The Art of Handmade Living: A Journey Through My Home and Life

As I sit in my cozy home, surrounded by the fruits of my labor, I am reminded of the importance of living a life that values craftsmanship, simplicity, and joy. It all began when I stumbled upon a article about Guy Wolf, a renowned potter who creates beautiful flower pots for Martha Stewart. I was determined to learn from him, and after years of dedication, I've had the privilege of apprenticing with him in Connecticut.

My love affair with pottery started with Guy's work, but it soon expanded to other areas of my life. I've always been drawn to handmade objects that tell a story, evoke emotions, or spark joy. Whether it's a well-made mattress, a cozy sweater, or a beautiful vase, every item in my home has a history and a purpose. My bed, for instance, is from the 1830s and was originally designed as a twin bed, but I found out that there's a mattress maker in the Bronx who creates horsehair mattresses by hand. He measured my bed, made a new mattress, and it turned out to be incredibly comfortable.

As I walk through my home, I'm surrounded by evidence of my passion for handmade objects. My bike, which I brought back from Germany in 1940, is a testament to the value of quality craftsmanship. It's built to last, with a solid steel frame that has become my trusty companion over the years. Art supplies take priority over clothes for me; I'm always working on a new painting or sketching project. My friend Deborah told me about her grandmother's saying, "We're too poor to buy cheap things," and it resonated deeply with me.

I've also developed a passion for bookbinding, which I discovered during the pandemic. I made this beautiful watercolor sketchbook, which has become one of my favorite possessions. It's a reminder that even in the midst of chaos, there is always room for creativity and self-expression. My love for books is not just about reading; it's also about appreciating the art of bookmaking.

When it comes to clothing, I've always been drawn to tweed suits, which were originally designed as fishermen's garments. I commissioned four sweaters from a knitting collective in Yorkshire, where each one tells a story of its own. The gansey's have become an integral part of my wardrobe, and I love the way they make me feel like a true British gent.

As I look around my home, I see a space that has evolved over time, reflecting my values and passions. It's no longer just a collection of possessions but a shrine to the art of handmade living. Every item in my home has a story, and every time I touch something, I'm reminded of the person who made it or the process that created it.

Marie Kondo's philosophy resonates deeply with me; I believe that the objects we surround ourselves with should spark joy and bring meaning to our lives. When I started decluttering my home, I realized that it wasn't just about getting rid of unnecessary items but also about creating space for new experiences and connections. My home has become a canvas, waiting for the next chapter in its story.

As I sit in my cozy home, surrounded by the beauty of handmade objects, I feel a sense of contentment and peace. It's not about accumulating possessions or material wealth; it's about living a life that values craftsmanship, simplicity, and joy. And as I look around me, I know that I've created something truly special – a space that reflects my soul and inspires others to do the same.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi i'm barry and this is jordan we're the brownstone boys this is our handmade home in brooklyn new york so we started brownstone boys when we started our renovation jordan had the awesome idea to start blogging about it we thought it would be something our family and friends would read and that's pretty much it but a lot of people read it and comment on it and we have a lot of followers now so it's been fun to share our story when we started renovation we had so many questions about how to renovate uh and we just weren't finding the right sources so we were like let's blog throughout our whole entire journey and it we found it was very helpful for other people in the process that we were going through so we were looking for about seven months for a place we were looking all throughout brooklyn we knew that we wanted a brownstone it's both of our dreams to have one so brownstone is basically a row house um so they touched another house on the side and what actually makes it a brownstone is the facade there is brick behind the the actual facade that you see so it's a masonry building but the actual facade is made of something called brownstone we spent about seven months renovating the place it was a little bit of a mess too it was chopped up into a bunch i think it was a five bedroom place they like put a bedroom everywhere they could find like a corner it was a lot of paint slopped on the the woodwork and we had it all stripped and it literally looked like someone was murdered in the place there was stuff splattered on the wall there was running on the quarters it was a total crime scene yeah so we wouldn't yeah you want to get it done when everything else is a mess too and originally we were going to strip the wood just for us to repaint it go back to a white color um but we stripped it and it looks so beautiful and so natural in the space that we were like we have to keep this we wanted to preserve as much as we could so things like the the traditional layout with the stairs having their own their own hallway with the wall that's traditionally there so the entryway is one of our favorite spaces because you really know you're in a brownstone when you walk into it it's the traditional you know stairway that goes up with the original banister and that sort of thing and this is where you can really see that original woodwork that we stripped um this door was covered in paint it was a very sloppy job and every color of the rainbow was on the store it was a bright blue it was a pink at one time and it was just like sloppy and dripping down and it just came out amazing they stripped all the paint off it all including the original hardware when you walk into the place the first thing you see is this banister when we purchased the place it was covered layers and layers and layers of white paint uh so when we stripped it this beautiful uh oak wood was exposed and we knew we wanted to save it there was a couple pieces missing so we went ahead and replicated the molding here on the banister and now it's definitely the shell piece in the house and it's really cool because you couldn't even see this detail that was in it when it was covered in paint so when they stripped it we were like wow that's amazing like they knew that was under there the kitchen is definitely something that people gravitate towards they come in and then next thing you know they're just hanging out on the stools uh in front of our kitchen island it's just we really wanted that like that show stopper kitchen so we wanted to be very open so we had to tear down a couple of walls to make this happen so there was a structural wall here we had to put this this header this beam up there was another bedroom right next to it that we had to tear out too so really created the open airy very bright feeling that we wanted to have here we knew we wanted an island in the middle of the space so we went ahead with a waterfall quartz counter my dream was always to have a farm style sink so we went with this uh apron front sink behind here we have a beautiful herringbone tile um you wanted to do white it's my fault jordan wanted something bright there but these are various colors by the way the white the grey i like more color than barry likes uh i like things bright colorful barry likes the same three colors he loves a good charcoal what about gray yeah we wanted there to be at least one small natural wood feature so although all the cabinets were gray and these shelves are gray we did this one oak shelf just to sort of echo a lot of the woodwork that's in the place and bring it into the kitchen warm it up a little bit when we got the cabinets uh we got this one and it had the fronts on it but we were like you know what for design purposes let's go ahead and turn it on its side we took off the front and then we just kind of left that as an exposed shelf and we think it looks really great here we actually built these pendants ourselves from scratch uh we were looking for pendants and the ones that we liked were thousands of dollars it was like every one that we saw like this one looks great oh it's two thousand dollars each um and then the ones that were in our price range for two or three hundred dollars were just very generic they're just very basic so we decided to make them ourselves so we actually got all of the components we wired them ourselves we've never done that before so we watched a youtube video to figure it out and completely wired them put them together installed them and we haven't burned the place down yet so we're fingers crossed so when we purchased this place they had the kitchen right here in the middle of the space it's kind of awkward obviously we weren't going to do that but because of that when we demolished uh the area the molding was affected this place has that beautiful ornate molding from 1890 and we knew we were going to go ahead and replicate that so we replicated all this molding to fit the original and now this is our beautiful living room area so one of our favorite light fixtures in the place is this one right here it is called a stick bulb and it is really cool because it is made here in new york city from reclaimed material and so this one specifically they get the wood from water towers in brooklyn yeah but we thought it was a way to pay homage to brooklyn a little bit in our place and we love it it looks fits really well over the table looks amazing so we are here in the master bedroom and this is you know this we wanted this to be very calming kind of like sanctuary for us so it's in the back of the building it's kind of like a tree house outside lots of tree branches in the summer um so a couple of things that we did here was you know it's a common problem in these brooklyn brownstones to have the old fireplace bump out that like sticks out of the wall and it's usually in the way for furniture placement so we just extended it so that it centered it in the room and sort of made a backdrop for the bed and we painted it this color which is good night moon from clear paint i think it turned out really well and we also had to fix the moldings here so just to make it look like it belongs here these are plaster moldings in this room so it was a project to restore these moldings as well another favorite thing in the master is the shelves over here we actually took a tabletop that was sitting in our basement we cut it to the right size we stained the wood and we used that wood to create these beautiful open shelves it is something we're pretty proud of i'm originally from new orleans and so i have my reminder of home the vintage map of new orleans here and then i love nautical stuff and so this is a nautical map of new york harbor so um just made sense for us you know my old home and i'm originally from las vegas where there is no history so unfortunately i don't have a vintage map of vegas in here so welcome to the brightest room in the house this is our guest bedroom uh this mural that you're seeing behind me uh is an original a good friend and old colleague of mine lauren caitlin a muralist painted this from scratch we just told her that we kind of wanted something vintage and botanical and she created this really this big showpiece in the place now we love it what i thought was like the coolest part of the process is after she painted the entire mural she went over the entire thing to give it this sort of like vintagey look and feel with wood stains but look it was actually a last-minute decision she wasn't even planning on doing that she painted it and it looked great and then she's like do you have any wood stain i was like why what are we staining where's the wood and she it looks like i was a little skeptical at first when she said wood stain but i can't imagine it any other way it looks awesome it's tight in we added some other botanical posters we added the skylight uh with our renovation all right so welcome to our pride and joy of this renovation we built this bathroom from scratch it was a little weird bedroom you couldn't even fit a bed in here it was kind of kind of useless space and so we thought it was a perfect size for a bathroom and since it was a new totally new space it didn't exist before we really wanted it to have a little bit of a vintage feel and feel like it has been here for a while so we went with very classic like hex floret on the floor classic subway tile on new york yeah it's very new york you see this tile everywhere in new york um so it is very classic and we have of course the original woodwork and the shutters uh nice claw foot tub this is actually a new clawfoot tub and we got a new one just because it's they're way lighter even though it is castle iron it's like a fraction of what the original ones were and then one thing that we really love as you saw is this vintage door that we put in we got this from a salvage yard and they fit it to the space and yeah we cut the space for the glass here we found this chicken wire glass we installed it and then of course we just wanted to make it as vintage as possible so we turn it into a good old wc i feel like no home is really finished uh so we're looking forward to all those small yeah there's a few little things we have there's it's always going to be 98 finished thanks for coming up the stoop and into our home see you guys soon i'm allie and this is my handmade home in queens new york i'm a freelance display artist i do production and design i've done set design um i do a lot of styling propping sourcing and when i'm not freelancing i own a small vintage business called farewell trading where i sell a curated collection of vintage and antiques accessories decor on etsy it's really hard to describe my style i mean i think i tend to have like a masculine aesthetic i'm really big on color stories my collection is from the late 1800s to present certain things just speak to me most of the time i have no idea what they are or the history about it i just i just buy whatever i like and i figure it out later that's the best part about vintage to me it's fun i don't take it too seriously i think it should bring up emotions and memories i just love funny little moments that you know you could just look at and smile when i first saw the house like one of the things that made me fall in love with it was how open it is i mean you could see the whole length of the house from the front to the back the view of the cemetery is one of my favorite things about the house a lot of people don't think it's great but i love it we like go biking through there we run through there it's just a gorgeous amenity across the street and then in the back of the house we have a very large church so another beautiful thing to look at the front sunroom has been about four different shades of pink it took me a really long time to find like the perfect shade that went with the wallpaper the plants and then like the yellows and blacks in the living room and i just finally found this like dusty pink that i think works with everything finally finally right welcome to my jungle um this is the highest concentration of plants in any room in the house it's also the sunniest just some old cameras that i found in prague this i love collecting like new york world's fair items um i just think they're so cool like such a cool part of new york history my parents actually got married at flushing meadows park so it's just like i just love it this is a planter i made from an old doll head that i use to display air plants it's kind of fun i mean the house is over 100 years old so things not being too updated and modern works with it i think the kitchen has like a perfect vintage feel but it's just modern enough this kitchen backsplash came with the house i am in love with it something about it really speaks to me just the colors the the imagery just like the lightning and the sun faces it's just like really cool and unique and i've never seen anything like it and i love it so these are one of my most recent finds they're vintage lusterwear from japan ceramic they're just so much fun and interactive therapeutic love spinning them love love them i decided to paint my entire dining room blue because i wanted to do like a primary color thing in here it's just my favorite color in the house it i feel like it goes with everything i photograph all my products for farewell trading against it it just i love it this is zero he's also a part of the art so this is a vintage bullseye mirror i love how gold and gaudy it is and i feel like it just really tops off the bar cart and they're very popular in my vintage shop still a lot of them so when we first moved in um the living room was just like hot red and there was this giant tv wall unit took up the whole wall it just felt so small in there so i knew i wanted to paint it white and do like a big gallery wall around the television that's why i chose to balance the wall out with black because the tv is just like a black screen like the shiny panther kind of balances it out and then a lot of the blacks and the artwork balance it out so your eye is drawn around the tv rather than at the tv the collection ranges from like the late 1800s um nothing too present this is a piece of art for my mother this tiger silk screen as well as the zebra silk screen and then these ceramic cats are old pipe breasts but i hung them on the wall because i think they look so cool and i don't smoke pipe so i have a small cabinet of curiosities just like a random collection of things that i love my little eyes that i use as props when i do photography for farewell trading i have this fun postcard that kind of spins this is my great grandmother and her czechoslovakian garb just very old hand colored photo i love it it kind of like tells a story about me without having to say anything and kind of just like i hope people get the humor and things that i have displayed so handsome yep so this is kind of just like my entrance display of just a few photos of certain family members my grandmother my mother my mom mom grandma my grandfather he's the only boy here a little nudy one of my grandma yes the wallpaper is original to the house like a lot of people would take that down before selling their house but i'm just so happy that the old owners left it up because i feel like it was just destined to be my wallpaper the wallpaper starts at the front of the living room and it goes all the way upstairs uh it's throughout the whole hallway and i love it this is my peacock he's from a pop-up display when the store closed i got to take him home my husband made a beautiful little perch for him to sit on and i think he just like goes really well with the wallpaper so it made sense so the portrait gallery wall of bearded men i was originally hired by a client to source all of these when the store closed i ended up acquiring them for my collection and it's one of my favorite collections just because it's one theme it's just bearded men you know that one's my favorite this guy i write everything down i have so many notebooks these are all just like filled with all sorts of things um i don't have a computer i have an ipad but i just i have to write everything down when i'm like sourcing or meeting with my clients i show up with like a pencil and a notebook so these are my books of secrets measurements sketches my brain in a book is my little stock closet where i keep things for my vintage shop i just recently found these little ceramic dalmatian book ends i just think the silhouette is beautiful the colors also um good mix of things some artwork crates whatever i like i buy sell it keep it whatever i want people to feel like they're in a museum in a way um i want people to look at everything and like wonder what something is like the anatomy of the hot dog cell thing it makes me just so happy i don't know why thanks for coming by i hope to see you guys again real soon hi i'm kate and i'm bill and this is our handmade home on long island new york my family goes back about six generations here and this guy's from the midwest and got dragged here to be with me and all 87 of her family members yeah we balance each other quite well in our strengths you know i'm i'm the one who's sitting there looking up kind of standard distances between counter tops and islands and making sure everything's like kind of all balanced and where it's supposed to be and she's the one who you know she's like i have to have this countertop this is the kind of top i have to have picking out basically and designing all of the kind of aesthetic of them i'm really very unreasonable and he's very reasonable that's what makes this work i started selling vintage after i started hoarding way too much vintage and this guy was like you gotta get some of this crap out of here um so i started selling online through etsy and then i started my own website and that's what i sell through now it's katepiercevintage.com and basically i go to thrift stores estate sales and i pick up everything i like and i keep what i really like and i sell what just doesn't work in our house we bought our house almost three years ago and we loved the old charm of it it was built in 1910 but it was an absolute disaster every little inch needed love i don't even think it had been painted in 30 years so we love that about it too though we're project people he does all the building i do the designing and it's just been a labor of love it had great bones the house had had phenomenal bones and we we completely redesigned the space moved everything from the uh the water lines the drains all of the we put in new windows when we moved in the kitchen had a totally different layout it was a long hallway basically from this door right here so it was it was a much smaller space much more kind of condensed space and it wasn't making the best use of the space so we just we really ripped it all the way down to the studs took everything out completely redid all of the electrical all the plumbing everything and then built it back up from there we used a lot of vintage elements in the kitchen like the reclaimed wood came from an 1800s barn in connecticut we've actually used ikea cabinetry for two parts of it and then the other part is just kind of framed out of two by four and then we just kind of covered it with the reclaimed wood to give it a more kind of rustic look so i'm a really impractical person i love visions for spaces and those visions are the priority so i wanted open shelving with loads of plants on them because everyone needs plants to cook right i used to have glassware plates everything on here and it just looked so cluttered so slowly anything that was actually a functional part of a kitchen just started coming off of the open shelves until they were just plants i really have a weakness for vintage glassware and these are my favorite glasses in the world um i've only come across three of them in all of my years as thrifting but they're peekaboo glasses this guy i saw him online at an estate sale and i saw that he was hidden just peeking through i call him ned now but i found him and he was this original acrylic portrait in really great shape and they charged me ten bucks and now he's one of my favorite pieces in our home the funny part is that on halloween ned had got an eye patch on christmas ned had a christmas hat so ned gets dressed up depending on the holiday he hangs with us the parties he party's hard i was at an estate sale recently and it was the home of an artist who had passed away and all of his life's work was in the home so there were hundreds of portraits and i was shocked when i got to the sale and found that none of the dealers were there for the portraits so i had the option of hundreds to choose from and it was a little overwhelming and i picked up 18 of them thinking that that was a lot of portraits to bring home and i thought i'll sell half of these keep a couple and then i added them to the wall and then i realized that i didn't have enough so now i'll be trying to find some more portraits to add i really envisioned them covering almost every inch of the white wall the library space is definitely my favorite and i love just escaping in there and the very small amount of free time that i get with having two young children and i love being surrounded by the books and the plants and i think it just has enough color to be very cheerful and happy and muted enough where you can feel relaxed in that space so it's probably the room i'm most proud of designing it just i kind of nailed exactly what i was going for i think i envisioned the shelves having the book collection that i've been collecting for four or five years now but also being kind of a live plant wall but there were some logistical issues such as this half of the bookshelves not getting any natural light so we found this product from mod sprout and their grow frames there's a grow light inside so that i could bring the greenery onto this side of the shelves i think my middle finger is my favorite i found this at a estate sale that was all mid-century stuff and it was in his basement like man cave bar and i just spray-painted it gold and it's my favorite it's very welcoming some of my plants are actually even thrifted this enormous euphorbia cactus thing i found at an estate sale and they're super expensive when you get them from a nursery but i got it for a hundred bucks and i realized it was a hundred dollars because everyone else at that sale was like how the hell would i get this huge thing home so we got it home by putting the thing on the back of my dad's pickup truck and me essentially hugging it going 40 miles an hour down the road really i mean i almost gave my life for this thing right and then i find out about it when you when you roll up in the in the driveway and say i need you to come get a cactus out of the truck all right that's normal that's normal it's totally normal for us totally normal she's just staring at me she likes to eat everything yeah literally she's eating couches and shoes and toys and there have been a few things that i've i've had to like hide after the dog has eaten it because i'm like oh that's not good like something you've just brought home some type of vintage thing you've brought home see those are the things that you just don't ever know now i'm gonna be thinking what what did you eat ripley what did you eat so we have no closets on our ground floor so we need this space to be a highly functional space yet play into the whole design so straight on into the kitchen where you see my orange bar stools picked up that same color and put it on the wall here so it would carry your eye into both spaces watch your head so this is probably my longest running collection they're all antique or vintage some people find this all super creepy they're like oh so you just have a bunch of dead people on your wall a lot of them are really old but i don't see it that way i just love the character of all the different silhouettes and a lot of them have the writing on the back saying what year they were made and the person's name and i just love that sort of thing it's a great conversation piece and everyone that walks in the house is always immediately drawn to this wall people will get people wrong we've been here for maybe a year at most and i came home and katie was ripping tiles off the wall in the bathroom um doing a very bad job and ripping up all the drywall underneath so um needless to say i i had to take over after that so that's how we got our first project started yeah so i really wanted to have a vintage dresser in the space from a diy perspective this is a perfect example of kind of implementing her vision obviously with the drawers they they go back and they take up the entire space and we wanted to make sure that we could be able to put the sinks with the drains and all of the water supply in but make the drawers still functional so that was you know we had to do basically surgery on these drawers and you know some of them have sections in the middle that we can't put anything that we just built kind of squares in or cut outs so that they go around the pipes and they're still usable i have so much fun with kids spaces because you can just go wild with color and whimsy this is our daughter eva's room she just turned seven and this house bed is the only piece that came from her old house she was two when we bought it and she still loves it just as much to this day this russian nesting doll collection this is how i get her to come to estate sales with me by telling her hey we'll find some russian nesting dolls and this art deco fireplace i found in a really disgusting basement and it was a project to get it all cleaned up and painted so we're in our younger daughter josie's room she's about two and a half years old this bed is a perfect example of kate just falling in love with something and needing to have it in the space because it is old enough that it's not a standard size so we can't get a standard mattress it's what is it called like three quarters yeah it's a three-quarters mattress you have to have them special made but i found that an rv mattress actually fits on the bed so she has an rv mattress i'm not the biggest fan of spaces that are just put together exactly right or pieces that don't have the little chip or patina i think that just adds character and we try to give that sort of character to every space we create thanks for stopping by and see you again soon when people come into our space they usually walk in like oh hey what's up and then they'll look to the side and be like what the and it's like immediately very im impactful and hopefully very transformative you walk five steps in and you're just in another zone completely i'm chatham and this is my handmade home in birmingham alabama well initially when we got the space i was going for like a 1970s scarface ultra modern look which immediately like got got the can i realized that i had too much stuff to be even like aspiring to that look it's just ridiculous like this cabinet has some fun junk in it practical sensible brown dress with glasses for day-to-day wear so in the past i used to have a boutique called charm and it was one of several boutiques that i've owned i would go to a ton of estate sales ostensibly to be looking for the shop but let's face it like the really good stuff i would say like oh this is great for charm and then i would of course bring it home and hoard it and add it to the collection of knick-knack paddywhack that you see before you to this very day i grew up on long island i collected things on the beach because i was basically a hoarder in training from like day one they were like like treasures i mean they felt like mermaids treasures or something and i still if i see a beautiful shell at an estate sale or in an antique mall or something like that i'll get it oh this guy here percy no big deal i don't know how percy went out but i know he went out a while ago and i always kind of wanted to pet a fox he feels really nice there are so many things about the things that i pick that i respond to um if it's ridiculous i love that if it's ghoulish a little love that just out now dumb i love that if it's super unusual if it's very made with very labor-intensive processes if it's kind of a lost art anything glittery anything sparkly anything kind of talismatic um just it just sends me i mean i just love it when i travel i like to pack like a ridiculously small amount of stuff in a suitcase that fits under the seat and then i bring empty collapsible bags to carry home so going there i'm packing like a ninja and coming home i'm like like just loaded down with extra bags and carry-ons and having to check suitcases and all that kind of stuff this guy is um he's an african uh fetish figure mostly from china founded in mexico from the flea market in paris and i walked around the flea market like four times you never know what you're going to find and the idea of being open to it and not only getting a cool souvenir but getting a like a beautiful object as well it's really exciting to me so the gallery wall was a giant giant pain in the ass to hang it's my favorite diy project of this place because if i sit down every time i look i noticed something else that's sort of thrilling or ridiculous or silly or funny it's taken probably six months to get to this point it took a long time believe it or not there was actually editing involved for every single thing that's out there probably there's probably another thing to match it that's jammed into storage in the basement or jammed up in a closet or just jammed up where anything is jammable and um cooking doesn't really happen up in this piece so this guy is a pretty handy dandy storage spot for stuff that i'll never use but is extremely fancy so um basically this is a fancy paperweight and a storage box i always been a big fan of books i didn't collect them for their color i just happen to have so many books that i eventually could arrange them by color it's kind of like trying to make a lot of sense out of nonsense so to create zones within the loft we i just tried to do it through like furniture groupings and this area that we're sitting in has the rugs and that kind of zones it out as like kind of a chill out relaxation zone so i think the only way to like make it look comprehensive is to group like stuff with like and to limit the palette because i feel like since i'm not willing to edit my stuff so much i have to edit something about it when people are in here i definitely want them to feel first welcome second kind of third it would be kind of cool if they felt curious like i want them to walk around and look at these things because i enjoy walking around and looking at all these amazing things and if they want to open cabinets or open drawers or open cat whatever they want to whatever they want to look at they can look at um it's all it's all kind of joyful even if it's not terribly well organized or if it's a messy drawer it's still it's still fun to look thanks for stopping by and i'll see you guys again bye hi i'm rajiv and this is my handmade home in new york city when people ask me what i do for a living i say i'm a movie star i'm a washed up movie star i kind of live an unusual life where leisure and my profession that the lines are very skewed something that was a hobby for 10 years for me sometimes becomes a profession that's why i spend a lot of time on doing the things that i love doing i started a business about 10 years ago doing calligraphy called letters in ink i was originally doing things like wedding invitations and then one day a friend suggested that i approach some local cafes and restaurants about redoing their chalkboards going into restaurants and saying like hey can i redo that chalkboard and be like why because it's ugly and i can make it beautiful and maybe it'll help your business how much nothing okay knock yourself out so i'd do it and then i'd leave my business card and then it would rain and when it would rain i would get a phone call hey can you come back and do that chalkboard and that's what i would charge them i got some press and then word spread and i carved out a little niche for myself when i think about the projects that really stand out over the last 10 years the main one is this room that i completely covered in chalk for the kipps bay show house i worked on that project for about a week night and day and then it was open to the public and the question that everybody asked was can i touch it and we said absolutely touch it and see what happens there was this tension between the people in the room and the walls a lot of people didn't believe that it was real chalk they thought maybe it was chalk and that we had sprayed it with some kind of spray and i never do that if you if you spray chalk work you lose a lot of the powdery edges and we wanted it to be impermanent we wanted people to understand that you put it up and if you brush up against it it is gone so in my space i thought why don't i paint the walls and the ceiling of one space with chalkboard paint and then kind of go crazy i did that with the intention of changing it regularly and it has been up for eight years it has gotten weathered over the years from people passing through i didn't anticipate what it would look like but i actually really like the remnants of architecture that has been worn down with time lots of bags and coats the kitchen was the only room up until recently that i didn't love in this apartment i decided it was time to make this kitchen a little jewel box make it everything that i have ever dreamed of in a kitchen and most of the stuff i was able to just do myself so the very first thing i started with was the wood paneling i wanted the kitchen to feel like an old pre-war tenement kitchen and it was really simple to just get this pine wainscoting nail it up and build up the moldings the baseboards and the chair rail i had a contractor come in and put in the crown molding that wasn't there either the other huge job that i did myself was i painted the cupboards and that was a lot of work i took all the doors off i took all the shelves out everything was painted with oil paint so it had to be primed and sanded and then painted two or three times the glass wasn't this glass it was just this frosted glass that was very modern looking and something i love about old buildings is when you can look at the windows and you see these wavy panels of glass that are hand blown when i was in high school and college i spent all my summers working as a costumed historical interpreter at a place called black creek pioneer village it's canada's equivalent to colonial williamsburg it wasn't just life-changing because i learned so many manual skills but being in that environment in buildings that were 200 years old utilitarian objects in these buildings were so beautiful there were irons with little like the handles were little swans heads and they didn't have to put a swan's head on that iron but they did that was the case with every single thing in these buildings useful things could be very beautiful that that really inspired me look at this sink look at this sink it is handmade in england by shaw's like everything that goes along with the whole dish washing process now is fun because it's beautiful like this oh hello vintage munich tea towel that i got when i lived in germany oh hello hand blown soaked bottle with a little vintage spigot oh hello dishcloth that was hand woven by my friend deborah and then we have the dishes working at pioneer village i was introduced to old china and silverware so i started collecting ironstone china this is early american pressed glass at an antique store a glass like this would go for i don't know 30 bucks but you can find stuff like this if you know how to spot it you can find it at like junk stores so people come over and they've broken stuff before and they felt really bad and i'm like don't worry about it it's fine it's just two dollars if it breaks it's fine if the marble gets stained it already has some spots on it and i love them this is my silver not silver plate there's a big difference every fork every spoon in there averages about 100 bucks i collected piece by piece since i was a little kid like i'd get my birthday money and i'd go and buy a fork if you look very closely you can see we have the lion on passant which means that that was made in london and then we have the leopard's head which means that it was made in great britain and then we have the monarch's head and the monarch's head on this one is a young queen victoria so this was made under queen victoria's reign and then we have a letter and the letter is a q so let's go to our book there's queen victoria's head 1854. they didn't have electric lights in 1854. this was made by natural light or by oil lamp i'm obsessed these are my cutting boards which i made i make soap with goat's milk coconut oil and olive oil and then i put a little bit of frankincense and myrrh in it that's exclusively what i use in here i package it up too call it wise man soap the soap that jesus would have used sometimes when people talk about me they use that phrase butcher baker candlestick maker i haven't done any butchering another aspect of my time in the kitchen is cooking traditional tamil food so my parents are from sri lanka and i am tamil that is an ethnicity and a language for those who don't know and it is the best food in the world and there are some very specific tools that are required to make this food and the stuff is just so beautiful this is used for a kind of um rice patty that's made with rice flour mixed with some boiling water you put the dough in here put the plunger in and then you squeeze out these vermicelli noodles onto these mats that are woven with strips of bamboo and then those little patties get steamed so it's another added aspect of the kitchen that i love it's this mix of new york tenement and sri lanka it's always been a dream to learn something on the piano and when the pandemic started i thought okay i am going to challenge myself to learn one chopin nocturne i just thought let's let's just take it bar by bar one bar that's all at the end of the year i can now sort of play one doctor it has been really fulfilling to sit down at the piano and to be able to play one of his pieces from beginning to land a lot of stuff in here is actually from flea markets and thrift stores new york has great flea markets and great thrift stores people are coming and going and dying all the time and you can find great stuff that's really really affordable the coffee table in the living room was 25 bucks a nice sort of bronze frame but it didn't have any glass in it so i bought it and then i got some mirror from just a glass store and it was actually old mirror that they cut down to size i wanted to actually make it look antique so i distressed the mirror myself you take some nasty stuff called muriatic acid and you spray it on the back of the mirror and it starts to eat away at the silver so it happens really quickly you just sort of you have to time it and get it to the level where you want it if you leave it on for too long it'll take off all the silver here is a little project about my friend who's obsessed with his cat and i thought i should write a little kids book and this is the little story about bernardo's cat agnes bernard is a hipster who lives in brooklyn and the cat gets angry sometimes when he leaves this is my landscape painting which is a copy of a painting from the 1850s by an irish painter george barrett i have always dreamed of painting landscapes and one of the ways artists have traditionally learned how to paint is actually by copying paintings copying paintings by the masters i printed this high-res image off the internet and zoomed in worked on this very slowly for the course of eight months it's oil paint so it had to be done in layers and the layers often would have to dry before i did the next layer but it was a big challenge that ended up working i love this thing this room is why i rented this apartment because of the wonderful light that streams in really for most of the day these lace curtains are pure cotton it is very very hard to find pure cotton lace today most mills that made this stuff are long gone so one of the few places left in the world where they still weave the old way is in liang france and that's where this comes from lace curtains fluttering in the breeze look at look what's happening good boy yeah yeah i was walking down the street one day years ago and i saw a cab stop on the side of the road the door opened and this fluffy thing just jumped out and ran into a building where a doorman had opened the door for him i was like today did i just imagine this so some some very careful detective work revealed to me that prince lived down the street and i befriended his owners they offered to leave him here when they went out of town i was taking a painting class at the art students league and my teacher's mantra was paint what you see not what you know once when i was doggy sitting prince i thought let me try painting him and it and it turned out it turned out great i was really happy with the with the result i love that dog so much i apprentice with a wonderful potter in connecticut guy wolf makes all of martha stewart's flower pots he's been making flower pots for most of his life i read about him in martha's magazine and was determined to learn from him so i begged him to let me come and visit and the rest is history i've been going there for about 10 years now this pot was made by guy this beautiful pot was made by guy and this pot was made by me the bed is from the 1830s and it's actually a little shorter than a normal twin bed but then i found out that there's a mattress maker in the bronx charles h beckley they have been making mattresses horse hair mattresses by hand they came here measured the bed made this wonderful mattress it's really really comfortable look at this the corner is is hand finished so there are hand tied springs in here layers of horse hair and cotton great mattress well made made to last remember deborah my weaver friend who made my towels in the kitchen she made this for me too i make a lot of things by hand so when i'm going out and buying something i want something that is well made i lived in germany for a year and a very good friend of mine was telling me that her grandmother had a saying we're too poor to buy cheap things i feel like my bike is my best friend it's from 1940 it was made in munich i brought it back with me it's built to last it's a solid steel frame it has a great belt art supplies take priority over clothes for me this is the bigger closet the canvases are up there this is full of beautiful wool um i'm always i always have a knitting project on the go this is a hat in progress all my books paper sketch pads oil paints during the pandemic i thought i would try my hand at book binding and i'm kind of hooked now i made this a few weeks ago it's a watercolor sketchbook you need to have proper watercolor paper in order to have the pages stay flat so that they don't buckle and curl let's talk clothes oh hello marie kondo so when i read marie kondo's book that philosophy really spoke to me that the objects that you have in your life should be meaningful to you and should make you happy so i did it i condo'ed this place i got rid of anything that did not make me happy just the things that sparked joy there was a lot more when i was a little kid i watched the sound of music and i was like i want to dress like that but it didn't seem possible and then i started working at pioneer village and was wearing tweed in in my costume fulfilled that tweed need when i became an adult i commissioned some tweed suits to be made and then i really felt like these are my clothes this is my style debra wove this cloth this suit took about three years to make the sheep she picked two different sheep that were two shades of brown you can see the dark and the light those are the two different sheep it's lined with salmon-colored silk i just love it i love the color combo the other thing that's in this closet that i wear in the winter i have four of them are these sweaters called gansey's they're fishermen sweaters there's something really sentimental about these fishermen sweaters they were a real working man's garment every village had their own pattern so i found a knitting collective in yorkshire where there's a group of women that still make gansey's the old way with real yorkshire wool and this is what came back knitted for me by marion brocklehurst who is 93 this year and she knits gansey's for daniel day-lewis it's like a hug the clothes in there they all have a story and they have meaning in them and every time i put on something that was handmade i'm thinking of the person that made it if someone told me there was a a shrine for marie kondo i i would go and worship at the shrine and take flowers and bow that's how she got to me oh what do we want to wear today a nice gray t-shirt oh maybe a striped one let's look through our blues this space became a lot emptier after the whole marie condo thing but what it turned into was a kind of canvas a kind of nice blank canvas for bringing things in that don't stay forever come in they visit they add joy then they die and my mind feels a lot lighter thanks for watching and if you like this video give it a thumbs up and subscribe to handmade for more home tours just like this one\n"