shaker lessons.

I took my own advice and spent last week playing outside, first visiting one of my sisters in Vermont and later visiting Mass MoCA in North Adams and the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A single night’s stay at the Rivertown Lodge in Hudson, New York before heading home to Brooklyn completed the tour of places that embody the beauty of restraint and simplicity to say nothing of utility and craft.

En route my children did perhaps more than what was strictly their fair share of weaving on exquisitely warped looms at two different cultural institutions and have since requested we invest in a floor loom for ourselves. To them, this seems to be a reasonable addition to a small New York City apartment and to me it seems to be the simultaneous delight and peril of getting outside and playing. (Proceed with caution and abandon in equal measure, my friends.)

When it comes to home design and writing about it, the word intention is used so often as to feel nearly tawdry, but making a few intentional tweaks is indeed what I’ve always found can to help turn hum-drum rental rooms into spaces that do more in terms of form and function. The Shakers are a famously intentional bunch and while I can’t say I’d find comfort in all or even most of their millenial laws, the care and consideration they give to their spaces is deeply appealing. Seeing some of those spaces up close and personal last week helped click the wheels forward on projects I’ve been putting off or otherwise stalled on. Indeed, nearly all of us came home full to overflowing with inspiration.