If you’re miserable at chopping vegetables and a roasting turkey is best left in somebody else’s care, chances are you’re the type of person who gets tasked with setting the table at holiday dinners. Although this not-quite-thrilling duty is simple (does it really matter where the salad fork goes?), it does present the culinarily challenged a rare opportunity to show off. Follow the simple tips in this video below and you’ll earn extra points with your host and compliments from other dinner guests. “What a lovely table setting! Who did that?” YOU DID.
Concepted, written, and photographed for West Elm’s blog, Front + Main.
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Forget sock boots and metallics—the hottest Fall fashion trend that we can’t get enough of is duvets. With a name derived from the French term for down—an allusion to the feathery material that typically fills them—duvets are customarily seen atop lavishly appointed beds and covered in all manner of beautiful fabrics. This season, they’ve come into vogue as a stylish garment—one that can be donned for practically any occasion. Need something to wear for gala season? Duvet. Going out for a quick lunch with the ladies? Duvet. Heading to an important business meeting? Yes way, duvet! While there are myriad ways to style this new wardrobe essential, here are 10 of our favorites.
1 — The Ball Gown
The quintessential duvet look. Pair with the shoes and jewelry of your choice, or go without for a bold and minimal look.
2 — The Chic Scarf
Make a statement when you hit the streets this fall by tossing your duvet around your neck. Added bonus: it will act as a stylish airbag if you end up tripping on the sidewalk.
3 — The Lump
Got a movie night planned with your SO? Go for this elegant seated look.
4 — The Ghost
Bad hair day? No need to fret when you’ve got a duvet in your sartorial arsenal. Throw it right over your head to complete this mysterious femme fatale look.
5 — The Mermaid
Remember leg warmers? Try an au courant twist to the eighties trend by wrapping a duvet entirely around your lower body.
6 — The Friday Night
There is no better way than to celebrate the end of the week than by wearing the season’s must-have item!
7 — The Saturday Morning
Evidence that duvets are your closet’s most versatile item, they can seamlessly shift from day to night and back to day again!
8 — The Coffee Line
Add a duvet to your day and dress up even the most quotidian tasks! This comfortable look will take you from grabbing your morning coffee to powering through a day at the office.
9 — The Puddle
Favored by trend-setting avant-garde crowds, this look sees the duvet worn atop a sedentary body. Excellent for leisure activities.
10 — The Midnight Snack
Stunning when bathed in the crystalline light of a refrigerator, this ravishing look will add a touch of intrigue to your late nights.
Thanksgiving is about friends, family, and the opportunity to give thanks for the wonderful things in your life. It is also, if you happen to be hosting, a prime time to show off. Yes, you’re excited to see the family members you don’t speak to any other day of the year, but let’s be real: part of you really wants to display how grown-up you are by way of an expertly basted Turkey. Or dang-near-award-winning cranberry sauce. Or—if try as you might, cooking really isn’t in your wheelhouse—perhaps a seriously extra place-setting, courtesy of an origami-like napkin fold. Get out that fabric starch and iron, because these wild napkin-folding techniques will be the talk of the table this holiday season!
Concept, art direction, set design, and writing for West Elm. A series of long-loop Fireplace + Yule Log videos. Designed to be played on televisions, videos were created in conjunction with the launch of West Elm’s Fireplace app for Apple TV.
A crackling fireplace is an obligatory fixture in any holiday fantasy, but so few of us actually have the fireplace to make such a thing happen in our own homes. Wouldn’t carving the turkey be so much better in the glow of a warm fire? Or your next cocktail party? Or opening presents on Christmas morning? If you’ve got a serious case of Fireplace FOMO, we hear you. And we came up with a solution. Enter Fireplace by west elm, our Apple TV App and YouTube Playlist that features 20+ cracking fireplaces, free to stream into your living room from your TV! It’s not a real yule log, but it’s the next best thing.
Concept, art direction, video editing, title design, and writing for West Elm.
Videography by Zack Taylor. Soft Styling by Eduardo Vinueza.
Created for and published on West Elm’s Instagram.
Your bed won’t make itself! ? Here are all of the layers for making a perfect bed: ✨ 1. Flat sheet – Adds a thin layer between you and your duvet. Keeps you from needing to launder your duvet cover as frequently + functions as a lightweight cover on hot summer nights. ✨ 2. Duvet/Comforter – Filled with down or down alternative, this fluffy number will keep you cozy + warm on cold nights, and adds comforting weight. ✨ 3. Coverlet/Blanket – Kept at the foot of your bed, a coverlet is great as a middle-weight cover for adding a tiny bit of extra warmth when you need it. ✨ 4. Pillows! Pillows come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and fills. Explore your options on westelm.com to see what’s best for you!
Let’s talk about gallery walls. Pretty much a thing since the Académie des Beaux-Arts stacked masterworks on top of the each other at the Paris Salons of centuries past, the gallery wall has reached fever-pitch levels of popularity in homes over the past decade. A mainstay on social media and lifestyle blogs, this “collection” style of art display is like the black dress of the home decor world—constantly reinvented and never really going out of style. But how to achieve it? If you’re worried about attempting the look without leaving your walls a mess of plaster holes, bent nails, and crooked frames—we gotchu. Here are 4 surprisingly simple ways to hack the gallery wall!
When writer and actress Tavi Gevinsonvacated her West Village apartment for Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she did so for many of the same reasons people turn to New York’s most populous borough: SPACE. “My old apartment was adorable, but small,” the Rookie Magazine founder says, “and after two years, I had really outgrown it.”
After learning of partnership potential with 300 Ashland, a new development along Brooklyn’s Flatbush Ave thoroughfare, she jumped at the opportunity. Gevinson’s new digs, which need to function as both home and workspace for the self-employed maven, fit all of her needs perfectly. Not only did her new one-bedroom have ample space and natural light, but its central location afforded proximity to several train lines and some of the city’s best cultural institutions. Just down the block is the esteemed Brooklyn Academy of Music (which Tavi has already been sure to snap selfies from) and the Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Botanical gardens are a short subway trip away. Another exciting development? The Brooklyn Public Library has plans to open a branch right in the base of 300 Ashland.
To help celebrate her new home, west elm and Street Easy teamed up with Tavi to help outfit her new apartment and share a special glimpse into the avid bookworm’s reading nook. Take a closer look below as Tavi shares five of her favorite books, pulled from her new neighbor, The Brooklyn Public Library! Want to see more of the space? Head over to Street Easy to see the Tavi’s full apartment!
This short story collection is both sweeping and intimate; cinemascoped and lived-in; a blend of Kathleen Collins’ filmmaking perspective with details that feel culled from personal experience. One story describes a love scene as though the narrator is setting up shots for a movie. Another covers a couple’s whole life together in a series of vignettes and half-unspoken rapport, like maybe true love is a kind of two-person omniscience; maybe true love is background music. Sex is, in part, a way for these characters to get to know themselves, and to know how they are seen by others. The reader listens in on inner and shared dialogues about blackness, black womanhood, and family. Collins died in 1988 and these stories were published posthumously, but the questions she explored remain relevant–and her capturing of them, revolutionary.
I don’t think you have to be a good person to make good art, but it’s really nice when the forces of creativity and compassion feed each other, instead of being at odds. When I interviewed Adrian Tomine about this book of graphic stories, he talked about how being a father has affected his work: “When I was a young, single guy, people either sucked, or they were awesome. And that was it. I loved some people, and everybody else could go to hell, you know? And I think now I have really complicated feelings about the average person that I meet. I realize that’s actually a really useful thing as a writer, to try and bring into your work. To take that feeling of, This guy’s kind of an asshole, but I sort of feel sorry for him, and I sort of relate to him, and to try to impose that on these fictional characters, has been a fun challenge for me.” I’ve always loved his books, going back to his earliest Drawn & Quarterly comics from when he was a teen. But in Killing and Dying, the care given to every character, all in uniquely difficult positions, is a beautiful example of how being open in life can open up possibilities within art. Also, comics seem like the hardest thing to make (to me), and I have so much respect for anyone who does them.
I read this book about the witch trials in Salem when I was doing The Crucible on Broadway. I needed help understanding the gravity of words and actions that, in 21st century secularism, seemed either inconsequential (“go to hell”) or silly (dancing in the woods). Much has been written of the witch hunt over the years — it was Marion Starkey’s already extensive The Devil in Massachusetts that inspired Arthur Miller to write his play begin with — but nothing captured my attention like this one. Stacy Schiff’s descriptions are utterly enthralling, without falling into the sensationalist, cover-story-feeling tone of other books that try to make history “fun.” Schiff lets the research speak for itself: According to court records, Mary Warren’s tongue hung out of her mouth for so long that it turned black. When Tituba spread her story of meeting with the devil throughout Salem, Schiff writes that it was like she’d handed out hallucinogens. That helped me process what it would be like for your world to actually be that small; no images, no information, no culture, nothing but your community and your beliefs and like, a bog. Schiff’s portraits of people/characters I’d hated since high school–Reverend Parris, for example–humanized them in ways political allegories can’t. (The Crucible is a rare allegory which treats its characters like people instead of symbols, but it’s not perfectly spelled out for every production or, say, 16 year-old English student.) I’d imagine rereading The Witches now would illuminate even more about America’s history of paranoia and hysteria. It would also help to see how, when assigning roles of heroes and villians gets you nowhere, understanding where everyone is coming from may actually make for progress, rather than fatality.
What to do when you’re totally fatigued from being inundated with images and notions of conventional beauty? Place it in historical context, of course! I like having this around as a reference book and to lend some perspective; make my daily experience with appearance more interesting. While it’s largely concerned with representations of beauty in art, it reads more like philosophy than art history. One of many Umberto Eco works that have had me rethink what I’d previously believed about personal style, taste, and aesthetics.
Everyone I know who saw the last production of this play talks how about how it wrecked them emotionally. I didn’t get to see it, but reading it is so gutting that I don’t know if I could handle a performance. It centers on the relationship between a young actress and her esteemed playwright father. Both have been hollowed out by their respective experiences with abusive parents and with show business. Act I begins with them bracing themselves for the review of the daughter’s new play, but their frenetic opening night energy turns grim. Success becomes as threatening as failure. And then–well, I started tearing up just describing Act II to a friend the other day. The last time I reread I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard, I was reminded of this line from Shaw’s Man and Superman: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.” And yet! This story isn’t fueled by cynicism or bitterness, but Halley Feiffer’s deep sense of compassion.
There’s an oft-quoted phrase that says “the best camera is the one you have with you.” Today, the camera that almost everybody has with them is an iPhone and, despite its tiny size, it actually packs quite the photographic punch. Over the course of time that I’ve had one, my iPhone has slowly worked its way up to becoming my default camera—my bulky DSLR coming out only when I need a truly “professional” shot. There’s no denying the iPhone’s (or any smartphone’s) benefits—it’s compact, actually fits into a pocket, and takes photos that genuinely rival consumer-grade point-and-shoot cameras. (For anybody skeptical of the iPhone’s photo-taking power, I highly recommend Austin Mann’s exhaustive iPhone 5S review.) As with any camera, though, the iPhone’s capabilities are vastly improved when you learn how to use it, taking advantage of everything it has to offer. Below, you will find my own favorite tips for making the most of your iPhone’s camera—from ways to expertly compose a shot to tricks for getting a more “manual” look. Let’s get snapping!
1. Shoot with a grid! Like many professional cameras, the iPhone’s camera app has a grid feature that allows you to view your shots with a 3×3 grid overlaid on top of it. There are numerous benefits to shooting this way, from making sure objects are truly centered to making sure your image is perfectly aligned. Although a grid, what with its right angles and implications of exactitude, seems like it might be creatively stifling, it actually opens up a world of awesome compositional possibility. On the iPhone, the grid isn’t turned on by default. Go to the “Photos & Camera” section of the Settings app to turn it on.
2. Get fancy with your focus! The iPhone automatically adjusts its focus and exposure every time you reframe a shot (you can see it doing this with the little square that pops up on screen when you do this). However, “manually” adjusting your focus for more customized shots is easy-peasy: just tap the screen once to choose the object or location that you want focused/properly exposed. If you want your camera’s focus to be on something that isn’t in the frame or you want to be able to shift your composition after focusing, the AE/AF Lock feature is great. Simply press down on the screen and hold until the focus square pulsates twice. You will then see the words “AE/AF Lock” at the top of your screen. This feature is especially useful if you’re trying to get a nice “blurred” effect on your image—just lock your focus on something super close up and then take your photo!
3. Get the perfect shot! One feature that professional photographers use to ensure the perfect shot, especially with portraits, is burst mode. Essentially, taking photos in burst mode takes a number of photos in quick succession, allowing you to edit through them and find the perfect shot (no blinking eyes or awkward poses!). The iPhone has this feature built in—simply press and hold down the camera’s shutter button. Instead of the singular “snap” noise that accompanies a tap on the shutter, you’ll hear a quick succession of snaps—and your iPhone will capture photos for as long as you hold the button. Quick tip: for super-simple snapping, and to take photos the old fashioned “button” way, simply hold down the top volume button to snap a photo.
4. Optimize your shooting environment! Whether you’re shooting with a professional camera or an iPhone, the same rules of lighting and composition apply. It’s always best to use natural light (even with the iPhone 5S’s new “True Tone” flash, artificial light looks, well, artificial). Aligning your grid with elements in your environment also leads to more appealing compositions. Check out our guide for shooting interiors for tips for composing the best photos.
5. Get the best apps! Although I recommend shooting in the iPhone’s main camera app before importing to other apps like Instagram (this allows you to save a high-res photo and then crop to your specifications), I do have a few exceptions to this rule. The VSCO Camapp, which is quickly becoming the gold standard of iPhoto photography, is a superbalternative to the iPhone’s built-in camera. Its camera mode allows for even more manual control, from focus lock to a two-finger tap that allows you to adjust your exposure and focus separately—a feature that I use an a regular basis. VSCO also has a number of amazing filters and post-processing options that allow for great fine-tuning and photos that look remarkably film-like. Aside from VSCO cam (a must-have for any iPhone photographer), I also recommend AfterLightfor its post-processing and framing options.
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