing fetish, daybeds. I’ve added a new one to my living room at Londo Lodge and I am loving the way it looks (and functions!).

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We’ve all been there. You’re in a rush, trying to catch a flight or be on time for a meeting. You rush to the bathroom then rush to wash your hands. The faucet is the kind with a sensor. You put your hands under the faucet, waiting for water to rush over your hands so you can wash them. The water doesn’t start. You remove your hands and wave them around a bit to activate the sensor. The water turns on. You put your hands back under the faucet’s stream. The water turns off. So you wave your hands around again, water starts back up. Then shuts off the second you get your hands in the stream again. You do this until you just give up, wiping your hands and your pants because you know the sensor on the paper towel dispenser isn’t going to work either. Leaving the bathroom with your cold, clammy, wet hands you think to yourself “Remember when we turned things on manually? Like with our hands? What was so wrong with that?”

We seem to be living in a time where a lot of things that aren’t improvements are being sold to us as improvements. Today, I’d like to talk about why I like physical buttons and levers for things we use every day. This is kind of a broad topic because physical buttons/switches/levers have been replaced by sensors and screens in so many different applications. For the most part, I feel like these have not been positive changes. So I’m gonna list a few of the buttonless things I come in contact with regularly and why I hate them.

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Every road I take regularly in California seems to be under construction. Highway 101 North, between San Francisco and Santa Rosa where my parents live, has been under construction since before they moved there in 2012. Highway 99, between my Yosemite house and Los Angeles, has had significant construction for the past few (five?) years. Between Los Angeles and Orange County (an area I often find myself in for work), construction on Interstate 5 and the entire network of freeways in the area is seemingly omnipresent. Recently, on a trip to my parents’ house, I discovered a new construction zone - Highway 99 north of Merced. All of this construction is a good thing, I’m sure. But sometimes it feels like we’ve spent so much time in construction mode we could all be dead by the time these roadways are ready to use properly.

On a recent trip to visit my parents a number of things, including road construction, added up to a journey that was mildly harrowing. Mostly, because I almost crashed my car.

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This winter will go down in my personal history as The Winter That Wouldn’t Stop Wintering. It is April, and I have been at Londo Lodge on and off since October, when government shut downs caused my Airbnb rentals to dry up. As far as weather is concerned, winter was pretty dry aside from a huge (unexpected) snowstorm in October and another huge (expected) blizzard in February that knocked out the rest of my winter rentals. It has been a winter (and yes I’m saying this in present tense because there is snow outside as I write this) characterized by joy, loneliness, the light buzz of something potentially terrible on the horizon (which I’ll tell you about soon, hopefully), and a general feeling of “I can’t do this again.” Meaning, I don’t think I can handle the tumult of not having a place to live when my house is rented to guests, the stress of constantly having to settle into a new place has left me permanently unsettled.

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About half the winters at Londo Lodge have been severe, with big thrashing snow and wind storms that cause a lot of damage to the tiny town of Fish Camp. Last year, luckily, was a pretty mellow year in terms of snow and fire danger but you can’t expect that kind of weather every year.

This year’s weather has created a decent amount of whiplash. In early October, a large winter storm came early and blanketed the property with about three feet of snow. It melted quickly. Other than that, most of the winter was pretty warm and dry until February, when we got some pretty major snowstorms. This recent snowstorm was quick yet efficient, getting a maximum amount of snow on the ground in just a few days. The snowpack on my roof ended up falling so hard against the deck that it pushed my railing nearly completely off (see below for pics of the fix!).

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The notion of throwing a party to watch something on television never occurred to me before I moved to Los Angeles. I grew up without TV, aside from a tiny little 13” color TV/VCR combo I bought when I was twelve that was mostly for watching movies. So my family really never made a point of appointment television, aside from the Olympics which have always captivated my mother.

Say what you will about Los Angeles, but we are particularly good at throwing parties for reasons that might seem inane or inconsequential to other people. Today’s topic: The Oscar Party and why I like them. And how an annual tradition that once felt fun turned into something that felt lonely and isolating.

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My friends fall into a number of different categories work-wise. I have some friends who are content creators who are in varying states of flux that range from “I think I am going to lose my house” to “it’s hard keeping up with the overhead of all these employees.” I have friends in entertainment, some of whom have been in the industry for a while and find themselves on a rotation of regular work, some of whom sold a big show years ago they’re still living off of, and most of whom are worried they need to find a new industry because this one clearly seems to have dissolved and/or left Los Angeles.

My Ivy League friends fit neatly into three categories: 1. The ones who entered into law or medicine and have had the same job forever, 2. The creative go-getters with bland startup jobs that takeover their whole lives then lay them off after two years, and 3. The ones who never worked either because of family money or because they got married to someone rich.

I also have friends whose jobs I don’t understand who always seem to be fine. They don’t identify themselves by their careers, don’t talk about work much, and seem to have a normal work-life balance. I think this is probably most people, but I don’t know many people like this. Most people I know have identities highly linked with their work.

The relationship between Millennials and work has always been fraught. We were the last generation who believed that college was some sort of stepping stone to stability. We got the grades, did the extracurriculars, and went to the best schools we could where we continued to perform like trained seals in an attempt to earn love, status, and acceptance. When we graduated and were looking to get our first jobs, the Great Recession happened. When we neared baby-having, home buying age (which is now 40 btw), the pandemic happened. And then Donald Trump and his tariffs (now wars!) wouldn’t go away.

My creative friends who have day jobs work in positions that have overtake their lives and they hate them for it. My doctor/lawyer friends are thankful to be employed but spend all their time thinking about what their artist friends are up to, wondering what that’s like. No one my age seems to have the sense that we can rely on work, or on a specific company. That has created a certain sense of malaise, nonchalance, and cynicism when it comes to work. We will show up and pretend to be passionate about marketing a certain product because we have to, but we will talk shit about it at home because we know the company we work for will lay us off the second we’re replaceable by AI or when the company gets a new COO and departments get reorganized. Employees can have no loyalties to companies that have no loyalty to them.

I’ve watched a number of my friends enter into a similar struggle cycle. They’ll get laid off a job they didn’t like (but killed themselves doing nonetheless), panic, spend months looking for a new job, find an exciting new job, and repeat that pattern every two years. This creates a defeated “can’t beat em, join em” vibe where they participate in the disingenuous, disloyal culture that has wounded them over and over again because that seems to be the only option.

LinkedIn, the job search website, has become a punchline. I just rejoined it and have had a hard time figuring out what it is for and how it is used. I previously thought it was a job listing site, but it’s more like an interactive, multidimensional performance piece orchestrated simultaneously by millions of deranged people hanging on for dear life. Over time, I started seeing more and more posts on social media making fun of LinkedIn and its mandate that its users present an absurdly cleaned up, saccharinely positive version of themselves that is so over the top it becomes a cartoon. No one believes anything anyone else posts on LinkedIn (“I’m overjoyed to announce my new role as Regional Manager of District Human Resources for Starbucks at Target.com’s Adult Baby Division!”). Everyone posts on it to show everyone else they can play the game, that they are professional, that they are hireable, so that when the next set of layoffs come they’ll be in a better spot to get another job that will be downsized a year after that. If you act hard enough on LinkedIn, no one will know how fucking crazy you are.

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This winter is my sixth living in my home, located at the Southern Gate to Yosemite. And this winter is the third winter that’s felt like a natural disaster. 2021 (my first winter) brought wind and snowstorms not seen for fifty years. 2023 was the year Mammoth, and my home, got completely buried. And 2026 is turning out to be another year of intense weather. We had one major (and unexpected) snowstorm in October. Then nothing til now. I’ve been doing yard work all winter, in a tank top, knowing that a big storm had to be coming because the pattern seems to be if the early part of winter is dry, the latter part is dramatically snowy.

If you watch the local news, they make every storm seem like some sort of natural disaster. Which has always seemed kind of stupid to be me because, hello, it snows here. So I’m not the type of person who thinks every single time weather happens it’s a terrible thing. I don’t even think fire is terrible. When people first see my house, many of them say the same thing, in a tone that’s almost pitying.

“Oh my God,” they’ll say, looking out my window at the burn scar just south of my house. “Were you here for that fire? So sad.”

“No, it happened in 2017, I moved here in 2020.”

I actually really like the burn scar for a few reasons. Firstly, it makes me feel like at least one side of my house has a lot less fuel on it. Second, because over the past five years I’ve watched as it’s become more and more beautiful. The trees still standing have turned silver. Oaks and dogwoods are starting to pop up. The little creek is now surrounded by a beautiful river tree that turns bright yellow in autumn. Thirdly, selfishly, I like my house to be bright. Because there’s a full ass forest burnt down next door I get way more natural light. It’s making me want to cut the trees as far from my house as possible to get as much light as I can (and get solar).

Snow, fires, windstorms, they’re all natural. But every once in a while a storm comes along that does truly feel like a disaster. I’m writing this sitting amongst the remnants of one such storm. It’s caused a decent amount of damage to my property and put into question how I am going to make it to summer.

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Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird felt oddly familiar to me. It’s a story about a suburban teenage girl who dreams of getting out of her Central Valley hometown. It’s a semi-autobiographical film starring Saoirse Ronan as Lady Bird, the stand-in for Gerwig, in which the main character dreams of leaving her hometown, which she views as entirely devoid of culture, to go to a prestigious college on the east coast. A lot of the conflict between her and her mother revolves around her mom thinking she’s being pretentious and too big for her britches while Lady Bird felt like she was constantly being asked to settle for less. She felt like she was being told she wasn’t worthy of the dreams she had, that her parents thought she was ridiculous and spoiled for wanting what she wanted.

I had a really hard time with Lady Bird. Mainly, I found it difficult to have empathy for the main character because I had lived a pretty similar version of that story (and didn’t receive a lot of empathy for it). I, too, longed to leave my hometown for a prestigious college on the east coast, to see new places and meet new types of people. And I, too, was met mostly with people who told me I couldn’t. In ways big and small, I was told I wasn’t worthy of goals that lofty, or of many goals at all. But I guess I’ve never seen that as a story that stands on its own as something all that compelling. Growing up in a middle class family then striving to go to fancy college on the east coast and get away from your hometown isn’t the most relatable basis for a rags-to-riches plot line. Many teenagers face much deeper and more pressing dilemmas.

Greta Gerwig’s story felt far too similar to my own for it to feel novel. Some of that “you’re being pretentious for wanting to get far away from where you’re from” must have rubbed off on me, because I do see the storyline as a bit privileged. “I wanna go to NYU wah wah wah!” Lady Bird met wide critical acclaim, so my instinct is that it probably is a good movie. But sometimes it’s hard to have empathy for yourself or situations too similar to your own.

What struck me most about the movie was that I recognized the aesthetic. I grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. But I was born in Merced and had a few friends who lived in the Central Valley. They looked, talked, and acted like the characters in Greta Gerwig’s movie. They had piercings and Manic Panic dyed hair. They wore skate clothes and were into independent movies and music. They shopped at thrift stores and made art.

I’m not sure if I’m alone in this, but I think sometimes when you grow up somewhere you think it’s the weirdest place in the world and everywhere else is normal. I truly did grow up in an anomaly, not many people grow up inside national parks. However, I also found the Central Valley to be an extremely odd place that felt as if it existed completely outside the spectrum of American culture. It was hot. It was ugly. It was forgotten.

When my parents moved from San Francisco to Merced so my father could work as a dentist at a clinic for low-income farm workers, my mom tells me she “didn’t feel like I was anywhere.” The Central Valley can be ceaselessly bleak. Winters there are intensely grey and muted. Summers are blazingly hot and increasingly smoggy. It can feel stifling.

While they lived in Merced, my parents began traveling to nearby Yosemite and eventually met the park’s dentist. When he retired, he offered to sell his practice to my father and my parents used the opportunity to move us from Merced to Yosemite Village. They maintained friendships with their friends in town and we visited often.

I don’t really remember living in Merced and thus consider Yosemite my hometown, but my family always sort of kept one foot in town so I feel a strong understanding for the culture and character of the Central Valley. Growing up, I felt culturally dissimilar to the kids around me - I felt a stronger connection to the circle of friends I’d been born into. A close friend of my mother’s, Susanne, had a son named Paul who was near my age. We were friends from toddlerhood and remained very close through high school. This is a story about the song “Supermodel” by Ru Paul but it’s really a story about a friendship between a gay kid and a straight kid.

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Instagram DM to Orlando Soria | January 28, 2026

Orlando. I’ve been following you for years and without meaning to be rude you are kinda messy with money, you are a very good talented designer but haven’t been able to create a stable career with it. Which I know and understand the setbacks you expirienced.

You have what it takes to have a solid business with desing maybe you need some professional help with the money part? Also get organised with the content you share, like make a gay in the wood weekly video (your also very funny) so there’s something to look forward from you , something catchy, Satty saturdays, share your cleaning, idk just content that makes people engage. Sorry if I’m overstepping, I want to see you succeed and struggle less at least with money.

That was an interesting message to receive. Here are my thoughts.

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It’s January, which has a lot of people thinking about home organization and renovation projects. I love a fresh start, and the early months of the year are normally when I start thinking about what projects I’d like to tackle during the coming year. Over the course of my design career, I’ve gotten good at figuring out how to beautify my home in relatively inexpensive ways. Some of this comes from getting products and materials sponsored, but more of it comes from research, spending time thrifting/bargain hunting, and doing almost everything myself.

A few projects I have on the docket for this year:

• Turning a room that was formerly a gym back into a bedroom.

• Adding a covered porch/trellis to make entering my house easier in winter (and to provide a place for muddy shoes).

• Redoing a seating area in my backyard that’s gotten overgrown.

• Building a decorative river (also for drainage) in my backyard.

• Redoing the fencing on the south side of the property (it’s currently barbed wire put up by the neighboring property that has all gotten smashed by branches).

• Adding more pathways around the house so things like the propane tanks are accessible.

• Fixing broken tiles (I got a kit to do it a few months ago).

• And of course continuing my obsession with mulching everything so there’s less dirt coming into my house.

I have to admit, I’ve been really flummoxed by the gym-to-bedroom conversion. I haven’t been putting it of per se, it’s more that I just haven’t had a chunk of time to tackle it yet. The room makeover involves priming the whole space after repairing all the holes in the wall, adding crown moulding, installing a light fixture, installing new drapery and roman shades, wallpapering four walls, adding trim around the windows, and furnishing and styling the whole room. When I think about it, I just get overwhelmed because it’s SO many steps. So I thought it might be helpful (for myself and hopefully for anyone thinking about tackling home projects this year) to talk about how I typically get myself organized for a design project.

When you work with a designer, the process typically goes:

• Client consult

• Measure room

• Designer research

• Designer sources furnishings

• Draftsperson renders designers plans into a 3D model

• Designer presents to clients

• Client approves and ordering/construction/etc begins

This is a very abbreviated explanation of the professional design process. And for most people, this formal type of process isn’t practical, approachable, or affordable (sometimes I wish I had the money to hire a designer!). I think sometimes people get so overwhelmed by the process and decision making that they end up just saying “fuck it” and buying things without really taking the time and consideration to make sure they’re going to work stylistically or scale wise. I had a former client who lives in a small bungalow in Silver Lake who bought an enormous Restoration Hardware sofa because he thought it would make his house look grand. It did the opposite because it was WAY too big. It made his living room look like closet. This is what happens when you start a design project without taking a breathe and really thinking it through.

A more approachable way of figuring out where to start is to start very general, getting more and more specific as you move along. The following questions are a good start:

1. What is this space for? Is it bedroom? A library? A nursery?

2. What needs to go in here? Like what exact pieces of furniture are absolute necessities?

3. What would I like in here if there’s room? These are add ons that might not be needed in the room but would be fun to have.

4. How do I want the room to feel? This is where it’s normally good to take a Pinterest break and just look for examples of rooms that give the feel you’re going for. For example, “I want the room to feel cozy and romantic” might lead to photographs of rooms with dark hued walls and velvety textiles. This can help you figure out practical ways to meet the general thematic desires you have for the space.

5. Do the inspiration images align with the style of my house and the style of decor I’ve done everywhere else?

6. Are the things I’m most excited about within my budget? If you see a room with a beautiful custom banquette but don’t have the resources for custom furniture, it may be better to choose a different solution.

7. Is there a way to break this project into phases so I don’t have to do it all at once?

A lot more questions go into planning, but that gives you an idea of what’s typically on my mind when I start. That last question is key, because it determines how you will organize the project. And this is something that’s kept me from starting my bedroom makeover, it’s really not that easy to break up the work because it involves moving a bunch of furniture away from the walls (which I can’t do alone) and a multi step wall resurfacing project. Ideally, if it’s a space you don’t need to be in all the time, you can tackle a project slowly, on weekends or during the evenings. But sometimes you can’t do that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I might need to make my bedroom makeover an event. I might need to invite someone up to my house to help me, to get it on the books, so that I don’t put it off forever. Sometimes you need to just put it on the schedule. “We’re going to do the bedroom the week of the 6th” type vibes. Otherwise the minutiae of the project might keep it at the bottom of your to do list forever.

Boredom and procrastination can also be helpful tools. Recently, I had a random weekend at Londo Lodge when it was too stormy to go outside. I really didn’t feel like taking my Christmas decorations down (half because I’m not ready, half because I didn’t feel like getting out a million plastic bins and scratching my arms on all those faux trees). “Fine,” I thought to myself, “I’ll finally do that nightmare pantry project I’ve been meaning to do.”

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So I spent the weekend taking everything out of a closet off the laundry room, removing the carpet, cutting the shelves so I could move the fridge out of the middle of the room, painting the floor, and putting everything back as neatly as possible. It took the whole weekend and I’m glad I didn’t tackle it before because I thought it would only take a day (I haven’t had two days to give to that project in a few years). But in that case not wanting to do the Christmas decorating worked in my favor and made me finally tackle a project I very much did not want to do. Organizing hundreds of bitsy things is not my idea of fun, and that closet has basically been a mess since I moved in five years ago. It was originally a tool closet because I lived there and had tons of pantry space in the old kitchen. But now that my house is often rented I needed a personal pantry I could keep my food in so I wasn’t jamming it between hammers and light switch covers from past projects.

When I do DIY projects in my house I tend to prioritize work that requires furniture moving first so you’re not moving furniture more than necessary. I don’t consider myself inherently an optimist but when it comes to estimating how long a project is going to take I always think I’ll be able to finish faster than I actually can. So when I’m planning I tend to take that estimate and double it. Often when we think of projects we don’t think about them holistically. We think “I’ll paint the room!” not “I’ll clear the room, then tape things off, then remove the switch covers, then cover the roman shade, then tarp off the floor, then prime, then paint.” The lesson here is never underestimate the steps that lead to the actual project. I always love watching professional painters because they take days to prep and tape off and the actual painting takes no time at all.

I think another mental tool to keep in mind when tackling DIY projects is tempering your expectations. I used to get so disappointed in myself (still do at times) when I’d start a project I thought I could do in half a day, then not finish it by day’s end. So now I tend to tell myself, "It’s okay if only a portion of Part A gets done today” so I’m not setting myself up for failure. I find when I am overly optimistic about how much I can finish in a day, it tends to lead to a lot of self-shaming which then makes me a lot less likely to tackle the next project. After all, it’s better to get 1/8th of a project done than 0/8ths of a project done.

The way we think about home projects probably relates highly to the way we think about the rest of our lives. If you’re an ambitious person, it’s likely that you never get as much done as you’d want. Even Martha Stewart wishes she had more time.

“There's so many things to do. I wish I had more time. All I want is a few more hours in a day.”

Source: CNN

One of the hardest things I’ve learned about myself since buying my house five years ago is that I have an obsessive level of perfection about myself and my house. I will never be good enough for myself, my house will never be perfect enough. I have done a lot of DIY projects I’d never tried before, to varying levels of perfection. And I’ve been so disappointed in myself and my work so many times. But when people visit, they don’t notice any of the small nitpicks I obsess over. I’m the only one judging myself and my house as harshly as I do.

So this is what I leave you with. Tackle that project and feel free to fuck it up. Because the more you let fuck ups roll off your back, the more likely you are to tackle future projects (even if that future project is fixing your previous mistakes). I have made an entire career out of just trying things. I’ve gotten good at a lot of home renovations tasks through this process of trying (and sometimes failing). Go forth and tackle that 2026 home project!

…Unless you have to prime and paint walls and move a ton of furniture alone and add wallpaper and moulding etc etc etc. :)

If there’s one thing design blogs love, it’s listing predictions of what people will be doing to their homes in the coming year. This is a way of analyzing what trends are coming and going. It’s also a diagnostic to see if you yourself know what is cool or not. Oftentimes, I find myself reading these thinking things thinking “But I don’t like rust (as a color)!” or “Zellige tile is still here? When’s she leaving???” If you’ve been following along for a while, you probably know I think these lists are kind of dumb. My main design philosophy is that you should make your house look like you rather than allow its decor to be dictated to you by strangers on the internet.

The only problem with my philosophy is that design predictions are fun. So today, in the spirit of finding fun where you can, I’m gonna make my own list of 2026 design predictions. Follow along and see what 2026 has in store design wise!

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Christmas letters. You know the ones, either typed out and designed onto a flat holiday notecard from Minted or printed on 8.5” x 11” paper, detailing the activities of an entire family. Pre-Facebook, the Christmas card was a way for friends to update each other on what was happening in their lives, in their family’s lives, over the course of a year. I don’t think I really paid much attention to these until around high school, when I started to notice these long-form, mostly type written letters, often felt more like pissing contests than genuine life updates. Which makes sense if you think about it, whoever writes the family year in review is unlikely to write things like “Jim is struggling with alcoholism” or “Ashley failed Algebra. Again!” We don’t want to do our families dirty like that, we want them to be seen in the best light. So most people write holiday notes that glaze over a lot of the actual happenings in a year.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to look back on your family’s year and highlight all the good things that happened in it. But I do think, much like social media has done since, these family update letters often left the readers feeling like they were some sort of weird outlier, their freaky family had [GASP] actual problems they actually had to deal with. I grew up in a middle class yet decently bourgeois world. My parents had all sorts of friends, many of them successful. So a lot of the Christmas cards we’d get would be about the incredible accomplishments of their brilliant children. Which again, understandable. But also kind of off-putting. For that reason I’ve always had a bit of a natural aversion to the concept of a year in review type holiday card. They seemed like relics that would end with my parents’ generation, millennials obviously being too cool and aloof to send something so dorky.

Cut to about five years ago, when people my age started sending me that type of Christmas card. “Oh my god,” I thought to myself, “do I have to do this now? What am I gonna write about… Being broke and single?” The Millennial Christmas card, with note, is essentially the same as the ones we received as kids. And while the cynical side of me still sees them as some sort of propaganda tool to convince everyone that you have a nice upstanding family, another part of me is starting to see them differently. I’m starting to see them as an incredibly powerful exercise in looking back at your year, telling yourself what happened in it, and in doing so giving yourself (and whoever reads your note) a chance to process the passing of time.

My friend Emily wrote a really nice blog version of an end of year note. And in the spirit of being positively influenced when I find the opportunity, I decided to take her idea and run with it. So today I thought I’d take a look back at my year and talk about things I learned or observed over the past twelve months. Follow along!

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