About

Lifestyle consulting for a sustainable and beautiful home, garden and closet
 

I grew up going to thrift stores, consignment shops, antique collectives and flea markets.  My parents were antique dealers and from a young age I began to cultivate an ability to spot treasures among other, less-than-savory items.  As an adult, I owned a fashion and home consignment shop for 8 years.  I have now turned my attention toward helping private clients identify and refine their own spaces and style.

Fashion, art, design and architecture have all defined us as humans throughout history.  We innately want to create and express who we are with an outward show of color, texture and form.  Every culture in the world does this in some form.  In the photos below you can tell a great deal about the people or spaces shown without any caption or description. 

 

In recent years these acts and expressions of creativity have been compromised by advancing technology (that makes ever cheaper goods) and globalization.  Fashion and home decor have become an increasing problem for our environment, creating billions of tons of unrecyclable waste every year.

 

Even environmentally conscious individuals sometimes fail to make the connection between their actual purchases and the implications of those purchases.  Someone who brings their reusable bags to the grocery store may not think twice about buying armloads of clothes from a fast fashion boutique. Clothing made cheaply from undesirable ingredients (did you know that polyester is actually a petroleum product??) is a main contributor to pollution and dangerous working conditions.  One has to look no further than the disaster at Rana Plaza to see just how tragic these conditions can be.

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We have to do better.  We MUST do better.

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I am passionate about helping individuals convert their lifestyle to something more mindful, sustainable, ethical and beautiful.  We are constantly bombarded by messages that try to convince us that we must consume certain things, own popular items, furnish our homes in the latest trends.  We all need to be better at resisting the latest "#trend" or cheap item from Amazon, Shein or Temu.

 

How do you live a comfortable life that reflects who you are at your core without either falling down the rabbit hole of consumption or becoming a victim to the pressure to conform to whatever trends are floating around?  You could start by trying to source items secondhand wherever possible.  Often, the exercise of looking for a specific item can be enough to make you realize how much you really need that item.  If you cannot find something you need secondhand then try to find it from a small, local business or from makers and suppliers who know their supply chain intimately, or use textiles that can be reused or repurposed. 

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This concept of sustainability also needs to be brought into our indoor outdoor spaces as well.  There are multiple outlets that sell secondhand decor and furniture. Those should be our first stops for items for the home.  We should be moving beyond non-biodegradable or non-compostable landscape fabrics, plastic pots, nylon twine, netting, etc.  Slow Floral also needs to be incorporated into our everyday ethos.  Did you know that conventional florists are exposed to over 100 pesticides, herbicide and carcinogens in their work?  We do NOT have the same standards for flowers that we do for food, and because these fragile stems come from all over the world (contributing to pollution) they must be grown to be sturdy.  That take heaps of chemicals.  What do we do when we get a bouquet of flowers?  We bury our faces in them and inhale deeply to see if they have a fragrance (that tends to be bred out of conventional flowers as well).  We then deliver these bundles of pretty chemicals to hospitals to comfort the ill and to welcome babies.  Yikes.

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My passion is in educating people about how to make better choices and helping them design the lifestyle they want while becoming more mindful and aware.