Slow Style Home: Decorating Personal, Meaningful Interiors

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In this Designers at Home episode, I visit a New York City loft where nature isn’t something added to the design. It’s what the design is made of.

When we talk about bringing nature indoors, the conversation usually stops at houseplants. But there are so many other ways in: walls made from banana fiber and handmade paper, upholstery layered in natural fibers, patterns drawn from leaves and honeycombs, and cane chairs that are allowed to wear with time. Nature is one of the five design elements I talk about in my book that are found in every Slow Styled Home, and this loft is full of it.

Subscribe to see and hear the full video home tour with pattern designer Lori Weitzner, room by room and story by story.

Explore Lori’s fabrics, wallcoverings, her book Ode to Color, and her free color quiz at https://www.loriweitzner.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!

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.

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

While the podcast is on break, I’m digging into the archives and re-airing my favorites. In this one, I sit down with novelist and New York Times book columnist Danielle Postel-Vinay to talk about what a French home is actually for.

It's about home as a vessel for your vision of life — not the self-focused idea of a home that simply mirrors who you already are, but something more outward: a home that carries what you value and offers it, on purpose, to the people who walk through your door. Danielle spent years studying this firsthand, from her teenage mentorship in an antique dealer's shop to her own French in-laws' apartment in Paris.

We discuss how the entryway becomes an embrace, why the French salon is never once arranged around a television, and the story of the asparagus dinner that broke every rule and kept every ritual at the same time.

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!

My conversation with Los Angeles designer Kim Gordon is about setting an intention before you design anything at all. Kim asks a house what it wants to be before she draws a single floor plan, and she treats the senses — not the color palette — as the true starting point of a room.

This episode comes from our archives and therefore it's the full length version. The podcast is on break for two weeks. Subscribe to hear all of the new full length episodes!

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!

To hear the full episode and see the video, subscribe here.

In this guest episode, I sit down with Julia Collins, a London-based art advisor and dealer behind Collins & Green, to talk about how to actually look at a painting — no art history degree required.

Julia has a real academic art background, and by her own admission, it's “in many ways irrelevant” to how she looks at a painting. The pieces she loves best aren't always the most technically accomplished — they're the ones that catch her somewhere specific: a color balance, a blank face, a detail she can't quite explain. That's the whole method, and it's one anyone can use.

Subscribe to hear us walk through 10 paintings as Julia dissects each one.

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!

To hear the full episode and see the video, subscribe here.

In this guest episode, I sit down with Chicago-area interior designer and author Maida Korte to talk about what happens when a “tight ship” personality runs headlong into a house that refuses to be controlled.

Maida’s new memoir, Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me, set out to be a book about renovating a hundred-year-old house in Woodstock, Illinois. What it became, she told me, was a book about giving up the need for things to be finished and correct on her own schedule — and what that release made possible in her marriage and with her four daughters.

Subscribe to hear the full conversation:the sentence a stranger said about her house that made her burst into tears, the moment her husband asked if they would ever “saunter,” and what she’d tell her daughters differently if she could do it again.

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!

To hear the full episode and see the video, subscribe here.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Debbie Mathews, a Nashville-based interior designer and antiques dealer, to look through a curated selection of the rooms she's designed — from a sunroom in Belle Meade to a ranch outside Franklin, Tennessee.

Every good client relationship starts the same way: the client names a problem and a few basics — a color they love, a piece they already own — and hands the rest over. What happens in that handoff is where a designer actually earns her keep, and it's usually invisible to everyone but her. This episode makes it visible.

Subscribe to see and hear the full portfolio review: the sunroom nobody used until Debbie figured out why, the custom-built solution to a very specific bedside problem, and the trick she uses to bring a two-story room down to human scale.

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'm going deep on one of the five physical elements of every Slow Style home — and arguably the most personal one: Heritage and Culture.

It's about heritage as authorship. Not just the objects you've inherited, but the idea that your personal history — however much of it you know, however complicated it is, however far back it goes — is a story you get to write, edit, and hand forward. Most people treat their heirlooms as decorating problems. I want to reframe them as creative resources.

In this episode, I show specific objects from my own home and the stories behind them, how to handle heritage when it's complicated, why the house itself has a history worth honoring, what to bring home from the world when you travel with intention, and the room in my house that proves you don't have to inherit heritage — you can make it.

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!

To hear the full episode and see the video, subscribe here.

In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Liz Williams, an Atlanta-based interior designer known for symmetry, elegance, and an eye for detail, to look through a curated selection of her portfolio — from a grand formal home on the Chattahoochee River to a barn in Madison, Georgia, that is rustic on the outside and quietly refined within.

It's about the last decision most rooms never get: the finishing detail that takes a space from considered to complete. Not the focal point, not the statement piece — the trim on the pillow gusset, the tape on the curtain hem, the nail head on the wingback. The thing most of us talk ourselves out of before we ever try it.

Subscribe to see and hear the full portfolio review: how Liz mixes comfort with formality, why she reaches for trim where most designers reach for nothing, and the moment a set of plain white lampshades became something worth remembering.

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!

Want to avoid renovation regrets? I talk with interior designer Danielle Nicholson about the thing that causes more renovation heartbreak than bad tile choices or blown budgets: starting before you’re actually ready. Danielle’s book “Don’t Start Without Me” is built around a single idea: the real work of renovating happens before you even talk to a contractor. Or even a designer. Before anyone shows up with a truck. Before the showroom. Before the finish selections. Very specific questions related to your vision have to be answered first — and most people skip them entirely. Subscribe to hear the full conversation: what Danielle wishes every client would bring to the table, the mistakes she sees made over and over, and why “I just want to get it done” are the words that make her cringe.

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 home of Jill Litner Kaplan, a Boston-area interior designer whose approach to decorating stopped me in my tracks — not because it's flashy or maximalist, but because of a single idea I couldn't stop thinking about after I left. It's about how color palates emerge from storytelling as opposed to the "pop of color" advice that's been watered down into a band-aid solution.

Subscribe to see and hear the full home tour with Jill — room by room, object by object — and a masterclass in what visual storytelling actually looks like in a home.

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.