Our bright-eyed, pre-budget moodboard
Get ready for 50 pages of design inspo—plus, a guide to Oslo.
This week, we’re moving into design and details—with a sidebar on Oslo, Norway, where I recently went with my Food52 co-founder and close friend Merrill. We did a lot of eating, and soaked up as many design and culture gems as we could. So, of course, I put together a travel guide for you. Also, letting you know that I’m going to post Chats early in the week rather than on Fridays. (If you don’t want to receive email notifications about new Chats, you can adjust your settings and have notifications sent only to the app.)
Over the next few posts, I’ll introduce you to our terrific design and construction team. Before we get started with them, though, I’m sharing the inspo board that Tad and I created for our dreams of the future. We laid out the vision for our new home, how we wanted to live, features we’d love to have—if we could afford them—as well as details and styles we don’t like. Tad: wallpaper. Me: inefficient kitchens.
Keep in mind that we didn’t create this for public consumption, so it’s neither polished nor comprehensive. But it should sketch where we’re heading, and I hope it might be helpful for the way you think about your own home renovations and future projects. We found it to be a critical and productive exercise, as it forced us to think about both mundane questions—will the printer be out, or tucked in a closet?—as well as bigger topics, like how do we want to feel when we’re at home? If you live with someone, putting together a detailed inspiration document also encourages alignment before you dive into a project and have to make time-sensitive decisions that can be tense if you don’t agree.