06.08.23

How to Live With Objects

Almost Everything in Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos’s LA Home is Vintage or Handmade

Next up in our How to Live With Objects house tours: Lisa Mayock and Jeff Halmos, who live in a 1920s-era Spanish-style house in the Glendale neighborhood of Los Angeles. Before moving to LA with their two children, Mayock and Halmos met in New York City, as designers of the somewhat legendary early-aughts cult-favorite fashion brands Vena Cava and Shipley & Halmos. After a brief stint co-running the graphic T-shirt line Monogram, they’ve both branched out into new lines of work — Mayock as an interior designer and Halmos in commercial real estate development. We visited them on a brilliantly sunny day in the summer of 2021, and although you'll have to wait for the Instagram-only behind the scenes content to peep their incredible backyard and pool, take a tour through some of their favorite vintage and handmade treasures after the jump.

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06.01.23

How to Live With Objects

Jonathan Pessin Shops 7 Days a Week to Amass the Collection of Objects He Jokingly Calls “Not For Sale”

A collector with a penchant for the oversized and the absurd, Pessin runs the cheekily named vintage showroom Not For Sale from a giant space next to his (now-former) loft in Los Angeles. When we visited, the boundary between the two spaces was practically nonexistent, cycling in as he does favorite finds like a giant Mr. Goodbar, a papier-mâché Bart Simpson, and, always, French industrial furniture from the 1950s. An excerpt from How to Live With Objects.

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05.24.23

How to Live With Objects

On the Hunt for Objects? Shop Our Book IRL at Nordstrom’s Manhattan Flagship

In our book, How to Live With Objects, we talk a lot about how rewarding it is to slowly and thoughtfully surround yourself with unique objects you feel a connection to, hence why we also caution against the department-store mentality of treating your interior as a series of empty spaces you should fill all at once. But when the department store itself becomes the place to find those unique objects, that advice obviously no longer applies — case in point, our new pop-in inside Nordstrom's midtown Manhattan flagship store, where now through June 17, you can shop nearly 100 truly special handmade, one-of-a-kind, and vintage objects from some of the makers and dealers featured in the book (as well as the actual book).

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02.01.23

How to Live With Objects

How These Vintage Dealers Restyle Their Jersey City Home on the Regular

When we first encountered Joey Meyers and Mark Baehser, it was online, via their vintage shop Ball & Claw — since renamed Unnecessary Projects — which had taken a place in the sprawling North Brooklyn vintage empire Dobbin St. Co-op. We assumed the two were old-hat dealers. But, as we discovered when we approached them about shooting their Jersey City Victorian home for our book, How to Live With Objects, it turns out they only entered the game a few years ago, out of love but also out of necessity: Meyers had taken to constantly cycling furniture in and out of their home, and they needed an outlet to offload the amazing finds that didn't quite work with their own space.

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01.05.23

How to Live With Objects

Mark Grattan’s Mexico City Apartment Oozes a Kind of Sensual Charm

Mark Grattan’s work is moody, smoky, sensual, and chic — all qualities that, a few years back, earned him first prize on the erstwhile TV show Ellen’s Next Great Designer (which also featured longtime SU friend Arielle Assouline-Lichten). Grattan's Mexico City apartment, on the fourth floor of a building by famed architect Luis Barragán — which we photographed for How to Live With Objects but which he has since left for New York City — had a similar vibe, filled with black leather, velvet, wall-to-wall carpeting, and sleek, low pieces designed by Grattan himself.

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12.16.22

At Home With

In Her Object-Filled Mexico City Home, Su Wu Surrounds Herself With Gifts, Mexican Crafts, and Contemporary Design

Even though Su Wu's home has since become, in our circles, one of the most well-known stops on the Mexico City circuit of cool, it felt inevitable that we should include it in our book, How to Live With Objects — both to commemorate our long professional relationship, and to acknowledge that when you're talking about the beauty and power of objects, hers is a voice that deserves to be part of the conversation. Wu is a staunch champion of the local Mexican design scene, using her home — which she shares with her husband, the artist Alma Allen, and their two children — as a place to co-curate exhibitions and showcase her ever-growing collection of gifts, Mexican crafts, and contemporary art and design.

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12.01.22

How to Live With Objects

A 1920s Brooklyn Brownstone Offers the Perfect Backdrop for Kim Mupangilai’s Collection of Vintage Handmade Objects

Born and raised in Belgium, Kim Mupangilaï is a Belgian-Congolese interior architect, furniture designer, and graphic designer who lives with her boyfriend in a 1920s brownstone in Brooklyn. Its original period details offer the perfect backdrop for her extensive collection of vintage handmade objects, which she also sells through her side project, the online shop En la Mésá.

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11.28.22

How to Live With Objects

Kathryn Bentley Hand-Painted Her Restoration Hardware Sofa, and So Can You

Kathryn Bentley has one of the best contemporary object collections we've seen to date, from Roger Herman ceramics, to a Waka Waka coffee table (designer Shin Okuda is a longtime collaborator), to the BZIPPY urn she jokes she wants for her eternal life. One of our favorite homes from How to Live With Objects, we're excerpting images of her colorful house tour — including the incredible Restoration Hardware sofa the hand-painted with sponges — today.

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11.22.22

Current Obsession

Body Parts Are Trending in Design, and Our New Book Proves It

In the last five years — somewhere between the giant nose vase German duo BNAG produced for Felix Burrichter's dollhouse exhibition at Friedman Benda and the butt bookends Marco Braunschweiler made for Marta's In Support of Books — body parts in design became a full-fledged thing. That's why we weren't a bit surprised when we noticed, visiting the 16 homes we photographed for How to Live With Objects, that body parts were popping up seemingly everywhere — from the Nicola L eye lamp in Yoram Heller and Eleanor Wells's living room, to the giant hand sitting at the base of Jonathan Pessin's object-filled bookshelves, to the nose relief on display in the London home of Sadie Perry.

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11.17.22

How to Live With Objects

16 Incredible Vintage Objects You Should Know From Our Book

When it comes to a visual wow factor, vintage objects reign supreme — they're often the most expressive, unusual, and unexpected, not to mention the most accessible, if you get lucky at a flea market or have time to kill on eBay. As such, a copious amount of real estate in our new book, How to Live With Objects, is devoted to the discussion of how to shop for vintage and what makes a vintage object worth buying, which means that we had plenty of pages to illustrate with images of absolutely incredible bygone designs, from a circa-1900 Swedish candelabra to some epic Postmodern gems. In today's book excerpt, we're spotlighting 16 of the vintage objects we included that, if you didn't already know them, we're sure you'll be pleased to get to know them now.

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11.16.22

How to Live With Objects

This London Townhouse Makes the Case for Painting Your Bedroom — Ceilings Included — Gold

Tatjana von Stein and Gayle Noonan cofounded the full-service creative studio Sella Concept in 2016, with von Stein in charge of interior architecture and furniture design and Noonan handling branding and identity. We had covered several of the pair's projects on the site before — including a gorgeous Mediterranean-hued bar in London, and a Hackney flat with a next-level tortoise-shell headboard — but we'd never gotten a glimpse inside their own home until we reached out during our book research. Boy, were we glad we did.

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The book is a wall-to-wall guide to finding your personal style and incorporating those meaningful works of art and design into your home.

11.15.22

How to Live With Objects

Out Today, Our Book Shows You How to Create a More Meaningful Home By Collecting Objects You Love

Two and a half years in the making, our first book, How to Live With Objects, is finally out and in bookstores — and, hopefully, in your home, if you pre-ordered! — today. We could not be more excited for people to finally see and touch and read this book — we very much wanted it to feel like an object in and of itself, since we're usually talking to you from behind a screen, and it's such a pleasure to hold the book in your hand and flip through it. So exactly what is the book about? Read on to find out.

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