LETTER 08. YAP: AESTHETICS

There is a quote I have been carrying around for most of my adult life.

"I will make everything around me beautiful — that will be my life." – Elsie de Wolfe (the original American Interior Designer)

She said it more than a hundred years ago. Based in New York City during the Gilded Age into the early 20th century, she was the first to make a profession of interior design — before that, the work was done by upholsterers and architects and the women of the household, but never named as a discipline. She named it. And she named it by naming, first, the philosophy underneath it. Not a business plan. A promise. Everything around me. Beautiful. That will be my life.

I read that quote and her story while at University in my early twenties and it landed the way certain sentences land — with a small internal YES — followed by the slow understanding that the sentence had been describing me before I had the language for it.

It’s aesthetics. It’s romanticizing the beauty all around us, because—why not? & if you know me, you know it’s the ringing truth for my entire life.

Here is what it looks like, day to day, which is the only place it actually matters.

It is the way I fold a towel. Not because anyone will see it (most days no one does) but because the folding is part of the day, and if the day is going to happen anyway, the towel might as well be beautiful, and the way it sits on my shelf may as well be beautiful every time my eyes gaze across it. It’s the small tray I put my morning coffee on. A linen napkin. A handmade ceramic dish for a bowl of cherries. The cup itself, hand-thrown, a little heavy at the base. I could drink coffee from a paper or plastic cup. I do, at airports. But when the choice is mine, the choice is the small ritual and again: why not choose beauty?

It’s the flowers on the kitchen counter, layered eccentrically into a gorgeous vase. It’s the candle I light when I sit down to write, even at 5:30 in the morning when no one is awake to see it. It is the way I fold my daughter's clothes into her drawer, stacks by color, softest fabrics on top, because her hands will touch them every morning and I want the touch to be a small pleasure. It’s the way I make the bed on a Sunday morning even though I know I might get back in it. It’s the small bee brass hook I had installed at the back of my dressing room door because most hooks otherwise are ugly and this cost me nothing to replace and the personalization saw me every time I opened or closed the door.

None of this really photographs. Almost none of it registers with anyone but me. The hook, the towel, the tray — no one visits my house and comments on some of the most beautiful details that truly bring me joy. But the small internal accounting of everything around me is what I chose it to be is the invisible architecture of a good day.

Beauty often gets dismissed amidst the everyday lives of most. Especially the small, domestic, low-visibility kind. The tray, the hook, the folded towel — this is the register the culture has been trained to call frivolous, or feminine (as if that were the same as frivolous), or over-the-top, or too much effort for something no one sees. I have heard versions of this dismissal my entire adult life, and I have never once agreed with it.

The beauty of small things is not frivolous. It is the practice of paying attention. It is a way of saying to your own life: I am here, I am living this, and I refuse to let the daily texture of it be ugly or boring or low-effort just because that might seem easier. It may be a discipline; but it is also completely natural for me. It’s a form of love — for the room, for the people in the room, for the version of yourself who is going to walk into the room tomorrow morning and need the towel to be folded.

Elsie de Wolfe understood this. She turned it into a profession. I have turned it into a life, and, slowly and carefully, into a studio that helps other people turn it into their lives too. That is the through-line that runs from the hook in my dressing room to the houses I have designed for other families. There is no distinction of scale. There is only the question, asked every day, in every room: is this beautiful, and if not, how could it be more-so?

That question has organized my life organically. It is, I think, the only question I have ever fully known the answer to — from the deepest part of my being.

—xobe.

A NOTE BEFORE YOU GO!: The HOME by BE. SUMMER STUDIO SALE opens tomorrow + runs through July 20th. It is the one sale we do each year — a curated selection at 25% off with code ‘SUMMERSALE,’ quiet, once, then closed. If any of what I have written about above has ever made you want to bring a little more small-scale beauty into a room of your own, the sale is a gentle place to start — shop it here. And whether you shop it or not, thank you for reading this letter and hopefully gathering a little inspiration to inject a little more beauty into your bubble.