Slow Style Home: Decorating Personal, Meaningful Interiors

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

Just before the first Material Matters opened in New York, I sat down with its founder, Amy Abrams, who also runs Artists & Fleas and Manhattan Vintage, to talk about building a home show for the “home curious.” She tells the story of the round Crate & Barrel table that showed up two weeks after her wedding and has since become vintage itself, and we compare notes on what we each hope to find at a show. At the end, I share three approaches to shopping a vintage show that came out of our conversation: something specific, something general, and serendipity.

Material Matters returns November 7–8 in NYC’s Flatiron District. https://materialmatters.world/

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

If your taste runs in more than one direction, this conversation is a good place to start. Canadian designer Philip Mitchell, author of Collected Interiors: Rooms That Tell a Story, loves too many things to settle on one style, and his rooms mix centuries and cultures without apology. What makes it work isn't limiting the styles. It's being picky about how many pieces are out at once, and giving each one enough breathing room that you notice the contrast between them. I call it disciplined maximalism. We take it apart using one entryway from his book, along with his trick for clients who can't say what they love: ask them what they don't. Photos are on the show notes page at SlowStyleHome.com.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Nadia Watts, a Colorado-based interior designer who works all over the country, to look closely at a home filled with salvage-yard finds, family heirlooms, old-world antiques, and contemporary art.

It's about why some wildly mixed rooms feel deliberate while others just feel busy. The difference isn't matching. It's that every piece is in conversation with something else in the room: a color, a finish, or a material picked up and answered somewhere nearby.

Subscribe to see and hear the full portfolio review: a wall built for a painting, a powder room with one sconce on purpose, a hand-painted French chandelier that matches nothing in its room, and Nadia's family story as a descendant of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

In this episode, I sit down with Sophie von Oertzen Williamson, author of The Art of the Clash, to talk about pattern, color, and the mix — and end up talking about how long it actually takes to earn your own eye.

Sophie is 42 and has trained her eye across very different worlds: Switzerland, Germany, the UK, Singapore, Ohio, now Connecticut. At 28, she didn't have the aesthetic she has today. Not for lack of talent — she just hadn't lived those years yet.

Subscribe to see the full portfolio walkthrough, photo by photo, straight from her book — including the pink that took twenty color tests to get right.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

In this guest episode, I sit down with Lauren Hidalgo, founder of the online marketplace Awarehouse, to talk about something we rarely stop to add up: what we're actually spending on the small stuff.

It's about how we assign value to what we buy — especially handmade objects — and the gap between what something costs and what it's actually worth. The $25 throw pillow doesn't feel like a real purchase. But enough of those add up to real money, spent on things with no story and a short life.

Subscribe to hear Lauren and me walk through four specific pieces — what they're made of, who made them, and what they actually cost you once you do the math on the alternative.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

In this Designers at Home episode, I tour the Dallas home of Aubrey Butcher — co-founder, with her husband Kale, of the tile company Riad Tile.

Every room has a volume control. Most of us only know how to turn it down — fewer things, blanker walls, quieter colors. Aubrey knows how to work both ends of the dial: which parts of a room to hush, and which to let shout. And because she and Kale spend their days sourcing stone and tile from around the world, the thing she reaches for to turn the volume back up isn't what you'd expect.

Subscribe to see the full tour — the rooms where she goes completely quiet, the ones where she turns it all the way up, and the marble that's doing some of the loudest work in the house.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

Myquillyn Smith is a lifelong home-lover, three-time guest, and the author of House Hushing — you might know her as The Cozy Minimalist. In this conversation, she walks me through backwards decluttering: her method for clearing a room down to almost nothing, living in it that way for a day or two, and only letting things back in once you've proven you actually miss them.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I found myself naming something that's been rattling around in my head for years. Myquillyn trusts the gut — how does the room feel — and I love that. But I also love having one very literal, stopwatch-able way to check the gut's math: if it takes you more than ten minutes to get a room back to feeling right, you have too much stuff in it. Not too much by anyone else's count. Too much for you. I'm calling it the Ten-Minute Threshold, and once you start using it, you can't stop measuring every room in your house by it.

We also get into her three categories of “soulful objects” — past, present, and future — worth keeping around, and why the goal was never to own less. It's to own only what earns its place.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

None of the designers I bring on this show share the same aesthetic, and they don't need to. What I'm looking for is the Slow Style philosophy in practice, whether or not they've ever heard the term.

I recently toured the home of designer Amy Dutton — a 1920s bungalow on the New Hampshire seacoast that she and her husband gutted and rebuilt while raising three kids. It turned out to be one of the clearest examples I've come across: without setting out to, she hit every one of the five design elements I talk about in my book, and all three of my design principles were quietly at work throughout.

Subscribe to see the full home tour on video — the antique that still adjusts itself with the seasons, the design rule she breaks on purpose in two different rooms, and the values decision hiding behind a square-footage choice.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

In this guest episode, I sit down with Ali Milam, managing director of Porta Romana, the British lighting and furniture house, to swap some of the best origin stories I've heard in years. If you're the kind of person who loves a historical novel about an artist or architect — the drama around who really painted the portrait, who sat for it, who bought or stole it over the centuries — this episode is going to appeal to you the same way. Every piece Porta Romana makes has a story like that behind it.

Earlier this year, I got to live out a total design-geek dream and tour their workshops in the English countryside. This episode is me bringing you along.

Subscribe to hear the full conversation: the museum exhibit that sparked an entire lighting collection, a sculptor casting mussel shells one by one, and an artist collaboration that started with draped fabric and ended in cast metal.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic. 

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

In this solo episode, I pull a chapter straight out of my book — Handmade — and this time I'm not just talking about it, I'm living it. What started as one paint color turned into curtains, a pleated lampshade, an antique cupboard found on Facebook Marketplace, and a chair I'm already planning to redo.

It's about something I don't think gets said enough: handmade isn't a shopping category, like “farmhouse” or “coastal.” It's a relationship — with a maker, with a place you found something, with your own two hands. And once you start seeing it that way, you can't really unsee it.

Subscribe to hear the whole cascade:the vintage French fabric that became a bedspread by accident, the lamp I hadn't actually seen in years, and why I think failed handmade projects matter more than the ones that turn out perfectly.

Support the show and subcribe here: https://slowstylehome.supercast.com! You'll have access to ALL full length audio and video episodes each week! 

Use code: style10 to take an additional 10% off your purchase at Aura House. Elegant diffusers. Clean, pure scents. 

Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?

Aura House + Slow Style Home: Elegant diffusers, clean scents, non-toxic.