Foundations

Where home began.

I’m fascinated by everyone’s fascination with 2016.

As a person who appreciates things in neatly packaged numbers, wouldn’t 2025/2015 have made more sense?

Still, it’s compelled me to go back through my photo album and remember what happened that year.

Most notably it was the year I met my husband.

10 years together, and honestly we feel stronger than ever.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about whether she should have a second child. Could her marriage handle it, she wondered. I told her that I hated Jared significantly less this time around.

I kid, but if you’ve ever been postpartum, you know I’m partly serious.

The poor men, it’s not even their fault. It’s biological, us as the moms knowing and carrying everything and them just being clueless, no matter how they try.

Anyway, back to 2016.

Before I met Jared, I had been through a lot in my personal life. I had lost a great love of my life in a very tragic way. And in the years that followed I felt like a teenager again — lost, partying, doing whatever I could to separate from myself.

While I had some exciting things happening in my career, physically I was not at my best. I struggled with my weight, cystic acne. Yet he made me feel like the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, even then.

I walked into his office in Flatiron in yoga pants and makeupless, I was on my way to a yoga class. I can’t remember the studio, these were the days of Classpass.

It was our first time meeting.

But this isn’t the story of how we met. I have another letter telling that story coming soon.

This is a story about where home began, for me.

It started with him. The foundation I never had. Maybe as women we don’t want to give that power away. But I’m not that kind of a feminist.

My childhood was less than stable. And while I had been in relationships before, I had felt happy before. This was different. This was the beginning of my own family.

It’s amazing what the physical body holds onto. In the months and years after we met, my body relaxed, exhaled. I may have a couple more wrinkles, but I feel more beautiful in my skin now than I did ten years ago.

As a person who adores home, who has translated my love of home into a career, I’ve thought a lot about why it feels so intrinsic to who I am.

It’s not too complex, to understand why.

Nevertheless I think it’s important and interesting to reflect on these things, the things that matter most to us, our passions and what makes us tick.

As a child I remember wanting a beautiful home more than anything.

My Aunt Sandy’s homes were my first love, my first exposure to beauty. Her home in Cincinnati, I thought, looked like the White House. Her kitchen walls swathed in ivy wallpaper, an elaborate milk glass collection in grand display.

Being from Florida I hadn’t ever seen a traditional Colonial like it, with a formal living room that no one used (I do plan to correct this in my own home one day) and a formal dining room alongside, rooms for pool tables and movie theaters and a basement housing a sprawling model train, even a miniature playroom built to a toddler’s height with Disney scenes painted on the walls.

Yet I adored most the sun room, decorated in the theme of sunflowers (the 90s, to be sure) and to me nothing felt more pleasurable, almost regal than to sit on one of those white wicker chairs, a glass of iced tea in hand.

That house represented something more than beauty, of course.

And now, ten years past 2016, I know what it was.