A Creative New York City Couple Carves Out Space for Hosting
Jory and Alex are a young creative couple who blended their tastes to create a welcoming and polished home on a budget. They’ve learned how to maximize their space for entertaining, hosting a basically unheard of amount of folks for “Friendsgiving”, without sacrificing coziness for when its just the two of them.
Tell us a little (or a lot) about your home and the people who live there: Alex and I live in a Mitchell-Lama co-op in Washington Heights, Manhattan. We love our neighbors and our neighborhood! Alex works at Saks Fifth Avenue as an assistant window stylist and I work as a producer at McCann NY for L’Oréal Paris and moonlight as a photographer. We’re both creative individuals and really love working on artistic projects and DIYs for our home. We are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve our space!
When we moved in we really went to work painting (shout out to Eider White by Sherwin Williams), adding some much-needed paint-love to our kitchen cabinets, adding a backsplash and shelving for our microwave, and decorating on a budget over the three years that we’ve lived here.
We have a hard time coming up with words to describe the style of our home, but you could probably sum it up as a mid-century inspired home with a little touch of classic country farmhouse. We love how we’ve been able to combine both of our different tastes into a home that feels like “us”.
What is your favorite room and why? Our favorite room is our living and dining area. Living in New York City apartments can be challenging in terms of square footage and we feel like we’ve done a good job with the layout, as it feels inviting and really takes advantage of the space. We love to entertain and have people over for dinner parties and we’ve managed to be able to squeeze 14 people (we borrowed another table) for our annual Friendsgiving dinner!
If you could magically change something about your home, what would it be? If we could magically enlarge our kitchen, maybe make it a bit more open-concept, and add a dishwasher and a wine fridge, it would be a dream come true! We cook a lot and even just having an additional counter would be helpful! We always laugh while watching House Hunters when people complain about the size of a kitchen that looks HUGE to us! We’ve managed to pull off some big meals in our tiny space and while it would be nice to increase the square footage of the kitchen, we are pleased with how orderly and efficient cooking in a tiny ass kitchen can make you!
What’s the last thing you bought (or found!) for your home? We brought in some new plants, like our snake plant and did some dressing up of our terrace. We added some faux boxwood panels to hide the ugly divider than separates our terrace from the neighbors… a find on Amazon!
Jory and Alex’s words of wisdom: Wait for the pieces that you really love and don’t just fill up a space with placeholders, because then they’ll never leave. We also believe in creating spaces for gathering and conversation. Most of our side tables can be used for additional seating if necessary.
Thanks, Jory & Alex!
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