What color (life) phase are you in?Reath Design's Frances Merrill on taking risks and learning to love blue.
I wrote about our renovation mood board a while back (here is our original). One goal of a mood board is to establish the color world that you want to live in. Many people go into projects with set ideas for a palette. We did not—we were looking to discover and embrace more color. A primary reason we wanted to work with Frances Merrill at Reath Design was for her daring, inimitable use of color. I mean, look at this beauty. And this one. This turned out to be a good instinct because she showed us the importance of a paint color’s luminescence, the gravity that a deep color gives to a space, the jolt that an unexpected hue can lend to a quieter room. She unearthed my childhood love for a green kitchen (I had a great aunt who had one, and I would visit just so I could stand in the kitchen) and transformed my suspicions about reds.
For years in Brooklyn, we’d been tamping down color in our home as a way of psychically taming the chaos in our lives (2 busy jobs, 2 kids, a dog, life in NYC), but Ojai is about re-emerging and unleashing as we enter a new phase of our lives. The first two friends to visit the house described it as “happy.” The palette has a lot to do with this. Frances doesn’t create a color palette with paint chips, rather she works the palette into a project’s mood board. I asked about her intuitive color process and she compared it to making soup: “I tend to make soup without a recipe, putting in a little of this and a little of that, while tasting to make sure it is balanced.” I hope you enjoy our conversation (and another of my color inspirations at the end). To kick off, here’s a video of us playing mix-and-match the swatch. Yours in room anchovies and food anchovies (read on to get the reference!), Amanda ... Subscribe to Homeward to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Homeward to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Friday, February 13, 2026
What color (life) phase are you in?
Friday, February 6, 2026
I held off on buying dinnerware until getting these 39 (!) recs
I held off on buying dinnerware until getting these 39 (!) recsAnd the nutty, boozy cake I’m making to serve on them.
We made it to February! Today is all about plates. And cake. A spectacular one from Dorie Greenspan. But first… A bit of housekeeping: If you signed up for a Founding Member subscription after November 25, 2025 and have not received an email from me about sending you a signed copy of my book, The Essential New York Times Cookbook, please DM me so I can get you a copy! (And for anyone who doesn’t have a Founding Member subscription, you can upgrade here if you’d like to get a book, too.)
And a “D’oh!”: Last week, I spent the afternoon with my new neighbor, the designer Nathan Turner. We made tangerine and orange marmalade on the Vulcan gas stove he has in his outdoor kitchen (a smart move in a warm climate)—video here. One of my jobs was to retrieve the processed jam jars from the simmering water, and I used jam-jar tongs to do so. A kind viewer wrote in to let me know I was doing it wrong: I had the tongs upside down. As they explained, “Flipping them over will make your life easier! The grippy, rounded, silicone portion is made to grab the jar top. The rolly, hard plastic helps your fingers slide with the handle.” Erp—next time.
As I wrote in my last post, I’m discovering that moving in and filling this house with personal touches and all the small goods that I love is going to take time. Turns out, there really is no dramatic before/after, even for the people moving in. While those “quick” transformations are fun to look at, I’m more interested in the human dynamics, design details, and craft that go into making a beautiful home—and making it your own. I’ve been insistent that we don’t rush into acquiring all of the utilitarian objects in our house, but I quickly learned there are some items I’d need to prioritize: scissors, wastebaskets, and everyday dinner plates, to name a few.
When we moved into our house, all we had was a stack of vintage cabbageware plates that I’d shipped out from Brooklyn. The best vintage cabbage plates have a finely webbed surface covered with crevices and ridges. These details make for a beautiful plate and, as we learned after using them for a few weeks, make them a nightmare to navigate with a fork and knife! Your fork feels like this. We were looking for something low-key and hand crafted, maybe a little earthy but not rustic. I wanted a solid hue that I could then mix with patterned salad plates and bowls. I’d ordered samples of Heath’s Chez Panisse main plate in sorrel; the Commune for Heath dinner plate in barley; Sarah Kersten’s Coupe main plate in both garnet and klamath wheat; and Kati von Lehman’s Place Setting No. 1 in the charcoal glaze.
Tad and I were considering the above plates when I hosted a chat for Homewardians, asking them for their picks. Let me tell you that you are surrounded by a very sophisticated group of plate aficionados. Thank you to everyone who joined the discussion and shared their plates of choice. If you check out the chat, you will notice that nearly the entire discussion centered around stoneware. But then Shawn L., a reader who recommended Caskata porcelain, jumped in to say, “Porcelain is so much easier to live with. Much more chip-resistant (3x) than stoneware and half the weight. I’m a pattern person, so I love mixing and matching pieces to tell an eclectic story. But I’m an outlier I guess.” Cheers to a contrarian view! The takeaways, followed by the full list of 39 recommendations: ... Subscribe to Homeward to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Homeward to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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