So something cool happened. Gather ’round.
Several years ago now, when I still lived in Brooklyn, I got to do a really fun job for a really cool client —multi-talented woman of the stage, screen, and audio recording, Ana Gasteyer! You might remember her glamfabulous master bathroom makeover I posted about with the incredible metallic pineapple wallpaper, and thennnnnnnnn…we never spoke of it again?
That’s my fault. Blogger fail. In reality I was lucky enough to work with Ana on a few major spaces in her home, but I never circled back to it on the blog. Evidently I didn’t even really shoot the spaces when I was done, unless those photos are hiding in a file somewhere deep in my hard drive, which is effectively the same thing. So stupid! Ana and I are still in touch—she’s good people!—but I’m rarely in Brooklyn, and asking to come photograph someone’s house like 5 years after the fact feels…I don’t know, not how it’s done. There’s an illusion of professionalism I have to maintain here, people!
Cut to: earlier this year. I received a book in the mail I’d been looking forward to: Hygge & West’s first book, Hygge & West Home: Design for a Cozy Life! I swear these things are related. Hygge & West has been my favorite wallpaper company for years (in fact…I don’t think I’ve ever used wallpaper on a project from anywhere else? nothing comes to mind? that’s kinda crazy.), and here they went and put together this beautiful book that brilliantly combines gorgeous interiors with profiles of the people who inhabit them and the things big and small that lend uniqueness and personality and coziness to these homes. The book is truly beautiful and such an achievement—I’m so proud to kinda-sorta know the amazing women who have built this company over the past decade, Aimee and Christiana. I want to be like them when I grow up.
ANYWAY. I’m looking through this book and all of a sudden—that’s Ana’s house!! I did that!! And then I started reading and I’m mentioned by name and everything, and…well. Surreal! My work, photographed by a professional and published in this glorious book! So, yes. I am taking a moment to brag because that was really fucking cool and a first for me. It looks very much as it did the day I left, which warms my heart.
Ana was such a great client—YES she’s a successful actress and overall class act, but she totally spoke my language of thriftiness, vintage, IKEA (I knew when she started spitting product names like a true aficionado that we’d get along), antique rugs, weird art…basically all the things I like. She and her family are all genuinely kind, smart, wonderful people, who were exceedingly gracious with this little 23 year old blogger guy who didn’t totally know what he was doing, flitting around their house rearranging all the things. With two young kids (not so young anymore!), she wasn’t looking to spend crazy money on fussy, fancy stuff and didn’t want a space that felt overdone—she wanted clean and practical and functional and calm. A place for everything, including so many cool and unique treasures accumulated over she and her husband Charlie’s rich and interesting lives thus far. I’m kind of freaked out by the interior decorate-y concept of buying decor items to fill out a shelf vignette or whatever that don’t actually mean a thing to the client, except that they paid for them, but Ana had so much great stuff to work with. So it was really a matter of trying to honor her existing things by pulling it all together in a way that felt cohesive and fun and stylish and livable.
Same area of the living room, before and after style! The building is an old factory/warehouse kinda deal, converted into living units, which is pretty common in Brooklyn. A lot of the work was adding little things to update and upgrade from the builder-basic finishes, and trying to make kinda weird areas and soffits and stuff like this look special and intentional rather than awkward. We removed track lighting in favor of more impactful pendants (this one from Flos was so so pretty), and added those little Alabax fixtures from Schoolhouse Electric to the soffit which evidently housed a duct, the vent for which I believe was photoshopped out of the “after” image—ha!
We papered the wall in Hygge & West’s Andanza and that shimmery copper backdrop was just…GAH! Gorgeous, gorgeous. The sofa was IKEA and I built a realllllllly long and narrow plant table for behind it (Ana loves a house plant, especially geraniums!). The rug was from Rugs USA (holy shit, it’s so cheap right now), the coffee table was from Organic Modernism (god I love that table), and the lounge chair was our big ticket item from Anthropologie. The guitar hook is from OneFortyThree! On either side of the piano we did two little “fauxdenzas,” the IKEA hack gift that just keeps on giving that Anna from Door Sixteen gave to the world many moons ago. I think I installed…5 different fauxdenzas in Ana’s place? Just so damn practical!
Don’t worry—we just moved that pretty antique china cabinet to a better wall! Aside from the beautiful vintage credenza, there isn’t a single thing in this photo that I purchased. I think Ana grew up with that incredible mirror, and the lamp (we called it the jellyfish lamp) was a gift from a cast mate, if memory serves. I spent the entire job terrified I’d break it somehow—that’s a helluva lot of crystal to be responsible for.
Not to get all weird and dark on you, but seeing these rooms presented in this way was really the first time I ever gave myself credit for doing a good job here. I think that happens a lot with creative work—by the time a project is nearing completion, you’ve poured a lot of time and emotional and physical energy into it, and you lose objectivity. Combine that with major insecurity (oh hiiiiiii) and it’s really hard to gauge whether something is good or not because to you it’s become a collection of projects that may not have turned out as perfectly as expected, or purchases that pushed you over budget, or back-and-forths with the client where you wish you had pushed harder for some option you liked better, or some flaw you hope nobody else notices, and so on. And yet: DAMNIT, DANIEL. It’s in a fucking book. A beautiful book. It looks great. And most importantly, it fits the people it was designed for, who have loved and lived and partied and chilled and, now, grown up in it. In what universe is that not a success? So this book, to me, feels like a real gift—a good reminder to not do that stupid thing anymore. It’s OK to want to do better and celebrate where you’re at. We’re often doing better than we think we are.
SO. I asked Christiana and Aimee if I could extend that gift to you, too, in the form of a good old fashioned Manhattan Nest giveaway, and they did us one better! Because it’s almost Christmas and we should have a little fun!
Up for grabs is not only a copy of Hygge & West Home: Design for a Cozy Life, where you can see the rest of Ana’s house as well as a ton of other spectacular homes, but also…TWO rolls of one of their newest papers, Piedmont! Any color! That’s 60 feet of wallpaper THAT IS SO CUTE AND PRETTY I JUST DIE. And knowing what I know of Hygge & West’s paper, it’s roughly 14,000 times more beautiful, somehow, in real life.
TO ENTER: Let’s run this old school. Leave a comment telling us where you’d use the wallpaper and/or who you’d give the gift of Hygge & West Home: Design for a Cozy Life to—which can totally be yourself! No judgment.
UPDATE: This giveaway is now closed! Thank you, everyone! The winner will be notified by email! :). A winner will be selected at random and notified via email! Please note that international entries are welcome and Hygge & West will pay the shipping, however the winner may be responsible for international duties & taxes.
Good luck!
I was generously supplied a copy of Hygge & West Home: Design for a Cozy Life. All opinions and nonsense are my own. Photos from the book used in this post are by James Carriére and used with permission from the authors.
