From the Agent: "Welcome to Hardwicke Farmhouse. The original structure dates to the 1740s, with a gracious Greek Revival center hall added in the 1840s. Its striking mid-20th-century addition was designed by architect John Messick, a founding partner of MCWB Architects and contemporary visionary with I. M. Pei. His work reimagined the property with bold architectural lines and a silo-inspired great room that fills the home with light and offers far-reaching views of the surrounding 600 acres of farmland. Daily life here is shaped by the quiet countryside, nearby farms, local dining, and easy access to the best of the Hudson Valley."
The home’s front parlor and dining room have woodburning fireplaces.
Photo courtesy of This Old Hudson Team at Houlihan Lawrence
Photo courtesy of This Old Hudson Team at Houlihan Lawrence
An iron-and-brick inglenook fireplace weighing over a ton anchors Messick’s addition.
Photo courtesy of This Old Hudson Team at Houlihan Lawrence
The custom element helps define the living area, and matches shelving found throughout the 495-square-foot flat.
Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.
From the Architect:"Located on the sixth floor of Bratislava’s renowned Kotva House, this apartment offers stunning views of the Danube and the Petržalka district, framed by the building’s signature circular window with an anchor motif. Originally an office space for an insurance company, the apartment has been converted into a living environment, preserving the building’s architectural heritage while adapting it to modern needs.
"The apartment’s layout was adjusted to include a kitchen, and the bathroom was enlarged by repurposing a former chamber. The entrance hall was reconfigured to accommodate the kitchen. At the heart of the apartment is a custom steel structure that divides the open space into distinct zones—living room, bedroom, and wardrobe—while maintaining an open, fluid feel. This central element organizes the space both vertically and horizontally, allowing each functional area to coexist without compromising on comfort or style.
"The steel frame has parts made using 3D-printing technology. This approach allowed for precise, lightweight, and customizable connections that contribute to the overall aesthetic while ensuring structural integrity. The result is a seamless, contemporary element that serves both as a functional partition and a sculptural focal point within the apartment.
"A key feature of the design is the platform stage, which occupies the center of the apartment. Made from spruce wood prisms and an adjustable stainless steel plate, the stage serves multiple purposes and can be easily modified to suit the needs of the space. It functions as a lounge seating area for relaxation, but can also be transformed into an additional bed when needed, making it perfect for guests or versatile use in a small apartment.
"This dual-purpose element embodies the core idea of the design: maximizing functionality within a compact space. The platform’s minimalist yet warm design complements the steel structure and allows for a flexible living arrangement, offering comfort and adaptability for a modern lifestyle. Inspired by the Japanese tradition of multifunctional living, the stage enhances the apartment’s sense of openness while providing a space for both leisure and rest.
"The materials used throughout the apartment respect both the building's history and modern sustainability practices. Stainless steel, wood, terrazzo made from recycled plastic, and restored wooden parquet floors were chosen for their durability, aesthetic appeal, and eco-friendliness. Terrazzo flows seamlessly from the entrance hall into the bathroom and shower, creating a unified, stylish look while contributing to a lighter, more sustainable alternative to traditional materials."
In Brooklyn, a couple tap architect Sarah Jacoby to give their townhome a vibrant, family-friendly update.
You might not guess it from its front facade, but this historic limestone in Park Slope is positively packed with color. The homeowners, Tim and Tara—he works in documentary film and is a record collector; she’s a textile designer with a sharp eye for color and pattern—reenergized it from top to bottom with the help of New York–based architect Sarah Jacoby.
The couple previously lived in a smaller apartment, and as they started to crave more space they reached out to Jacoby, who had worked with them on a previous renovation. With two growing kids, they were ready for a home that could flex with family life, and they wanted a trusted collaborator to help shape it.
The home’s exterior fits in with the traditional Park Slope streetscape. New Marvin windows with green frames hint at the colorful interior.
Finding the right house, however, wasn’t straightforward. "We saw so many different places," Tim says with a laugh. "Newly renovated homes were nice, but they felt off. You were paying a premium for someone else’s choices."
As they debated whether to choose a move-in-ready home or one that needed work, Jacoby provided a key insight. "If you go for something that needs more work, you’ll get to put your stamp on it," she said. Her words stuck, and their patience paid off—eventually, they found the one, a charming limestone that hadn’t been touched since the 1940s. "It had historic details we wanted to preserve, but it needed an update," Tim explains.
After: Entry
Set against the warmth of original wood moldings, floral wallpaper sets the tone for the interiors. "You get a taste right there, at the beginning—it’s going to be fun," says architect Sarah Jacoby. A Filigrana light fixture by Sebastian Wrong hangs overhead.
The couple purchased the home in 2021, and construction began in October 2022, guided by a clear, joyful vision to fill the home with levity, color, and pattern—an approach shaped in part by the pandemic. "During Covid, we realized how much our environment mattered," Tara explains. "It’s like you start to appreciate joy and space in a whole new way."
Tara picked wallpaper she loved, and Jacoby selected coordinating "friendly" hues and vibrant tile to give the home a palette and personality perfectly suited to the fun-loving foursome.
From the Agent: "Taken down to the studs and rebuilt with intention, this 1950s home has been reimagined as a quiet and refined desert retreat shaped by natural materials and simple, lasting design. Soft plaster finishes, warm wood details, and custom millwork define the living areas. Extensive built-in storage throughout keeps the interiors clean and functional, while the kitchen continues this restrained approach with integrated cabinetry and beautiful finishes that highlight the material character of the space. The two-bedroom, one-bathroom layout includes a carefully conceived bedroom addition with built-in storage and a workspace that opens directly to the outdoors. Set on 2.5 quiet acres in Monument Manor, the home is just minutes from the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. It’s a compelling opportunity as a primary residence, a high-design vacation home, or an incredible short-term rental offering."
The home was renovated by its owners, Alison and Jay Carroll, who also founded the olive oil and skincare brand Wonder Valley.
Photo by Brandon Stanley
The renovation retained the home’s original woodburning stove.
Photo by Brandon Stanley
This is not the duo’s first foray into renovations—they also revamped and currently operate the El Rey motor court in Santa Fe.
Sloped and moss-covered roofs blend the home with its pristine setting.
Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.
From the Architect:"Nestled in a secluded valley in southwest Iceland, this holiday home is situated on a site defined by untouched natural vegetation, including mountain birch, heather, and grass. The terrain slopes gently southward and borders a large lake, offering dramatic views across the water toward distant mountains.
"The architectural composition is organized around a long, horizontal volume aligned with the natural contour lines of the site. This main wing features an almost flat roof covered in moss, blending the structure into the surrounding landscape. Perpendicular to this form, a taller volume with a pitched zinc roof rises as a contrasting element. A freestanding outbuilding houses a sauna and storage, also topped with zinc roofing. All facades are clad in untreated vertical larch paneling, designed to weather naturally over time and integrate seamlessly with the Icelandic environment. The southern-facing living spaces and bedrooms are oriented toward sweeping views of the lake and mountains, while a long internal corridor ties all functions together. Along the northern side of this corridor lie the entrance, bathrooms, and storage areas. Given the harsh Icelandic climate, particular attention has been paid to designing terraces that create sheltered outdoor spaces regardless of wind direction, enabling year-round use.
"The interior is clad in untreated aspen paneling, imparting a calm and natural character. Floors are finished with concrete tiles and underfloor heating, ensuring both comfort and resilience in the Nordic climate. Ceilings alternate between timber panelling and acoustic stretch fabric, balancing warmth and acoustic performance.
"The use of untreated natural materials, a moss-covered roof, and a building form that follows the terrain reflect a conscious effort to minimize the visual impact on the landscape while creating a home that ages gracefully alongside its environment."
They’re cutesy, emblazoned with monikers and logos, and part of the growing phenomenon of people treating their domestic spaces and personal "brands" as interconnected.
There’s a theory of restaurants (popularized by restaurant industry expert Ben Leventhal) that every restaurant wants, in its restaurant heart, to be either a nightclub or a diner. My friend Alison Thurston—who loves dinner parties and thrifting for home decor and analyzing the people we know as much as I do—and I have developed our own theory of homes: Every home, in its home heart, either wants to be a sanctuary or a restaurant. (Binaries are as false as they are useful frameworks, and sometimes they’re very fun.) Sanctuary homes are sunlit, minimalist, full of plants, quiet, peaceful—and a sure sign that they’ve been actualized is a sense of airy placelessness. Restaurant homes are curated, candlelit, soundtracked, oriented toward socializing—and a sure sign that they’ve been actualized is, I’ve decided, custom matchbooks.
Alison and I both have restaurant homes. But only Alison has custom matchbooks. They’re a good mauve with no name and just her address and an insignia of a cat on the back. She has an ‘only first-time guests’ policy for handing them out. This is why we have restaurant homes, we like to invite the new. "I like always having random people come over," she says. "My favorite thing about single and slightly manic friends is they bring a random guest to dinner. When you’re in a sanctuary you need to be vetted, and be a guest who behaves." We love guests who don’t behave. She now distributes the extras to our friend’s "dilettante lovers who we’ll never see again" and to the Philadelphia Gas Works technician who inspects the pipes.
Before Alison, I first even learned about the possibility that a human civilian could order their own custom matchbooks for something other than a wedding from a TikTok by art director Delaney Lundquist, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and posts interior design content on social media under the handle @tremont_home. She thinks the appeal, for her originally and for the more than 18,000 people who liked her TikTok about her custom "Tremont Home" matchbooks (which she sells templates for on Etsy), is celebratory freewill.
Interior design content creator Delaney Lundquist sells templates for her custom "Tremont Home" matchbooks on Etsy.
Courtesy Delaney Lundquist
"When you’re in your twenties and thirties, the novelty of having your own space, that you are entirely in charge of, is very special," she says. "Commemorating that with a memento that is highly personalized, and maybe a little bit of an inside joke, is playful. I think that’s what really sticks with people."
"And,"—she adds immediately—"the interior space is increasingly visible and performative on social media. The matchbook is a little visual identifier, a representation of your brand and your home and your persona."
Nick O’Brien, the CEO and founder of Templi, a printed goods company that has seen a 336 percent increase in custom matchbook orders since 2022, says of course the rise in people making custom matchbooks for their houses can be tied to the influence of social media culture. Is it a crystallization of the commodification of home-life-as-personal-brand? (Think: an ambient impulse to have a dinner party that looks tasteful, no matter how it tastes, and that projects a sense of your "aesthetic.") Sure it is. But, O’Brien says, it’s all got a big wink to it. Pet portraits on the matchbook covers are as common as satirical references to English estate-culture or sly indications that one’s house is a corner bar. O’Brien points to a memorable forest green set he printed with the words "Meet Me at Gianna’s" and a tablescape illustration. "It shows a love of restaurant culture," he says, "It’s casual, and they’re just trying to have fun."
O’Brien adds that part of the appeal for personal matchbooks is that they are newly available for the regular consumer. In the past couple years, he explains, the minimum order for custom matchbooks has come way, way down due to printing innovations from the manufacturers. Previously, minimums would be something like 5,000 items per order, and now they can reasonably start at 50 pieces, for about $100. Online graphic design platforms like Canva, as well as the availability of for-sale templates on Etsy, has made the design aspect more accessible as well.
Like many personal objects that photograph well, these matchbooks, in their tiny way, carry the weighty tension between living online and offline. In a November 2025 New York Times story, Jennifer Bradley Franklin wrote about the rise in regular people giving everyday homes family crests, names, and insignia, and the wider trend of presenting domestic spaces as part of a carefully crafted identity and image. The branding of the house is effortful.
O’Brien imagines that people are drawn to these physical markers as a rejection of the screen-heavy world. The matchbook is something real to hold. But it’s also a signal that you’re living an offline life in which people are coming to your house and hanging out with you. And it’s a signal that looks very good in photos, to indicate to people online about your life offline. "Does it photograph?" he asks rhetorically. "Extremely well. It’s difficult to mess it up. It’s engagement-inducing."
Lifestyle content creator Rachel Shea DiBease’s custom matchbooks say: "I stole this from Rachel’s."
Courtesy Rachel Shea
There’s a pure delight to these objects that’s undercut by the culture of the moment: that everything seems like it could be in service of a curated ethos. Sheila Liming, author of the 2023 book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, says that this little tension vibrating in each custom matchbook is what makes the phenomenon so fascinating. "It makes it feel like the stranger is the main audience for that gesture, and not necessarily the person who’s benefiting from it in the moment," she says, "which is a strangely depersonalizing way to go about hosting someone in your home." (Of course, if you’re a restaurant, you truly do court the stranger.)
At the same time, Liming adds, mementos are wonderful: "There is a matchbook in my purse right now that I’ve been carrying around for over a year, because it reminds me of a certain meeting that I had in a restaurant with a person, right? I can understand how this keepsake culture, or this attachment to mementos, has carried over into hosting culture, and that desire to maybe stamp an experience with a physical object in the same kind of way."
Like most mementos, the matchbook is real and it exists to reference an intangible experience. I forgot partway through writing this that matchbooks are actually useful. And I use them! All time! I light candles with them almost every day. They spark my thrice-yearly cigarettes.
Custom matchbooks, by design, won’t be seen everywhere. They’re not the status coffee table book. Their status is in their individuality and your pursuit of this personalized indulgence. Content creator Rachel Shea DiBease, who posts lifestyle content from her homes in Charleston and Philadelphia, thinks they’re great eye-catchers. Her custom matchbooks say: "I stole this from Rachel’s."
"It’s a conversation starter," she says. "When I first started doing it, my husband, who’s in school for architecture, his friends would come over for board game nights and thought I was a graphic designer, because who else could make these?"
Lundquist adds that these are the types of things that can make people really excited about hosting. "If the matches are what makes you excited to host and invite people over, hell yeah, make the matches and let that be the entryway to getting everything else," she says. I love to cook, but it’s imagining the tablescape that thrills me about having the dinner party.
For my friend Alison, the dream, she says—especially because her custom matchbooks have a more elusive design without her name—would be to hear a rumor of people talking about her mysterious matchbook, like they might discuss for an if-you-know-you-know kind of restaurant. A place so good, its glory spreads by word of mouth. So, of course, custom matchbooks for the home reveal the impacts of branding culture—and the performance of self intensified by social media—on our personal aesthetics. But we restaurant-house people make sacrifices for the public. A sanctuary should be in the protected hills; a restaurant is on the street level and ready to be recognized. A restaurant must entice and surprise and be generous. And memorable!
My husband and I poured concrete ourselves and built a carport—but not without delays and setbacks. (And we still have a ways to go.)
"By this time next year," my husband said, the morning after our wedding, "we’ll have the backyard completely renovated."
"We’ll have a party," I said. "An anniversary party," he agreed.
Larry and I were sitting underneath a somewhat shabby overhang on the edge of our garage, watching the sun rise over the garden where we had gotten married the previous evening. Our DIY backyard wedding—which included 60 guests, a chamber choir, a potluck dinner and a $15 eyelet lace dress—had been so successful that we felt like we could do anything.
So we committed, in the way that one commits on the first day of a marriage, to completing the backyard renovations by June 2025. Larry began making concrete molds for our patio in September, with the goal of pouring concrete in October. That’s when we learned that fall was one of the busiest times of the year for outdoor contractors, with everyone hoping to get their projects done before the winter. We weren’t able to get anyone in to do the initial pour until late November, at which point Larry decided that there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t learn to make and pour concrete himself.
The winter weather held long enough for Larry and a friend to do a second pour in December, at which point we decided that there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t learn to make and pour concrete as well. So, when the spring came, I put on my overalls and got to work.
At left, learning how to pour concrete. At right, trying to get the pontoon boat under our new carport.
Courtesy of Nicole Dieker
Mixing and pouring concrete is remarkably similar to making a cake, in the sense that you need to add the right amount of water, stir everything around really well, pour it evenly and get all of the air bubbles out before it sets. You’ll want to avoid slopping too much concrete over the sides of the mold, for the same reason you’d try to avoid getting globs of wet cake on the outside of your baking dish, but anything that gets spilled can be cleaned up afterward.
It’s also an excellent project for a newly married couple, in part because it allows you and your spouse to work together without getting hung up on the persnicketiness of, say, hanging wallpaper. There’s no tiny little flower that has to match up with another tiny little flower while one of you is standing on a chair with the weight of the paper and paste dangling from the ends of your hands, which are, of course, held over your head, and everything starting to dry before you can get the seam in place, and there’s always that one little air bubble that never gets ironed out, and whose fault was that, anyway?
Concrete, despite or perhaps because of its strength, is incredibly forgiving. Which gave Larry and me the strength to forgive ourselves when it became obvious that we would not have our renovation completed in time for a first anniversary party in June 2025. "And now that this is becoming a multiyear project," Larry said, "I think the next component that needs to be completed is the carport."
Our house came with a single-car garage, which Larry had already turned into a tool shed and workspace. Our single car is parked in the driveway. The carport, which would be built in place of the overhang we had been sitting under the day after our wedding, would hold our pontoon boat during the winter, so Larry and I wouldn’t have to pay the marina to winterize and store it.
Larry estimated that it would take two weeks to build the carport. It took two months. During that time, he calculated the optimal angle for drainage, since the roof needed to be both high enough to accommodate the boat and low enough to line up with the garage. He had maybe 10 degrees of wiggle room, and ended up giving the boat just four inches of clearance. Larry also carefully measured the notches required to make the rafters flush—there were 19 of them, and each needed to be precise—and designed and printed 3D jigs to help him get the job done."It turns out I didn’t need the jigs, once I figured out how to cut the wood," Larry explained, "but I’m not sure I could have figured out how to cut the wood without making the jigs first."
Almost a year to the day of our first concrete pour, we had a group of friends over to the house to roll the pontoon boat into the carport. This couldn’t be done with a winch because we had to take the boat around a corner, which meant manipulating it back and forth like a piece of furniture, with six people pushing and pulling and me shoving chocks under the wheels every time we paused to recalculate the angle.
Our completed carport.
Courtesy of Nicole Dieker
We actually got the angle wrong, that first evening—both the horizontal and the vertical, since it became obvious that unless we packed part of our backyard with bricks and dirt and any other material we could scrounge up, the boat would roll ever-so-slightly and then inevitably down an incline that could take it straight into our neighbor’s house. So Larry moved piles of dirt from our patio excavation and placed them in the necessary spot, and we invited everyone back over for a second round, and this time the boat rolled precisely into its place.
"How long did that take?" Larry asked a young boy who had come along with his dad and had been instructed to stay out of the way and keep the time. "Twenty-seven minutes!" he replied. Yes, on the second try, after a two-week estimate became a two-month project, after the idea of renovating a backyard by an anniversary deadline became a lifetime dedication to our garden and our marriage and our agreement to do as much as we can ourselves, because that’s how we learn. And we still feel the way we did, the morning after our marriage—as if we could do anything.
Top photo by Ellinnur Bakarudin/500px via Getty Images
