What is Homeward?

Photography by Victoria Pearson

I love being home. My career has been built on helping people cook great food, organize their homes, and fill every nook and cranny with things they love (more on my background below). Yet I’ve never really had a chance to create that ideal space myself. My husband and I spent our entire married life together, more than 20 years, in a Brooklyn apartment. Facing empty nestdom as our children headed off to college, we decided to branch out and find a place in a warmer climate—for part of the year now, and maybe for more of it in the future.

Photography by Victoria Pearson

Homeward is about finding that first house and constructing our next phase of life. It’s a space for everyone who wants to live a life of meaning, beauty, and comfort. I’m excited to share my insights, design sensibility, home and cooking ideas, and resources of all kinds. That will include practical advice, such as how to lay out a pantry and what to look for in outdoor dining chairs—and also some impractical advice, like where to get a spiked anti-coyote suit for a 12-pound dog. I’ll unearth excellent design finds each week and seek out opinions from both pros in the field and from people like you! I’ll do it all while grappling with bittersweet existential topics, like: Will this be the last home I inhabit? What does your childhood home say about how you live now?

Here are the different ways you can join me on Homeward:

Free subscribers

You’ll receive a monthly recap of highlights and the occasional post, depending on how many renovation snafus I have to wiggle through at the time!

Paid subscribers

By upgrading to paid, you will receive my weekly posts that cover:

  • updates on my house project

  • shopping recommendations and resource lists

  • home and cooking ideas

You’ll also get access to:

  • comments and community chats

  • all posts in the archive

Founding members

By becoming a founding member, you will unlock:

  • an annual subscription with all of the above, including access to all my posts in the archives, as well as community conversations and chats

  • a special 10% off* at Food52 for the duration of your subscription

  • a one-time 10% off* at Schoolhouse

  • my deep gratitude for supporting Homeward

To get a sense of Homeward, you can start with the first three posts—about evolving your home style; knowing when it’s time for a change; and finding your next hometown—which are all free.

I hope you’ll join my fun, messy, enlightening series about making a home!
Warmly,

Amanda

P.S. For those who don't know me, I’m the executive chair of the cooking and home brands Food52 (which I co-founded with Merrill Stubbs), Schoolhouse, and Dansk. Early in my career, I cooked and baked my way through Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany. I was a reporter and food editor at The New York Times for a decade and have written a bunch of books, including Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes; The Cook and the Gardener; Eat, Memory; A New Way to Dinner; two Food52 cookbooks; and the bestselling The Essential New York Times Cookbook—which took me forever to write. I played myself in the Nora Ephron film, Julie & Julia (and had to audition for the part), created the Twitter app Plodt (back when X was Twitter, Twitter was fun, and Twitter had apps), and served on President Obama's Commission on White House Fellowships.

*Check your inbox for a welcome email with your special code. Some regular exclusions will apply.
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A top-to-bottom renovation, design finds, and hard life questions—the nitty gritty of creating our home in Ojai, CA. Plus, input from experts and all of you! A researched, opinionated resource from Amanda Hesser of Food52, Schoolhouse, and Dansk.

People

I'm Founder and Executive Chair of Food52, Dansk, and Schoolhouse. I live in Brooklyn with my husband Tad Friend, our college-age kids, and our dog, Fiver.