Updates
I haven’t posted in awhile bc I’ve taken Domcile on the road while I film and photograph for my own personal artwork @summer.mccorkle
But it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about space…and how we live in it bc I’ve been tent camping and living out of Jeep for the past three weeks in the desert which is the ultimate minimal lifestyle! I have also made some like minded minimal lifestyle living obsessed friends along the way and checked out how they are living on the road. Check out Red’s hand built set up complete w pantry, bar, sink, counter space, mood lighting and fridge freezer. An inspiration for organized living! Next we have a Rubicon that has the Dometic pullout fridge/freezer combo that I didn’t even know existed and which I now covet. But I’m also learning that even tho my set up is humble, it still serves me well. I get to wake up in beautiful new places to gorgeous views outside my tent. To quote Gretel Ehrlich, a lovely writer who has spent an extensive amount of time living outside and traveling: “Tent life pressed into me what the Tibetans call a mixing of mind and space. By that they mean thought moving with no direction and no bias, yet with a precision capable of taking everything in”. I love this quote.
With all this in mind, I just read an article in Forbes about the benefits of minimal living which I highly recommend. It also has a good checklist of questions to ask yourself when thinking of bringing something into your life. I love a good checklist! ✔️ see link in Bio or copy this https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/04/24/a-psychologist-shares-5-benefits-of-making-the-minimalist-switch/
It’s a snowy day here in Brooklyn and what better way to spend it then flipping through this cookbook The Beauty Chef by @carlaoatesthebeautychef that I’m currently obsessed with: I love her philosophy of clean eating and the recipes have very unique combinations of flavors and textures that are inspiring me and pushing me out of my auto pilot, ho hum, let’s just get fed way of eating I seem to have fallen into due to cooking burn out. This book makes me want to cook again! Also the photography is gorgeous.
Clutter clearing doesn’t just have to do with just getting rid of stuff. It has to do with looking at what we bring into our lives in the FIRST place. Wired just published an article (link-bio) published on Grist about fashion’s POST manufacturing pollution that I highly recommend- it’s a fascinating read. I remember when I had first heard of this mountain of discarded clothing in the Atacama desert and found the whole thing very disturbing and confusing. Why were there massive piles of clothes littering a pristine desert in Chile of all places, like a mini oceanic garbage patch? Then it burned. Having worked in the fashion industry myself (#2 polluter next to oil) it made me want to be extra conscious of what I consume. Here are some guidelines I use:
✨Quality over quantity. Even if it means paying more $ for less items, it ultimately is worth buying quality items that last longer over cheap stuff that falls apart in 5 washes. Find small companies or even individuals that make small batches of timeless well-made pieces.
✨Buy vintage and second hand. These clothes already exist! You also get a lot of compliments on vintage pieces bc they are truly unique one of a kinds.
✨Research the companies you buy from. I use Good on You, a website that rates dif brands on their sustainability practices. There is a LOT of greenwashing happening esp with bigger corps. So find out what sustainable actually MEANS to the company.
✨Buy non “plastic” fabrics like all natural organic materials like cotton, linen and wool. But note even then it can be hard to get a piece that is truly made from 100% natural materials bc of polyester thread, tags or plastic buttons. Check out brands like @abch.world whose mission is to create truly circular fashion or look up compostable underwear! Its a thing.
✨Buy with intention and buy what you truly LOVE ❤️ so you actually want to keep what you have! You want to open your closet and be syked at what you see! You could even go as extreme as a capsule wardrobe but that is for another post.
These are small moves compared to the corp level but you can still play a small part and stop buying smthg just bc it exists. Remember: your $ has power.
We are now in the second week of a new year and I’m hoping you are feeling rested after the holiday crash. I’ve had a number of people reach out this past weekend to get support from the ✨Space Therapy✨helpline 📞or to just tell me that all they want to do is get organized and then sending me pics of the projects they have been tackling. I love receiving these pics! Send away! 💌
There is something about the start of a new year that makes us look at what surrounds us and ask: what objects are no longer serving us? When we start doing a little clutter clearing, the physical act of getting rid of things flexes that decision making muscle and can put us in a meditative mindset because we are fully present in an action of doing. Once we get started, the exhilaration of even the smallest wins, in the smallest corner or drawer or shelf can lead to the courage and clarity needed to go deeper. Try it. Take a small project and tackle it, letting your mind empty out and open up. When you are done see how you feel inside and note this feeling of freedom and clarity. Doing this may give you the courage and desire to examine even bigger questions like: what processes are no longer working for me? What do I want my life to actually look and feel like? Who or what do I want to be included in this? Clutter does not only come in the form of objects. It can apply to situations, people and habits. Deep breath- you don’t have to decide all this today.
But I have noticed when people start clearing some physical clutter they also get very brave in other aspects of their lives and start the process to stop settling for less than they want.
Clear minds, clear hearts, can’t lose.* Let’s do this.
*(I had to go there 🙃)
We can talk about physical clutter clearing another day (which we will!) but today I just want to focus on the mental clutter clearing. This list of questions, brought to us by @melrobbins is the perfect way to look back at the year, see what worked, see what didn’t and decide what we will keep and what we will purge for 2024. I highly recommend sitting down with a pen and paper or some friends and family and doing these. I found it so enlightening and rewarding - like, wow I had a great year and went through some sh*t and learned a whole hell of a LOT!!! Now I’m ready for 2024. ✨❤️😘.
🎉It’s the LAST day for 40% off an individual Space Therapy session! ✨That’s $75 bucks for one hour of virtual professional organizing, clutter clearing or interior consultation! An individual Space Therapy session will help you close out the year by clearing some clutter, letting go of things that no longer serve or support you and help you create a plan to re-energize your space in the new year. Whatever it is, I can help. It’s the perfect gift to give yourself and the unexpected and absolutely unique useful gift to get for someone else. See link in bio for more info on Space Therapy. Contact me via the contact form on my website or DM me to find out more and to book!
Hi all! 🍁 I'm offering Space Therapy sessions at a 40% discount (that's $75 bucks!) for a first time individual session. Space Therapy is virtual professional organizing for those needing help but who don't have the time to devote to an in person 4 hour session together. An individual Space Therapy session is perfect if you have something you want to work on and need help coming up with a plan or you are feeling generally overwhelmed and don't know where to start. I can help!
This is the perfect gift to give yourself or someone else you love.
See link in bio or DM me for more info or to book!
Sale ends Tuesday 11/28.
Happy Fall Equinox!🍁This past Saturday marked the start of the fall season. The Seasonal Equinox is a PERFECT TIME to take stock of our clothes and get rid of what is no longer serving us. Marie Kondo’s method says to start with the off-season clothes because it’s been awhile since we’ve seen them. So let’s go! ✨1. Gather all your off season clothes. Dig them ALL up wherever they are- closets, basements, laundry rooms- and go through in this order: Tops. Bottoms. Dresses/Jackets/Coats. Socks. Underwear- Tights/Thermals/Loungewear. Bags. Accessories. Winter Sportswear. Shoes. ✨2. Kondo’s method is to hold the article in your hands and ask, “Does this spark joy?” I find a LOT of my clothes spark joy. I love clothes and I can get a bit attached to them. See all these pics from museums? I love a lot of paintings and photos for the clothes! 💕 So in a variation of her method I take it a step further. I TRY ON every item. Yes. EACH ITEM. ✨3. Look at yourself in the mirror. How do you feel? Does it fit weird? Does it fit at all?? I find clothes that are vintage/from a discount store or some fancy consignment store are sometimes just OFF but at the time of purchase we convince ourselves they fit. Trying on each item is a way to really see what is working and what is not! And if it doesn’t fit- buh bye. No saving clothes for the weight we were or the weight we want to be. That will just depress us every time we open the closet. Be honest. Our clothes should reflect and represent who we truly are, NOW. Not who we were. Even if we have a LOT less clothes at the end, we know that every item in there fits us properly and was chosen with intention. It makes getting dressed 100% easier. ✨4. Rinse/Repeat with our summer clothes. 💫If you are stuck, reach out for a session. It’s shocking how much you can get done in a short amount of time with a witness and someone motivating you! 🌟(And yes, that’s my closet and yes I kept all those Converse). Credits: 1-2 Rembrandt. 3. Portrait of poet Laura Battiferri by Bronzino. 4. Laura Litinsky. 6. Unknown 7. Deborah Turbeville. 5,8,9, Domicile. 10. Gerard ter Borch detail.
Good morning! Not to be stepping in on @zillowgonewild style here but my friend was showing me her friends’ place that is for sale in upstate New York and I had to share it as a mid morning Monday snack. Look at this beauty! The couple who is selling it bought it in the 90s for a basement bargain price (ah 90s real estate- prices and availability we can only dream of now) and lovingly renovated it over the years…
if I wasn’t already trying to be in two places at once and live the bi coastal lifestyle and I had 650k in cash sitting around I would definitely snatch this beauty up! So light and airy and serene… 😌
Oh ps it comes with another little side house that you can see in the listing.
My dad once won an award for cleanest garage in his town in Wisconsin. This is the article about it in the local newspaper. 😆We joked it was so clean in there you could eat off the floor. He had a lot of tools and he knew where every damn one of them was. And he LOVED cars (in particular Corvettes and Ford trucks) and of course, the Packers. Attention to detail was his forte.
Just sayin’- genetics run deep! Happy Father’s Day!
Hi!
I’m offering a new concept here at Domicile. I call it ✨Space Therapy. ✨ I had a few people express that they wish we could work together but either:
1. They just didn’t know when they could find a solid four hours to set aside to do so.
2. They don’t live in LA or NYC (or our timing didn’t align)
Or
3. They want to do the work themselves but just don’t know how to start.
It made me wonder how I could help within these parameters… 🤔
So I’ve come up with a plan to work together virtually! 🎉Space Therapy is a 4 hour package that includes (4) 1 hour video chats and text support as needed during the duration of us working together. Projects can last as short as a week or as long as a month, depending on the amount of time you have to devote to the work.
The break down is this: we start with a 1 hour video chat consultation. You give me a tour of whatever it is you want to focus on- it could be a closet, a storage space, the kitchen- or it could be your whole apartment or house! I then help you come up with a game plan of where to start and give you techniques to approach it. You work on your own schedule and we continue to have virtual and text check ins to keep things moving. We can also just use the time to work together over video chat.
For the detailed breakdown, go to the website link in bio, under Services. Or DM me if you are interested and I can tell you more.
I’ve done it with a few people so far and I have to say I think it really works well! ☀️
P.S. This beautiful painting is by Emil Bisttram. It’s called “Oversoul” and was part of “Another World” a show I saw at LACMA in LA that I’ve been meaning to post about. 🌟
🌱 This past weekend I planted this year’s “garden”!🌷
When you live in New York City [most] people have to sacrifice living space for the opportunity to call this crazy city home. This includes access to your own personal outdoor space such as a yard, deck, patio or garden. As someone who LOVES nature 🦋 and being OUTSIDE ⛰️and LOVES plants 🪴 and gardening 👩🌾 this has been a real sticking point for me over the years (and probably why I now spend more and more time in LA 😉).
Enter The New York City Fire Escape. The fire escape is famously a place where people can claim their own little version of an outdoor escape (see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Frances Ha, West Side Story, to name a few), (even if it’s technically illegal to do so. 🤔). I have always lived in buildings with fire escapes and in my current apartment I have the luxury of being on the top floor of a small 3 story townhouse (ie no one uses this escape but me) so I can really make the most of my little outdoor oasis!
My apartment is mostly monochromatic so I decided to go for a riot of warm colors this year for contrast.🌹🌸🌷I get so much joy looking out my kitchen window every morning just from utilizing this small amount of space for my ‘lil flower babies. I read out here 📚 drink coffee out here ☕️ write posts out here (happening now) ✏️ and catch some sun out here.☀️
No matter how small a space you have, there is always some way to work with it so that it can bring more serenity and joy to your daily life. And I highly recommend bringing anything green or floral into your home to do so. Even if you aren’t a green thumb there are many plants out there that require very little care such as the ZZ plant or the Pothos plant. Check out @greeneryunlimited They are a local plant store in my neighborhood of Greenpoint and their website is a great resource for plant care!
✨🌷✨🪴✨🌱✨🌻
If you saw my last posts gushing about the two places I stayed at in Joshua Tree and how I loved the interiors- guess what? They were done by the same people @joshuatreecabin
!!!
I knew there was a reason why I loved the second place I stayed just as much as the first- different dimensions, same vibe!
Wilder Cabin as it was called then (now called The Jasper Cabin by the new owners) was sold last year (oh maaaan! If only….) and they pretty much kept a lot of the same aesthetics as before, including those gorgeous double doors that opened up to the desert.
I’m notorious for shopping off people (stopping people in New York to ask where they got those xyzs is very common- that’s why they call it street style) and their apartments. I stayed at my good friend’s apartment while I was renovating mine and was “inspired” by a lot of her stuff (incl. her toilet brush- what can I say? The woman has good taste) that ended up in my place. I hope people see it as flattery and not that I’m a stalker. 😬🙃 When good taste is around it’s impossible for me not to sniff it out!
So of course I was tracking all the stuff in these places I stayed in- oh, who makes this amazing tea kettle? Where are these ceramic mugs from? I’ve never seen a leather fly swatter! I love the color of these glasses! etc. But the cool thing is that that these same people @joshuatreecabin have an actual physical STORE in Los Alamos (and online) called Campover! @campover
There you can find a lot of the same things they feature in their spaces. So smart. I loved the Moroccan glasses (see here on the porch w a pink drink at sunset) and I can attest to that white ceramic tea kettle heating up super fast- functional and gorgeous. And I used this dust pan / brush set and was wondering while I did, hmmm my mom loves a good brush & dust pan. Wonder where they got this from?
Now I know. I love supporting small businesses, esp stores with an actual physical location which nowadays is so rare. Go check ‘em out! @campover
After my stay at the Joshua Tree place ended, I wasn’t ready to go back to LA. So I booked another place in Landers, a “town”nearby. The place looked great in the pics online and when I arrived it was totally “nice” inside -spacious, with two bedrooms, a large living room and a modern kitchen. But have you ever had that feeling in a place where the energy just does NOT feel right? I walked in to this new place and immediately wanted to leave. [This post does not have pics of the place to respect it’s owners privacy].
I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly. It could have been the layout of the furniture. Or the layout of the rooms themselves. It felt too large and impersonal and just not… considered. It had plants but they were sad and covered in dust. And it probably didn’t help that the place itself was caged in by your typical desert chain link coyote fence, surrounded on three sides by places that I couldn’t tell if they were abandoned or occupied. A lot of these old homesteader properties had been abandoned for years before JT turned into one of the Air Bnb capitols of America. So who knows what went down in this space before. Not to mention how this land was occupied by homesteaders in the first place while Indigenous Peoples were moved to reservations.
Regardless of what it was, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. So I did! I only stayed one night, couldn’t sleep and left the next morning.
The point is, it doesn’t matter how “good” a place looks; if it’s not imbued with love or cleared of any bad energy in it, you can feel it. So I moved on to this small, very sweet, studio set up. So simple. So well done. You could feel the person who designed it had put a lot of effort and good energy into it. It felt comfortable, personal and loved, not to mention it had an expansive view without a chain link fence so I could experience the desert as it should be- vast and open. See more pics @JoshuaTreeCabin for this placed called the Campover Cabin.
I’m guessing the people who decorated the Air Bnb in my previous post were influenced by this book that was on the coffee table: At Home in Joshua Tree by Sarah and Rich Combs @thejoshuatreehouse I have to admit-I had seen this book in bookstores when it came out and at the time, as a full on black and white minimalist New Yorker, I had kinda judged it, chalking it up to what I had seen in Joshua Tree on prior trips- another boho hat wearing desert transplant influencer coming from LA and taking the desert and commodifying it. So much judgement! And I was wrong on a lot of fronts (although she does wear a hat but honestly out here you HAVE to wear a hat! See the hat wall photo). (PS out here I wear a mostly desert color palette. Black is too hot).
Because I can’t pass up any book that is about interiors and home, I ended up reading it and I have to say it was a lovely read and I actually learned a lot! They are like anyone else who comes from somewhere not here and falls in love with the desert. And they love making interiors feel good so you want to be in them! Who can argue with that? It’s everything I love too. They talk about all the things that make a home- from what you put in it to what you eat in it. They also talk a LOT about nature and how, when you live here in Joshua Tree, nature is just a part of your daily life. You eat outside, you lounge outside, you bring the outdoors in with plants, rocks and colors that reflect your surroundings. (See pics). As someone who has lots of rocks, plants and a very large cholla cactus bone in my Brooklyn apt, to remind me of the desert, I totally get this. I learned a lot about Moroccan rugs, different plastering techniques and native desert plants. (I already knew how to make a Mezcal margarita and nutritional yeast popcorn). For ex: did you know Creosote, the common yellow flowering bush seen everywhere in the Mojave (see pic), can live to be thousands of years old? The oldest one known is King Clone who lives in the Creosote rings Preserve in Lucerne Valley and is thought to be 11,700 years old. WHAT?! I need to go talk to him.
Hey there, I’ve been on the road for the past 3 weeks shooting for 10 days in the desert (@summer.mccorkle) 📸and then went back to LA to catch up with life so I just haven’t had a chance to post in awhile! This week I decided to have a real vacation and booked something last minute in Joshua Tree. You know when you walk into a space that is someone’s home or Air bnb or even a hotel room and it just feels right? ✨When I feel this, I’m like can I just move in and LIVE here? Forget my old life and all my stuff. I want to live this simply. ✨
This place I’m staying feels that way to me. @thejaspercabin
Everything here is so considered yet homey, clean but not too minimal. This is exactly the feeling I strive for in a space- how to make it feel uncluttered yet not fussy; minimal but lived in; cool and calming yet warm and inviting. You can tell the people who put this together @wildwood.collective really thought how to make a space comfortable and reflect its surroundings. Brown leather, warm woods and wicker furniture, along with rugs, pillows, blankets and towels all utilize a warm subtle palette that speaks to the desert surroundings. Staying on theme with your typical Joshua Tree style, they used vintage furniture, an old general electric oven and knick knacks that make it feel rustic chic. But they also mixed it up with a nod to the Brooklyn/Upstate New York Remodelista farmhouse vibe with its clean white walls, dark kitchen cabinetry, woodblock countertops, wooden doors, a farmhouse sink, and black fixtures – it just really works together here. Scent is another layer w PF candle diffusers @pfcandleco in the rooms so the space smells so good when you walk in - subtle and fresh. I use these in my place too and I usually can’t stand scented things. I’m currently writing this from the very comfortable brown leather couch- the wind is blowing the sand and creosote around outside and I’m very happy to be inside, doing nothing but thinking about interiors and domestic bliss. (And that dog in the painting!❤️)