It’s a good thing that beach season is months away, because if there is one thing that makes this time of year tolerable, it’s huge mugs of piping-hot melted chocolate, milk, and whipped cream. We’re talking, of course, about the obligatory beverage of any wintertime night in: hot chocolate. While your hot chocolate ritual might entail a box of factory-sealed envelopes containing micro-portions of chocolate-flavored powder (it has a time and a place and we don’t judge), we’re here to tell you that an über-rich, molten hot chocolate made from scratch takes almost the same amount of time and effort to make. Get out a bar of chocolate and put on some sweatpants—let’s make hot chocolate!
There are certain things that are no-brainers when it comes to throwing a party. Food, drinks, music—check, check, check. But there are some other details that can make all the difference between a snooze-fest and an all-nighter (in a good way).
Have you ever noticed how guests always corral in the kitchen during parties, only to leave your living room a ghost town? Do you find that people hover for too long near the canapés and cocktails without circulating? The problem could be traffic flow. While your furniture arrangement might work for day-to-day use, a dining table or an inconvenient sectional chaise can cramp things up when things get crowded, forcing people into bottle-necks. Avoid the holiday traffic jam this year and follow these tips for maximizing your cocktail party floor plan.
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A floating sofa might look lovely on a normal day, but it’s only in the way during a party. Scoot all of your furniture along the walls for your fête to create a clear flow for walking and enough standing room for everybody to be comfortable. Bonus points: if you re-arrange often, think about investing in a flip sectional like our Eddy model shown here. You can switch the chaise from left to right depending on your layout.
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It may be tempting to artfully arrange food and drinks in a centralized location, but it’s a recipe for overcrowding! Instead, place food and beverages throughout your party space to space people out and subtly encourage mingling. Coffee + side tables are great places to put a bowl or two of snacks.
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Need extra seating? Shift some of your throw pillows from your sofa to the floor for a cozy + casual place to sit down.
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Move your dining chairs to the wall and form seating clusters to foster conversation. Side tables can be moved from the sofa’s edge to these areas for placing drinks and snacks.
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Transform a console into a bar by putting down trays and glassware.
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Swing your dining table against the wall and turn it into an oversized buffet for serving large dishes or punch!
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.
From the New York Subway system to American Airlines, Massimo Vignelli was responsible for some of the most iconic and enduring graphic identities of the twentieth century. Born in Milan in 1931, Vignelli displayed an interest and aptitude in design at a relatively early age. At sixteen, he began working as a draftsman at Castiglioni Architects in Milan. Here, he not only became immersed in the practice of architectural design, but also in the ideas of key Modernist thinkers.
As a designer, Vignelli firmly believed that design should be clean, simple, and completely timeless. He detested trends and what he referred to as the “culture of obsolescence.” For him, good design surpassed the merely ephemeral, something he believed was a cause of waste and “visual pollution.” He favored primary colors and simple typefaces. “I don’t believe,” he has written in The Vignelli Canon, “that when you write dog the type should bark!” While Vignelli limited himself to just a few colors and typefaces, he was able to create intriguing, eye-catching designs through his clever plays with proportion, space, and balance. Like many of his modernist peers, he was obsessed with the grid and his negotiation with its stark boundaries produced elegant and beautiful results.
In 1967, Massimo Vignelli was commissioned to redesign the graphic identity of the American furniture company, Knoll. Known for its modernist furniture by designers such as Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, and Harry Bertoia, Knoll’s products were perfectly suited to Vignelli’s timeless aesthetic. In the graphic program that Vignelli produced for Knoll, one can see many of his ideas at work, from his preference for clear, organized space to his use of the new (at the time) Helvetica typeface, something Vignelli undoubtedly favored because of its versatile simplicity. This poster depicts the Knoll logotype in large letters that overlap to form an almost abstract pattern. While a number of Knoll’s products are depicted as line drawings on the back of the poster, none are visible on its recto. Alone, the colorful, bold type communicates beautifully the power and elegance of the Knoll brand.
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