I’m a design historian by training and a writer by chance. My work has appeared in Angeleno, C Magazine, LALA, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as numerous print and digital outlets devoted to antiques, auctions, home wellness, and design showrooms. I’m most frequently contributor to Luxe Interiors + Design, where I also write the Scene column (newsy design roundups) for their Los Angeles and Southern California editions.
After graduating from the University of Glasgow with an MPhil in the Decorative Arts, I took a curatorial role with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Decorative Arts department. There, I oversaw the Early American galleries and helped organize exhibitions on California Design and the European Arts and Crafts movement. I also worked closely with the department’s educational council, which introduced me to such luminaries as Tony Duquette and Desmond Guinness, two figures who opened my eyes to new ways of appreciating objects and the very idea of home. From the museum, I moved to Architectural Digest (it was literally across the street on Wilshire Boulevard at the time), which gave me extraordinary access to the magazine’s vast archive and library, deepening my love of 20th-century design and decoration. As a freelance writer for more than a decade now, my interest in the decorative arts and interior design have melded into a deeper appreciation of how we feather our nests. I also have an ever-growing interest in fields like neuroaesthetics and color psychology, and the ways in which our homes can heal and support us.
Over the years, I’ve contributed to many scholarly publications, including Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects; the Museum of Arts and Design’s Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design; and furniture designer Charles Hollis Jones’s monograph, Mr. Lucite. In 2016, I reunited with several of my wonderful AD colleagues and co-wrote Paige Rense’s memoir, Architectural Digest: Autobiography of a Magazine, 1920-2010, published by Rizzoli in 2018. What an extraordinary opportunity to work directly with Paige at her dining table in West Palm Beach, and to research nearly a century of design! She will forever be an inspiration to me. I’ve also recently been contributing to Apartment Therapy’s design history features (subjects like the history of Dutch doors and keeping rooms) and doing a good amount of ghost writing, but mum’s the word on the latter.
If you’re here and reading this, thank you, and feel free to get in touch here or via Instagram. I’m always excited to hear about people, places, or things I should be covering, and am always open to new creative projects. I feel so very lucky to work in this field. It’s a community of extraordinarily talented people.
