And because I’m chronically online and all too aware when it comes to relatively innocuous pop culture knowledge, I saw it all go down.

I’m like my dad, except instead of knowing an astonishing amount of Jeopardy answers, I know too much about social media phenomena. And while trend awareness may seem like brainrot to some, it's become almost essential knowledge for understanding the invisible forces that shape what we eat, where we go, and what we do, especially in an influential city like New York.

As someone who is endlessly passionate about restaurants and hotels (the food, the design, the niche concepts, the indulgence, the escapism… I mean truly, the list goes on) this topic is something I’ve thought a lot about, and written about on numerous occasions. And though I could probably go on a tangent, I’ll sum it up to just this: low brow is the new high brow in big city dining.

One of the best examples of this is the great Chickengate scandal of 2026. And yes, that might be an exaggeration of the actual impact, but just know it was a very huge topic in a very small circle for a very short period of time, and I was witness to all of it like it was my own personal soap opera.

It went like this: a full rotisserie chicken from a brand new, upscale wine bar in Greenpoint went for $77, with the half chicken being priced at $40. And while they weren’t really the first to charge an exorbitant amount for something you could get at the grocery store for $5, they were the first to go viral when someone called them out on social media.

The initial post itself didn’t directly mention Gigi’s, but take one look at the comments and it will become clear that everyone knew who it was about. And while some were berating the restaurant for the fine dining gentrification of something that could be made at home for a tiny fraction of the cost, other people pointed out the larger issue: restaurants are struggling to pay rent, pay their workers, and provide a unique, competitive menu in a city that houses some of the best dining in the world. Prices are high because dining out is a luxury, and as customers, we are expected to pay the premium on both high quality food, high quality service, and the establishment’s ability to keep the lights on.

The chicken drama spread like wildfire, and other similarly-priced restaurants took notice. Badaboom was similarly called out, and responded with a kind of ceasefire:

The entire drama can be summed up as follows: someone posted about the price, the screenshot made its way around, and within days it had a life of its own. People who had never been near the restaurant and never would were suddenly weighing in. Chicken next to a Costco receipt, chicken as a punchline. Chicken as the one thing everyone could agree to be annoyed about, while also understanding that the discourse was ultimately larger than the exorbitant cost of a traditionally low brow food item.

Anyone with inside knowledge of the industry will understand the cost of sourcing and labor, the cost of running a kitchen, the insane cost of overhead that makes restaurants one of the riskiest business ventures. But that doesn’t negate the fact that even low brow foods can be high brow, and it all depends on the roof they are served under.

This drama really only lasted about two weeks. If you follow any major food publications, you may have seen something about it in passing. The drama was brief, and to my knowledge, did no lasting harm to Gigi’s. They’ve since opened a backyard patio for summer service.

What struck me most about the whole thing is the choice of dish itself. Of everything Gigi's could have built a menu around, they landed on rotisserie chicken. They didn’t make it fancy or dress it up with a different name. It’s a classic rotisserie chicken with sauces, and it’s pretty much the core of their concept. Gigi’s is a self-described wine and rotisserie chicken bar.

So what makes a neighborhood restaurant decide to serve traditionally lower brow comfort food as a luxury food item? Low brow may be the new high brow, but I think it goes both ways.

I once worked for a prominent hospitality group with an extensive portfolio. Their NYC properties include a Michelin-starred French restaurant and a well-known (but slightly reimagined) Italian restaurant that was once Michelin-starred under previous ownership. In marketing these restaurants, I was told to keep my content lively and energetic. Where a sexy slow motion pour and dim, ambient table shots backed by a Frank Sinatra song would have been my jam, I was told to make it faster, punchier, more fun. “We’re not a stuffy restaurant”, the social content needed to say, “we’re a cool restaurant.”

Somewhere along the way, unpretentious became the thing worth paying for, and looking casual became more valuable than looking impressive.

A $40 half chicken is what your dad might eat while standing over the sink, except now it comes with a wine list and candlelight. Instead of hiding the price, the restaurant hid the seriousness, in the same way my old clients hid the Michelin star stuffiness behind a fast cut and a fun soundtrack. It’s the same way caviar is being served on chicken nuggets at Coqodaq. Low brow isn't replacing high brow in this city… it’s just being sold back to us at a markup.

Rotisserie chicken has always been the least pretentious food that exists. It’s the dinner you grab on a weeknight when you don’t feel like cooking, or the thing sitting under a heat lamp at the grocery store. It has never once been considered a luxury item, which is exactly why watching it get the fine dining treatment felt so strange to witness in real time. Suddenly you had restaurants marinating birds for a full day in proprietary spice blends, serving them with a trio of house-made sauces, plating them as a luxurious main event.

I’ve seen the same thing with other foods. The Coqodaq chicken nuggets, the omelette I once ordered at Cathédrale that was rather ordinary, except it was topped with crème fraîche and caviar. Not to beat a dead horse with this statement, but low brow is the new high brow, just with better plating.

I do think that this is one of the more interesting things happening in food right now. For years, the fanciest thing on a menu was the thing that felt the furthest from your own kitchen. But now, chefs are taking the most familiar foods and turning them into something indulgent. A whole roasted chicken done with real technique, a good brine, the right heat, and the right rest before it’s carved, is genuinely one of the hardest things to nail in a kitchen. The high-low pivot is really just fine dining admitting that comfort food deserves the same respect as anything else on the menu, and diners are responding to it because there’s something deeply satisfying about eating a dish that feels like home but tastes like something rare and high-end.

I don’t know if this is meant to be a social commentary, or a think piece, or just a fun rehash of some niche drama. But I have noticed that the lines between fine dining and cheap comforts are blurring together, and it’s creating some interesting shifts in the culinary world. Stuffy wants to be fun, fun wants to be chic.

There's a seat for me at either table.

So today, I’ve decided to coin a new one. The Thin-Stemmed Glass Theory.

It goes like this: the truest measure of someone’s taste isn’t what they show off, it’s what they reach for when nobody’s around to see. Anyone can put together a version of themselves for company. The good plateware comes out, the nice candle gets lit, the beautiful things make their one appearance before going back into hiding. But the real test happens on a random Tuesday, alone, when there’s no one to perform for and the only person who feels the difference is you. That’s the moment the theory lives or dies. Do you reach for the pretty glass, or the boring one? Do you use the good stuff, or save it for an occasion that may never quite arrive?

I recently wrote an article about the science of atmosphere and what happens to your brain when you surround yourself with beautiful things. And while I wholeheartedly believe in the psychological benefit of beautiful things, I think the Thin-Stemmed Glass Theory is less about brain chemistry and more about what beautiful things actually do to your relationship with your own life.

When everything around you is purely functional (utilitarian glasses, forgettable furniture, whatever was cheapest or easiest) your days start to feel that way too. You move through them instead of noticing them. But when you’ve chosen the things around you with some care, even small things, using them becomes a tiny moment of contact with your own life instead of just a task to get through. Pouring wine into a glass that you love and feels good in your hand is a completely different action than pouring wine into a glass you’re indifferent to, even though the wine and the pour are identical.

Beautiful things you keep for yourself, the ones nobody else sees, are a way of saying that your own experience matters enough to be worth the extra thought. The Thin-Stemmed Glass Theory is consciously deciding that the version of your life that happens when nobody’s watching still deserves some care. And in my opinion, it is that serious.

I own a set of wine glasses with stems so thin they look like they’d snap with a light breeze. They hold the same amount of wine as the glasses I had before. The wine tastes the same. But drinking out of them feels different.

There’s a chic fragility to a tall, ultra-thin stemmed wine glass that makes the whole experience of drinking wine feel more luxurious. You’re holding something delicate, something that requires a little bit of care, and that changes the way you sip and the way you sit with it. Compare that to being handed an ugly, chunky wine glass at a bar; a bulky piece of glassware that could probably survive being dropped from a moving car. It does the job. It’s functional, but it doesn’t make you feel like you’re truly indulging in the moment.

There’s a version of taste that gets performed for other people. The dinner party version that exists mostly for someone else’s perception. That version certainly has a time and a place, but it’s not what the theory is about. I’m talking about the version of taste that nobody else ever sees, the everyday things you choose for your own personal use. These are the things that reveal what you actually value, because nobody’s watching when you reach for them.

I think that’s why the wine glass has become such a strange little anchor for me. It’s a beautiful little thing, and using it makes me feel like I’m someone who pays attention to her own life instead of just getting through it.

Taste, to me, isn’t just about having expensive things or trendy things or things that photograph well. It’s about developing a relationship with the objects in your life that you touch every single day, so that using them feels like a small act of care instead of something you do on autopilot. It’s the difference between a candle that just sits there and a candle you actually light because you like the way the room smells when it’s burning. It’s the difference between a coffee mug that’s just a vessel and one that makes the first ten minutes of your morning feel like they belong to you.

Taste is closer to a practice than a purchase. It’s developed by paying attention to the weight of a glass in your hand, the way certain fabrics feel against your skin, or the sound a good door makes when it closes. Most people move through their homes without ever really noticing any of these things. And once you start noticing, you can’t really stop.

This is also, I think, why my work in hospitality has shaped how I think about my own home. When you spend enough time in restaurants and hotels that have clearly thought through every detail, from the weight of a menu to the specific curve of a wine glass, you start noticing when your own life is missing that same intention. Tasteful restaurants don’t choose to hand you an ugly, functional glass. They hand you the dainty, thin-stemmed glass because someone understood that the vessel changes the experience of what’s inside it.

I apply that same logic at home, running my own life through the same test I’d apply to any space I walked into professionally. Why would I drink my everyday glass of wine out of something that doesn’t make me feel anything, when the alternative costs about the same and sits three feet away in a cabinet?

None of this needs to be expensive to matter. A taste for beautiful things isn’t about spending more, but rather, about being selective, choosing fewer things, and loving them properly, instead of accumulating piles of things. My favorite items in my apartment are the ones I picked because something about them made me stop and pay attention, and I never once regretted spending the extra time to find exactly the right version of something ordinary.

Surrounding yourself with beauty is repeat decision, not a purchase you make once. You decide, every single day, whether to use the good glass or the boring one, whether to light the candle or let it collect dust, whether to fold the towel the nice way or just toss it on the rack. None of these decisions are dramatic. But they add up into a life that feels tended to, rather than one that’s just being lived through. Which is really just the Thin-Stemmed Glass Theory, playing out one small decision at a time.

So yes, I have a favorite wine glass. It’s thin-stemmed, slightly impractical, and can only be hand-washed. And every time I pour a glass of wine into it, on some random weeknight with absolutely nothing to celebrate, I remember that the whole point of the theory is exactly this: choosing beauty for an audience of one, on a night nobody else will ever know about.

This Week’s Select Picks:

Zalto Denk'Art Universal Hand-Blown Crystal Wine Glasses

Apotheke Signature Scented Candle, White Vetiver

At some point, we started optimizing our lives into oblivion. Indulging in habits that might give you cortisol face or imbalance your hormones became insecurities that could be easily exploited by the brands, creators, and industries that show up on our social feeds every day.

So forget wine nights, forget a large popcorn at the movies, forget going out the night before an early morning workout class, even though these little moments are meant to be small moments of joy in our stressful lives. Instead, they've become guilt trips that pack a punch, because they don't fit into the hyper-optimized aesthetic that we are spoon fed through an algorithm designed to take our money.

One thing that I don't think is talked about enough is how identical the “clean girl” aesthetic looks on nearly every creator promoting it. The same brands, the same outfits, the same products. Most of it funneled through the same handful of PR agencies running the same gifting and seeding campaigns. It's not that everyone happened to land on the same skincare fridge and the same five brown sweaters independently, it's that everyone was sent the same box, on the same week, with the same talking points, and everyone posted it the same way. Minimalist style is in, but only if it’s that $65 boat-neck top from Intimissimi.

In that regard, I almost feel like “clean girl” is just over-consumption disguised as self-optimization. But like every major trend, things tend to swing the opposite direction like a pendulum. And while “clean girl” had a good run, we’re starting to see a new trend rise from the ashes. Party girl is coming back with a vengeance.

But what does that really mean?

Enjoying life. Enjoying food, drinks, and style that might be impractical or maximalist, but that make you feel good anyway. It’s a push against aesthetics and lifestyles that keep us rigid and scheduled. It’s laughing too loudly at the bar, staying up a little too late, and refusing to feel guilty about any of it.

Personally, I don’t want to serve “clean girl”. I want to look like a jet lagged Bianca Jagger in vintage Yves Saint Laurent with a 70’s blowout and a cigarette. I want to look like Martin Scorsese would cast me as a leading lady next to Robert de Niro in an 80’s crime thriller.

Brands are starting to pick up on this too. The polished, beige-toned aesthetic is starting to feel a little flat. We’re starting to see messy textures, unfiltered moments, and purposeful chaos. Rather than looking perfect, brands are moving toward campaigns that feel real. Years of curated, over-styled content is being replaced with what feels honest, even if that means chipped nails, cluttered backgrounds, or lighting that feels uneven.

Take Demna’s Gucci, with it’s recent rejection of quiet luxury, embracing “logomania” with chaotic-chic models Kate Moss and Emily Ratajkowski. Then there’s the “messy bag” aesthetic, where people are taking 5-figure bags and smothering them in maximalist accessories.

But fashion aside, I always like to bridge the gap between cultural trends and the hospitality industry, which tends to stand on the cusp of culture, picking up on a mood before most people register that it's shifted.

If “clean girl” is the beige-on-beige dining room, “party girl” is loud decor and clashing textures. In NYC, it’s the giraffe-print walls and red LEDs at Obvio, or the mirrored ceiling and ultraplush banquets at Tigre. It’s unique and eccentric decor that wants to stand out from the rest, not blend in. The party girl bar or restaurant is built to be remembered.

And yet, as the pendulum swings away from sterile green juice mornings and toward the dim, late night pull of the messy party girl, it’s worth admitting that looking like a jet lagged Bianca Jagger in vintage YSL still takes effort, and so does scuffing up a five figure handbag until it looks lived in. The algorithm hasn’t stopped selling us an identity, it’s just traded the Intimissimi top and athleisure set for a leather jacket and smudged eyeliner. A new aesthetic can still be bought.

But the post-optimization era doesn’t need to be about finding a new way to fit the mold. It can just be an invitation to have fun again, to stop treating our lives like something to be managed and start treating them like something to enjoy.

Order the wine, let yourself miss the workout class without stressing about it, let your laugh be a little too loud. The clean girl era taught us how to optimize every hour of the day.

The party girl era might just teach us how to waste a few of them well.

You might think that a real trip requires a packed bag and an Uber to the airport. But the older I get and the more hectic life becomes, the more I've come to appreciate the luxury of stepping away from reality in the comfort of my home city. There's a version of getting away that doesn't require a passport, a suitcase, or any of the logistics that usually come with the word vacation. It just requires a hotel room somewhere in the city you already live in, and the willingness to treat it like it's further away than it actually is.

A local hotel stay removes every inconvenience that travel usually demands. There’s no red-eye flights, no long TSA lines, no lost baggage, no rush to catch your layover.

You show up with a small bag, hand off your key card, and walk into a room someone else has made immaculate for you. The exhale happens almost before you’ve set your bag down. You skip past the getting there and land directly in the part that makes you feel like you can take a deep breath, which is really the only part of any trip that matters anyway.

Good hotels are some of the most intentionally designed spaces most of us ever step into. Someone thought about the temperature of the lighting. Someone thought about the weight of the duvet, the placement of the outlets, and whether the chair by the window makes you want to sink down into it.

There’s a reason you sleep better in a hotel bed even when it’s technically no different from your own. The room is doing something to your nervous system that your apartment, with its stack of unopened mail and the to-do list stuck to the fridge, was never built to do. Your apartment was built for everyday life, while a hotel room was built for exactly one purpose: making you comfortable enough to stop thinking for a while.

Which is where the real appeal of a staycation comes in, and it’s this: you never actually have to leave the building.

You can finally enjoy the pool on the roof that you never usually make time for, since you’re always rushing to check out. You can indulge in that spa treatment you booked without any intention of cutting it short this time, and maybe even take a peaceful nap after. You can patronize the hotel bar downstairs, where you don’t need a reservation and nobody on earth is expecting you anywhere after, so get that extra glass of wine, because who cares, you have nowhere to be. You can order takeout or room service for every meal and never once feel like you’re missing something by not going out.

The idea of a staycation may feel a little indulgent and impractical, but I promise you, that’s the whole point.

I’ve noticed my brain works differently the second I’m somewhere that isn’t my apartment, even if that somewhere is eleven minutes away. My everyday spaces come loaded with everyday context. My desk remembers every deadline I’ve ever sat at it for. My kitchen remembers the dishes I haven’t done. A hotel room doesn’t know anything about me, and that blank slate is doing more for my mental health than I expected it to.

Sometimes rest just means being horizontal, and sometimes you need to leave the environment that’s been running your nervous system in the background all week. I don’t think I fully understood the difference until I started doing this on purpose, checking into a room a few miles from my own front door and discovering that proximity has nothing to do with how far away it actually feels.

The best staycations I’ve had had almost nothing to do with what I did outside the hotel and everything to do with what I did inside it. I didn’t check email until I felt like it. I didn’t make plans that required me to be anywhere at a specific time, including anywhere outside my own room.

A local getaway is the perfect excuse to ignore reality for a moment; not checking emails until you feel like it, not making plans that require you to be anywhere at a specific time, and never needing to leave that soft, cloud-like bedding.

I love letting the hours go soft in a way that regular life rarely allows, because regular life is mostly a series of things you’re supposed to be doing right now.

This is your sign to leave your responsibilities at home and go check into something local. You don’t even need to leave the hotel. Just put up that do-not-disturb sign and let your nervous system feel the difference.

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I am one of those people, and I think it’s worth talking about.

There’s a version of my life where I became a speech-language pathologist. I went to school for it, did the coursework, passed the tests, and spent a semester observing grad students teaching kids how to properly talk like it was something I would actually be doing, when I didn’t even know how to talk to kids myself. I chose the major because it seemed well-regarded and practical, the kind of thing that would justify itself at dinner parties without requiring much explanation. By senior year I knew I didn’t want it, but I didn’t yet know what I did want, so I made the next logical-sounding pivot: healthcare management. My first job out of college was answering phones at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Trajectory was slow, and so were the jobs I took. Editing doctors’ notes. Managing interviews for fellowship candidates. I felt like I was moving in a direction I hadn’t fully chosen.

So I started serving tables on the side. A buzzing college bar, oftentimes from 4pm until well past 2 in the morning, and still had to get up for my full-time job at 7am. I was running 90-hour weeks for eight straight months without a day off, just to cover rent and buy lunch. It sounds miserable, and parts of it were, but it also gave me something I hadn’t expected: an addiction to adrenaline. Believe it or not, taking care of twelve angry tables and needing to be seven different places at once gives you a masochistic kind of rush, and it all feels justifiable when you count up your tips at the end of the night. I loved the satisfaction of being genuinely good at something that required me to move fast and think faster. I thought that energy would translate well into recruiting. I thought my drive and my ADHD tendency to bounce through a million thoughts at once would make me an excellent headhunter.

A few jobs and a global pandemic later, I was working in Talent Acquisition / Recruiting Operations for an aerospace company in Providence. The company was old and bureaucratic, and the job was soul-crushing in a way that felt personal. It was everything I had hated in every previous role I’d held, but I had been desperate after a layoff. Desperate enough to commute four hours round-trip every day, transferring between two trains, waking up at 4 in the morning and not getting home until 8 or 9 at night.

I lost my social life. I lost my energy. I lost, for a while, a significant chunk of my mental health, and I didn’t even fully realize how hollow I had become until I started looking for somewhere to put whatever was left.

That’s when I started making art. Painting first, acrylic then oil, then digital. Prints, pattern-making, wallpaper designs. Nothing about it was strategic. My attention just slowly shifted away from my circumstances to whatever it was I wanted to create that day, and that shift turned out to be the most important thing I did during that entire period of my life.

At the end of 2024, having been in a long-distance relationship with a wonderful man in New York City, I finally made the jump. I packed up my things, moved, and decided at that moment that I would never sit behind a desk again. Nothing in my corporate life had ever given me passion or purpose or that feeling that I was doing something that actually mattered to me. I wanted to create, and I wanted to make a living out of it. I had watched other people do it, photographers and videographers and writers and artists, people who were not just surviving but thriving, and I didn’t see a convincing reason why that couldn’t include me. I’m resilient, I’ve always persevered, and if this journey involved struggle, at least I’d be struggling through something I actually loved this time.

I started small, turning my personal Instagram into a food blogging account. I had been a successful book review blogger a few years prior, but the landscape has changed and everything is about short-form video now. So I posted video after video, focusing on the thing I knew best: restaurants. Good food, great ambiance, great service. I got free meals, which lead to free hotel stays. Then, because connections are everything, a friend of a friend got me a role at the hospitality group she worked for, a small startup group with three successful and well-known restaurants under their belt.

I was thrilled, and then quickly humbled.

My way of creating content wasn’t going to cut it. My phone had been dropped so many times the photos may as well have been taken on an iPhone 6S from 2015. I was creative, but I didn’t have the skill or the toolkit yet, and this group didn’t have a marketing team to offer true guidance or realtime feedback. They knew what they didn’t like but hadn’t yet figured out what they did. Knowing that this was my doorway regardless, I invested in a high-end camera, lighting equipment, and other accessories that could have covered rent that month. I watched YouTube videos about composition and angles. I went into the group’s restaurants off-hours and practiced. I built my own content calendars, developed my own strategy, and started producing work that was closer to the vision in my head.

My work was not perfect. There were times my content didn’t land and my skills weren’t yet up to par with what I so clearly envisioned. But I pushed through, continued learning, and steadily watched the accounts grow. I realized I had a lot to learn and that I was learning it very, very fast. I wasn’t a natural, but I was creative, and more than anything, I was passionate about it in a way I had never been passionate about anything I’d done for money before.

What was supposed to be just a few months turned into eight. That role led to other opportunities: event photography gigs, new clients, and eventually a contract with the renowned group behind more than 42 restaurants nationwide, founded by a very successful restauranteur. Through their small, nimble marketing team I’ve continued to upskill and grow, and I’ve also met genuinely talented people doing work I truly admire.

I also started this publication.

THE CITY SELECT began as a name for my Substack, and it became the umbrella for all of the work I’ve been doing: the creative studio, the newsletter, the full body of professional work I’m truly proud of. The name stuck with me because it felt like it could be an actual magazine title, while also feeling relatable to my client work. I’ve always maintained an ethos of beautiful, intentional design, with a focus on hospitality, city life, culture, and storytelling. THE CITY SELECT felt like the perfect name to encapsulate all these different facets.

And it’s crazy for me to think… all of this creative growth happened within a single year.

I should be proud. And truly, I am. After all, I’ve never been shy about sharing. My friends will know something has happened to me when I go more than three hours without posting on my Instagram story. I’ve documented this entire journey publicly, because I genuinely believe that ‘build in silence’ is terrible advice. But sharing your journey and fully believing in your own legitimacy are two different things, and I’ve learned that you can do the first one pretty confidently while still wrestling with the second.

When someone asks what I do, there’s a brief internal conversation before I answer. I’ve built a brand, developed my own website, launched a publication, bought expensive production equipment and learned to use it despite not being able to put together a single piece of IKEA furniture. I’ve shot high-impact events. I’ve created content for some of the most recognizable restaurants in New York City. Creation is my sole source of income. By any reasonable measure, I’m a professional creative.

And I still feel weird saying that out loud.

Imposter syndrome doesn’t operate on evidence. It doesn’t care about your portfolio or your client list or how much you’ve grown. It lives underneath the rational layer of things, narrating your life from the outside in, as if you’re watching yourself from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know your story.

But here’s the thing: nobody knows your story. The person who walks into a room looking like they’ve always belonged there, you have no idea what it took them to get there. You don’t know how many years they spent doing work that felt wrong, how many times they started over, how many mornings they woke up genuinely unsure if they could continue on. Confidence doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates through a long series of small decisions to keep going anyway, and from the outside it looks seamless because you only ever see the part where it’s working.

I spent most of my life being very good at persevering through things that were very, very hard. I have always prided myself on my resilience. The difference now is that I’m applying that same stubbornness to something I actually love, which somehow feels more uncertain than any of the jobs I stayed in out of desperation. I think that’s part of what imposter syndrome is really doing: it’s a hedge against caring too much. If you’re still just figuring it out, still not quite legit, still maybe pretending, then the stakes feel manageable. But the stakes aren’t actually lower. The work is real, the growth is real. The only thing that isn’t real is the internal story that says that what you’re doing doesn’t actually matter yet.

I’ve always believed in speaking your desires into the world until they become your reality, in acting as if something is already true until it is. It’s essentially how I got here. And I think the only real antidote to imposter syndrome is a version of that same practice: not pretending the doubt isn’t there, but refusing to give it more weight than the actual evidence of your own life.

There are times when doubt creeps in, and there are times where I genuinely believe I can teach myself anything. Both things are true at once, and I’ve stopped trying to resolve the tension between them.

If you had asked me what I wanted to be at three years old, I would have said artist. That was my first aspiration, and one I clung to until it started to feel like something I was supposed to grow out of. I didn’t grow out of it. It just took me thirty more years to stop arguing with myself about it.

It’s called Tigre, and the entrance is easy to miss. An unmarked door in a graffitied wall, a man checking IDs outside, nothing else to signal that anything notable is happening on the other side. I almost walked past it. But I went in, and the moment I did, something shifted. The lighting was soft and moody, the seating plush, the bar itself a half circle wrapped in warm golden light. I sat down, ordered something classic, and just let myself be in the moment.

That feeling, the physical sense of ease that a well-designed space can produce, is something I’ve been curious about for a long time. There’s actually a field of study built around exactly this phenomenon called neuroaesthetics, which looks at how art, beauty, and design affect the brain. It sits at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and aesthetics, and it’s essentially trying to understand why certain spaces make us feel the way they do.

The short answer is that our brains are responding to everything. Symmetry, lighting, texture, proportion, the way sound moves through a room, whether a ceiling feels too low or a doorway too narrow. None of it registers consciously, but all of it is being processed. Aesthetic experiences activate the limbic system, the part of the brain that governs emotion and memory, which is why a well-designed space can produce something that feels less like a preference and more like a physiological response. It’s why you walk into certain rooms and immediately relax without knowing why. It’s why you remember the atmosphere of a meal long after you’ve forgotten what you ordered.

Hospitality spaces understand this, at least the good ones do. The moment you walk through the door of a great restaurant or hotel, your brain is making a rapid assessment based entirely on design cues. Warm lighting signals intimacy and comfort. Natural materials feel grounding in a way that synthetic ones don’t. Open, symmetrical layouts reduce what researchers call cognitive load, which is just a clinical way of saying the space doesn’t make you work to exist in it.

When all of these elements are working together, the experience feels effortless. You can’t point to any single thing that’s making you feel good. It just feels right. And that sense of rightness is what makes people come back, what turns a single visit into a loyalty that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there.

Color does a lot of this, too. Warm tones in a lobby or dining room create a sense of welcome before a single word has been exchanged. Cool hues in a spa lower your heart rate before you’ve even sat down. Soft, layered lighting mimics the natural shift of daylight in a way that overhead fluorescents never could, which is why a candlelit room feels so different from a brightly lit one even when the square footage is identical.

These aren’t aesthetic choices in the decorative sense. They’re decisions that shape how a guest moves through a space, how long they stay, how they feel when they leave, and whether they want to come back.

What I find most interesting about neuroaesthetics is that it applies just as much to the spaces we live in as the ones we pay to visit. Maybe more, actually. Restaurants and hotels are designed to be experienced. Our homes and workspaces are designed to be inhabited, which means the stakes are higher and the opportunity is more personal.

The principles translate directly. Lighting is probably the most immediate lever. Harsh overhead light in a living room or bedroom creates a flatness that makes it hard to settle. Soft, layered lighting, a combination of ambient, accent, and task, changes the entire emotional register of a room. Dimmable bulbs in warm tones, a table lamp in the corner, a candle on the coffee table, none of it is expensive or complicated, but the cumulative effect is a space that feels like somewhere you actually want to be.

Texture works the same way. The brain responds to tactile richness even when you’re not touching anything. A room with velvet, linen, worn wood, and natural stone reads differently than one with only hard or synthetic surfaces. The variety creates a kind of sensory warmth that makes a space feel considered rather than assembled. This is why a single well-chosen throw or a set of ceramic dishes can shift the feeling of a room in a way that’s disproportionate to their size or cost.

Color is worth being intentional about too, even if you’re not repainting anytime soon. Soft neutrals and earthy tones create a calm that’s easy to spend time in. Deep blues and greens feel sophisticated without being cold. Warm browns and muted mustards are grounding in a way that works especially well in rooms meant for gathering or eating. None of these are rules so much as tendencies, patterns that show up consistently in spaces that feel good to be in.

The thing that tends to impact me the most about the environment I’m in is clutter. A cluttered room isn’t just visually busy, it makes it harder to relax or focus. Clearing pathways, removing things that don’t serve the space, choosing furniture with rounded edges rather than sharp corners, these choices affect how your nervous system responds to a room in ways that are subtle but real. A disorganized bedroom makes it harder to sleep. A kitchen where everything has a place makes cooking feel less like a chore. The layout of a space shapes your behavior in it, often without you noticing.

And then there are the sensory layers that finish a space off. A scent that’s present but not insistent. Music that sets a pace without demanding attention. A rug underfoot that makes the room feel anchored. These are the details that hospitality designers think about carefully because they understand that an experience is only as good as its least considered element. The same logic applies at home.

None of this is about replicating a hotel room or chasing some aspirational aesthetic, but rather, about paying attention to how your spaces make you feel and making small, deliberate choices in response to that. The goal is comfort that doesn’t require effort to maintain, beauty that feels like yours rather than performed, a home that restores you rather than one you just pass through.

That night at Tigre, I wasn’t just enjoying a good cocktail in a nice room. I was experiencing what it feels like when someone has thought carefully about every detail of how a space should make you feel. That kind of intention is available to all of us, in whatever form our own spaces take.

Notice the spaces that make you feel something. The corner of a café where the light is always right. The hotel lobby that slows your breathing the moment you walk in. The room in your own home where you consistently feel most like yourself. There are reasons those spaces work on you, and once you start looking for them, you’ll find them everywhere.

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There’s a person you’ve probably noticed at a restaurant at some point, sitting alone, completely at ease with it. No phone propped up as a social crutch, no performative scrolling to fill the silence. They ordered something good, they’re looking around the room, and they seem genuinely happy to just be there. Without doing anything in particular, they’ve become the most interesting person in the space.

I think what draws your eye is how rare it actually is to see someone fully comfortable in their own company. Most of us have a hard time being alone in public without reaching for something to fill the silence. It feels vulnerable in a way that’s difficult to explain, which is exactly why the people who’ve moved past it seem so effortlessly at ease with themselves. They’re not performing anything.

So much of how we experience going out has become tied to who we’re with and how it looks. Whether we’re grocery shopping as a group activity or sharing our matcha order on social media, it’s almost like experiencing life in moments of solitude is a thing of the past. We’ve built so much of our social lives around the idea that experiences need witnesses to count.

So when someone walks into a room alone and seems genuinely unbothered by the absence of all that, it registers. It reads as a kind of independence that most people wish they had more of.

Dating yourself is really just the practice of treating your own time with the same intention you’d bring to a night with someone you were excited about. The good restaurant, the outfit you actually feel good in, or the plan that was made because you wanted to do it and not because it was the easiest option. Most of us don’t extend that kind of care to ourselves by default. Solo time gets the practical version of everything. You might choose the place that’s close and convenient, or make dinner based on whatever’s-in-the-fridge. You might spend the entire time scrolling on your phone.

And I get that there’s something that feels a little overindulgent about putting real effort into an experience that’s just for you. But that feeling is exactly worth examining, because what it’s really saying is that you don’t quite believe your own company is worth the effort. The solo table person has clearly made peace with the opposite conclusion, and you can feel it from across the room.

You might think people are going to notice you’re alone, and that noticing is going to mean something. But the reality is that nobody is ever cataloguing your solo status or constructing a narrative around it. The stories we tell ourselves are almost entirely fictional, and the moment we realize that, something loosens.

What’s left when the self-consciousness fades is just the room, and rooms can be pretty interesting when you’re finally paying attention to them. You notice things that normally get filtered out. You’re not performing for anyone or managing anyone else’s experience of the evening. You’re just there, watching, present in a way that’s harder to access when you’re splitting your attention.

That presence is what the solo table person actually radiates. Not some curated image of independence, just someone who got comfortable enough with themselves to stop narrating the experience from the outside. It turns out that's a pretty rare thing, and the room can feel it.

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Love,
Becca

I love staying in high-end hotels.

I love walking through the door and being inundated with sensory details, like a subtle smell of lavender or the plush feel of a rug beneath my feet. I love immediately hopping on the bed and rolling around on a soft, pillowy comforter.

I tend to get the best night’s sleep in a soft hotel bed, with the AC blasted and the blankets wrapped around me like I’m in a burrito of clouds.

I’ve thought a lot about what actually creates that feeling, because I want it at home. And the more I’ve paid attention to it, the more I’ve noticed that it has very little to do with the size of the room or the price tag on anything. It’s almost entirely about intention. Someone made a series of small, considered decisions about what the experience of being in that space should feel like, and those decisions are invisible until you start looking for them. The good news is that most of them are completely replicable.

The bathroom is where I’d start, every time.

Personally, I think the bathroom sets the tone for the entire experience of a space. A hotel bathroom that feels considered makes the whole room feel more luxurious regardless of the square footage, and the same logic works at home. It’s one of the easiest places to make a real difference.

Hand soap is the obvious place to begin, and I mean this genuinely. The soap next to your sink is something you interact with multiple times a day, and there’s a real difference between the pump you grabbed without thinking and something with an exfoliating texture and heavenly scent. For a truly luxurious experience, I recommend Aesop Reverence Aromatique Exfoliating Hand Wash.

An exfoliating hand soap in particular turns a completely functional task into something that feels like a small indulgence, which is exactly the logic behind every good hotel bathroom amenity. Not everyone can justify spending $90 on Loewe Tomato Leaves Liquid Soap, but even some grocery store finds like Mrs. Meyer’s have options that are genuinely nice without being precious. Put it in a clean pump dispenser if it doesn’t already come in one.

From there, pairing your hand soap with a matching hand lotion makes more of a difference than it sounds like it should. Hotels do this because the continuity of scent creates a sensory coherence that reads as luxury even when you can’t name exactly why. Both next to the sink, paired and intentional, and your bathroom already feels more like somewhere someone thought about.

A small tray to hold all of it helps too. The difference between products scattered across a counter and the same products sitting in an organized grouping is the difference between a bathroom that feels cluttered and one that feels considered. Hotels are obsessive about this kind of visual editing and it’s completely worth borrowing.

Scent is probably the single most underrated element of what makes a hotel feel the way it does.

The best ones have a signature scent that registers the moment you walk in, and it does something to your nervous system that no amount of nice furniture can replicate. A consistent candle or diffuser in your living space, something present enough to register but not so strong that it becomes overwhelming, creates an ambient atmosphere that changes how the whole apartment feels. The key is consistency. One scent that you use regularly starts to become associated with your home the same way a hotel scent becomes associated with the memory of being there.

I recommend Apotheke Co. for a wide range of luxurious scented candles that are reasonably priced.

For the bedroom specifically, a scented spray on your pillows before you go to sleep is the kind of detail that sounds unnecessary until you try it and then becomes genuinely hard to give up. It’s a thirty second thing that makes getting into bed feel like a moment rather than just the end of the day. I highly recommend the Jo Malone London Lavender & Moonflower Pillow Mist.

But while scents are the easiest way to make your home feel like a cozy little getaway, bedding makes the most disproportionate difference.

You don’t need to spend a lot, but you do need to be intentional. The things that make hotel beds feel the way they do are actually pretty simple: good quality sheets with a higher thread count, a mattress topper if your mattress needs some help (I personally prefer pillow toppers over memory foam), and enough pillows to feel genuinely abundant. Hotels don’t put two pillows on a bed. They put four, or maybe even six, because the excess is part of the point. It signals that comfort was considered here, that someone wanted you to be able to arrange yourself exactly however you needed to.

White or neutral bedding reads as more luxury hotel-like, mostly because the uniformity of it looks more intentional than a loud pattern. A good duvet, a waffle or linen throw folded at the foot of the bed, a couple of euro shams behind your regular pillows. None of these things have to be expensive purchases, but together they make a bed that you actually want to get into at the end of a long day.

Now, everything up to this point has been a suggestion, but I’m about to give you the one non-negotiable: never use that big, bright, sterile, overhead light. Little lights only. What do I mean by this?

Most apartments are lit terribly by default, with overhead lighting that’s bright and flat and makes everything look worse than it actually is. Hotels rarely use overhead lighting at all in guest rooms. They use lamps and accent lighting that creates warmth and dimension rather than just illuminating the space. If you have overhead lighting on a dimmer, use it low or not at all in the evenings. If you don’t, a couple of well-placed lamps will change the atmosphere of your space more dramatically than almost any other single thing you can do.

Make sure to also use warm bulbs. The difference between a cool white bulb and a warm one is the difference between a room that feels like an office and a room that feels like somewhere you actually want to be.

The last thing, and maybe the most important one, is the idea of removing friction from the experience of being at home.

Hotels feel effortless because everything you need is already there, already in the right place, already thought through. You don’t have to hunt for anything or manage anything. A lot of what makes a home feel draining rather than restorative is the accumulated friction of things that are just slightly off, the burned out bulb that’s been there for two months, the bathroom counter that got away from you, the bedroom that never quite came together. None of these things feel like a big deal individually, but they add up to a space that asks something of you every time you’re in it instead of giving something back.

The hotel feeling is really just the feeling of being somewhere that someone took care of. And it turns out you can give that to yourself. It just requires deciding that your home is worth the same attention you’d give a space you were putting together for someone else, and then actually following through on the small details that create the feeling you’ve been chasing every time you check in somewhere nice.

Start with the soap. You’ll feel the difference immediately, and it’ll make you want to keep going.

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That freedom to walk around and just pop in somewhere that looks interesting is becoming a bygone era. Moving through New York is a heavy logistical puzzle governed by Resy notifications, calendar invites, and phone alarms. Getting a table at a decent spot requires sitting at your laptop at 9:59 AM on a random Tuesday, hitting refresh just to lock down a 5:30 PM or 10:30 PM slot three weeks from now. We’ve traded the fun of figuring it out as we go for the security of a confirmation code, effectively turning a casual dinner into something that feels like a calendar placeholder.

This completely changes how it feels to make plans with people. When my night is mapped out weeks in advance, I’m constantly watching the clock. If I’m having a great conversation over an early drink, I can’t just stay and order another round. I have to cut it short because I’m calculating the walking time to my next booking.

The schedule dictates our fun nights out, forcing us into a rigid timeline that leaves no room for the random detours that actually make New York fun. We are so busy keeping our appointments that we forget how to just exist in a neighborhood.

The apps rely on a sense of manufactured scarcity that changes why we even go to these places. When a restaurant is constantly booked out, the goal shifts from enjoying the actual food to just winning the slot. Getting the hard-to-get reservation turns into an achievement instead of just an enjoyable night away from your responsibilities.

It alters the energy of the dining room, too. When everyone in the room had to fight an algorithm to get a seat, the vibe can feel incredibly performative, filled with people documenting the win rather than relaxing. (Note: This is not a dig on the people who choose to photograph their meals. My camera always eats first.)

This can put a ridiculous amount of pressure on the actual night. When you have to plan a dinner a month in advance, your expectations are sky-high. Every little detail is under a microscope because you invested so much emotional and logistical effort into just getting through the door. A meal can’t just be a normal, comforting Tuesday night anymore because the system forces it to be a whole event. If the pasta is just okay, or the service is a little slow, it feels like a failure of investment rather than just an average night out.

I also feel as though we’re losing the actual neighborhood vibe of these spaces. The best spots in the city are built on regulars. The people who live around the corner and wander in on a whim because they know the bartender or love the house wine. When every seat is claimed weeks in advance by people traveling across boroughs to check a box, that local connection disappears. The dining rooms become completely detached from the blocks they sit on, acting as checklist destinations rather than neighborhood living rooms.

When making a reservation is the only way to ensure a good night out, the unpredictability that makes the city feel alive gets pushed aside. We’ve optimized our social lives to the point where we rarely risk a bad meal, but have we also eliminated the chance to genuinely be surprised?

Jimmy and I went a few nights ago with no real agenda beyond bowling and seeing what the food situation looked like, and we ended up staying way longer than either of us planned.

The reason we went in the first place was a collab I’d been eyeing: Brooklyn Bowl is currently serving the BK Fried Chicken Pierogi, a limited-run item from a partnership between Veselka and Blue Ribbon Restaurants. If you’re not familiar, Veselka is the East Village institution that’s been serving Ukrainian diner food since 1954, and Blue Ribbon is the restaurant group behind some of the most excellent spots in the city. Together they made a fried chicken pierogi that had no business being as good as it was, and it’s only available until Monday, May 25th.

We got our lane, ordered drinks, and the pierogis arrived somewhere in the middle of the first game, which in hindsight was probably my downfall. I was on a tear early on, threw three strikes in a row, and won that first round without much competition. Then the food showed up. The BK Fried Chicken Pierogi is shredded chicken and collard greens wrapped in tender dough, breaded, fried, and tossed in Blue Ribbon Signature Spice, served with honey sour cream and pickles for $16. The spice blend gave each one a salty, savory punch, and the honey sour cream added just enough sweetness to balance it out in a way that kept me going back for the next one before I’d finished the last. Jimmy, who had been paying attention to the actual game while I was busy with the plate, came back and won the next two rounds. I have no regrets.

There was a band playing while we bowled. It was a folksy, fun kind of set that filled the room with energy, and after we finished our games we decided to stay. We found a spot, got another round, and let the music do its thing. It was one of those nights where nothing was planned past the first hour and it still managed to stretch into something worth remembering.

Brooklyn Bowl has a way of doing that. The food and the bowling and the live music all share the same space, and the night kind of builds on itself without you having to force it. The Veselka x Blue Ribbon pierogi is a genuinely good reason to go right now, and with the collab ending Monday, the window’s closing fast.

Brooklyn Bowl is located at 61 Wythe Ave in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

This is one of those moments in your life that happens to you for the very last time, but you don’t realize it until much later. Maybe your last pregame was senior year of college, or a few years later with some out of town friends that are staying with you in your tiny city apartment. At some point the plan shifted from “come over at eight and we’ll head out together” to “just meet us there,” and I think we lost something in that transition that’s genuinely worth getting back.

Part of it is financial, and I think we should be honest about that rather than pretending otherwise. If you live in a major city, I’m sure you feel the weight of this.

Going out in New York City in 2026 is expensive in a way that requires a certain amount of strategy if you want to do it regularly without feeling it in your bank account for the rest of the week. A cocktail at any halfway decent bar is running between twenty and twenty-five dollars before tip. Dinner for two with a bottle of wine will casually become three hundred dollars before you have had time to consider the calculations. A night out that involves both dinner and drinks at multiple spots can quietly become a very significant expense, and when you are doing this regularly with a group of friends, it adds up faster than anyone wants to admit.

Pregaming solves this in the most straightforward way possible. A good bottle of wine at a wine shop costs a fraction of what two glasses would cost you at a bar. Making a simple spread of food at home before heading out means you arrive somewhere already fed and happy rather than starving and ordering a full meal on top of your drinks. You get to have the long, unhurried part of the evening, the part where the conversation actually goes somewhere, before the noise and the bill have a chance to cut it short.

But the financial case is almost beside the point, because the real reason I miss pregaming has (almost) nothing to do with money.

I miss the ritual of it; the intimacy of being in someone’s home while everyone is still getting ready, the energy of a night that is full of possibility because it has not happened yet. There is a version of the evening that only exists in that window, before the reservation and the crowds and the check, when you are all just together in a kitchen with good music and nowhere to be for another hour. In these moments, nobody is performing for a room full of strangers. You’re just with your people, catching up in the way that actually counts.

I spent a lot of evenings like this when I was younger and I didn’t appreciate them the way I should have. They felt incidental then, just the preamble to the real thing. Looking back, I think they these moments were often the real thing.

Pregaming means walking into the bar or restaurant already warm, already laughing, already in the version of yourself that is genuinely happy to be out. You’re not arriving cold and spending the first forty minutes trying to find your footing. The night has already begun, and everything that follows is just adding to something that is already going well. If you think about it, when you start the evening at home, you give yourself the flexibility to move through the city the way it was meant to be experienced, without the pressure of extracting an entire night’s worth of value from a single reservation.

So I want to bring it back. Not the college version of it (those frantic last-minute shots before the cab arrives, taking you out for a night you will only half remember) but something more than that. An intimate gathering at someone’s apartment before heading out. A few simple drinks and a good playlist. An hour or so of just being together before the city takes over.

It costs less, it starts the night better, and it gives you back the part of the evening that used to feel the most like home.

I think we’re about to be reminded of that in a very significant way.

The next few years will bring a flood of AI-generated content and AI-powered service. The friction will be removed from countless transactions. Recommendations will be instant and personalized, check-ins will be seamless. The entire infrastructure of daily life will become more efficient, and less and less of it will involve another human being.

And as that happens, the things that can only exist between people will become more rare and more sought after than they have been in a long time.

The hospitality industry sits at the center of this shift in a way that is worth paying attention to. Its highest and most irreplaceable value has always been something that automation can’t deliver at a fundamental level: the feeling of community and belonging in a single moment in time.

A machine can check you in, and a well-trained algorithm can anticipate your preferences and provide exactly the right suggestion at exactly the right moment. But a person can make you feel genuinely welcome in a way that neither can. The places that continue to understand this will matter more as the world around them becomes increasingly impersonal. Warmth and unhurried attention will be appreciated in a deeper way than they ever have before. We all want our lives to have less friction, but an experience that makes us feel warm and human will only become more cherished.

What makes hospitality truly great has always been the people behind it, and the way they make you feel without you being able to point to exactly why. The host might greet you like they were genuinely waiting for you, the bartender might take the time to ask about your preferences in order to make a recommendation for your next pour. These are small gestures that go consciously unnoticed, but they make you feel good. You find yourself wanting to come back.

These spaces revolve around emotion, which is intrinsically human. You could stay at home and cook yourself a perfectly good meal, or you good go out for dinner and reconnect with an old friend over a dish that was prepared for you with consideration, surrounded by ambiance that was carefully engineered to make you feel comfortable. The staff waits on you and the bartender crafts drinks for you while conversation hums in the background. Over the course of a good night, these moments unconsciously accumulate into something larger than any one of them, and by the end the only thing you might remember is how good it felt to be there.

Emotion is the thing that no system can be trained to produce, because it was never built on logic to begin with. It is built on the instinct to make someone feel cared for. A great room on a great night leaves you with a warm feeling that sits with you the next morning when you’re already thinking about when you can go back.

AI can surface the restaurant, but it can’t give you a feeling that lasts. Evoking emotion and creating memories that stick with you is what hospitality is all about.

In a world designed to eliminate friction, the experiences that make us feel deeply human may become the most valuable of all.

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Brunch with a View: Laser Wolf

Start your day at Laser Wolf, an Israeli-inspired restaurant with a seriously elevated vibe. If you’re looking for a delicious brunch spot, this one’s a winner. The star of the menu? Unlimited salatim, a generous spread of Israeli-style cold mezze that comes with every entree. The spread typically includes hummus, baba ganoush, Israeli pickles, cabbage slaw, beets with labneh, tabbouleh, and schug & harissa, all served with warm, fluffy house-made pita to scoop it all up. It’s the perfect starter for your rooftop crawl and a great way to fuel up for the day ahead.

Laser Wolf has a lively, social atmosphere, with good music and a fun crowd. The space itself is semi-open, so you can enjoy the outdoor feel with the comfort of indoor seating. This spot is a solid choice to kick things off, whether you’re stopping by for brunch or popping in for a relaxed evening vibe.

Casual Afternoon Drinks: Berry Park

After brunch, take a short walk over to Berry Park, a laid-back, beer-garden-style rooftop that’s perfect for an afternoon drink. The vibe here is casual and no-frills, making it an easygoing stop between more high-energy rooftops. This spot has a strong focus on craft beer, with a solid selection of cocktails and wine for those who prefer something different.

The rooftop is spacious, with plenty of standing room but also ample seating if you want to relax for a bit. Pair your drink with classic bar snacks like burgers, fries, or wings. If you’re in a group, this is the perfect place to kick back, enjoy the views, and recharge before the next stop.

A Tropical Escape: LilliStar

Next up, make your way to LilliStar on the rooftop of the Moxy Williamsburg for a complete vibe shift. This 11th floor gem transports you somewhere far from Brooklyn, with lush palms, wide-brimmed umbrellas, lotus sculptures, and green marble setting the scene for a tropical afternoon.

The cocktail program comes from the award-winning Bar Lab Hospitality team behind Broken Shaker, so you know the drinks are going to be something special. Think playful, inventive sips with views of the Williamsburg Bridge, the East River, and Lower Manhattan spread out before you. It's a fun and unexpected stop that keeps the crawl feeling fresh. Just note that LilliStar is only open on weekends, so plan accordingly!

A Little More Sophisticated: Bar Blondeau

As the afternoon shifts into golden hour, head over to Bar Blondeau, where you’ll find refined cocktails and a more sophisticated, European-inspired atmosphere. Located atop the Wythe Hotel, this indoor rooftop lounge offers panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, making it a stunning spot to enjoy drinks while the sun sets.

The vibe here is intimate, perfect for unwinding and enjoying a conversation. The space is filled with soft banquettes, warm lighting, and chic decor, giving it an effortlessly sophisticated feel. If you’re a fan of ambiance, this is the place to be.

Bar Blondeau’s cocktail menu is creative and well-balanced, with options like vermouth, amaro, and spritz variations. There’s also a great natural wine selection and small plates like oysters and crudo. It’s a perfect stop for a more refined drink before the night picks up.

Golden Hour Dinner: elNico

Before heading to the big skyline views, stop at elNico, the rooftop restaurant and bar at The Penny Williamsburg. This one is a real standout! It’s a full dining destination with bold Mexican flavors, a menu inspired by family recipes, and cocktails that lean heavily into agave-based spirits. The panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline are as impressive as anything else on this crawl, and the atmosphere is lively and fun without feeling overwhelming. Try to snag a sunset reservation if you can.

Sunset & Skyline Views: Westlight

For unbeatable views of the Manhattan skyline, Westlight is your must-visit. Located on the 22nd floor of The William Vale Hotel, this rooftop offers 360-degree outdoor views, making it the perfect spot for sunset cocktails. As you step off the elevator, you’re greeted by an indoor lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows, sleek modern decor, and a stylish central bar.

From here, you can head outside to the expansive wraparound terrace, which is fully open-air and offers a variety of seating options. Whether you’re standing, lounging on sleek patio furniture, or sitting at the bar, the views are absolutely stunning.

Westlight offers high-end cocktails and elevated bar bites like truffle fries, wagyu sliders, and shrimp dumplings. The food menu is great for sharing, making it an excellent stop before you head into the night. The vibe here is sophisticated yet lively, and with those sunset views, it’s one of the best rooftop experiences in the city.

Late-Night Party Energy: Water Tower

Finally, to wrap up your Williamsburg rooftop crawl, head to Water Tower, located on the rooftop of The Arlo Williamsburg. Named after the iconic water tower structure it’s housed in, this spot offers a truly unique experience. Inside the cylindrical water tower, the atmosphere is moody and club-like, with dim lighting and a DJ setup creating an energizing, party-ready vibe.

Step outside the tower onto the narrow wraparound terrace, and you’ll be treated to expansive city views. The space is mostly standing room, adding to the energetic feel of the place, making it perfect for those looking for a lively night out. While the focus here is more on the party atmosphere, you can still enjoy a strong cocktail and soak in the views.

Water Tower brings the energy and is the ideal place to end your rooftop hopping adventure with a bang. If you’re looking to keep the party going, this is the place to be!

That’s a wrap on your Williamsburg rooftop crawl! From laid-back brunch vibes to high-energy late-night fun, there’s a spot for every part of your day. Sip cocktails with a view, indulge in delicious food, or dance under the stars. No matter your vibe, Williamsburg has everything you need to enjoy the warmer months to the fullest. So grab your friends, soak in the sunshine, and let the rooftop adventures begin!

In major cities like New York and Boston, we’re used to familiar circles of coworkers, college friends, and the people we see at the same gym. We rarely find ourselves sitting next to strangers for two to three hours with nothing but a shared menu to bridge the gap. But that is exactly the point of the rise of these private supper clubs, where you trade predictable restaurants for the unpredictable intimacy of a shared table, often in a residential space.

The most interesting seats in the city right now are being found through Substack links and Instagram DMs, tucked away in buildings where the host stand is a buzzer and a flight of stairs.

Ryan, the co-founder of the SoHo loft dinner series Off the List, says their project grew out of a desire to make dining feel more intentional again.

“Off the List started from a simple idea: bring people back to the table in a more meaningful way,” he explains. “In a city like New York, dining can feel fast and transactional. Chef Matt and I wanted to create something more intimate where people slow down, share a table, and actually connect over food and wine.”

Alongside Chef Matt, he hosts dinners that feel less like a commercial transaction and more like a deliberate pause in the middle of a frantic week. They collaborate with small wine producers, pairing a five course meal with bottles you will not find on a standard liquor store shelf.

Ryan says the difference comes down to how deliberately the experience is designed.

“What makes it different from a restaurant is the level of intention and intimacy,” he says. “Each dinner is limited, curated to a theme, and private. Guests are guided through a full experience rather than just ordering a meal, and that creates a deeper connection to both the food and the people around them.”

At Off the List, that experience unfolds course by course. As the wine is poured, guests hear the story of the small producer behind the bottle. As plates arrive, the work behind each dish becomes visible in real time. There’s a feeling of closeness that comes from sitting on someone’s actual furniture or passing a heavy ceramic bowl of pasta to the person on your left. These small, tactile rituals of care do much of the work of breaking the ice before the first course is even finished.

We can see a similar thread with The Social Section Supper Club, which has proven that this craving for community is not a New York specific trend. Operating out of Boston, the team approaches each dinner as a social experience as much as a culinary one.

“Supper clubs create a space for connection in a way traditional dining doesn’t,” the founder explains. “It’s slower, more personal, and centered around the experience just as much as the food. Each dinner is intentionally curated to feel intimate, social, and a little unexpected.”

In these rooms, the host acts as a social architect. This is often a one or two-person production where the founder handles the tablescape, the playlist, the guest list, and the digital outreach. There’s creative autonomy in these micro-hospitality brands. Because the scale is small, the host can afford to make decisions that would never make sense in a commercial kitchen. They can choose a heavy linen napkin that needs to be hand washed or a specific vintage glassware set that would be too fragile for a high volume bar. These choices signal to the guest that they are in a space that was built by a person rather than a corporation.

This sense of belonging is also at the core of Club Crumbs, a series that has built a dedicated following by focusing on the intersection of good food and even better conversation. These elaborately decorated gatherings rely on the strength of a community built online to fill tables in the physical world. It’s a digital to analog bridge that allows people to move from being a follower to being a dinner guest. By signing up for a specific dinner, whether it is focused on a certain cuisine or a creative theme, you have already opted into a shared interest.

The social currency in the 2026 dining scene has shifted from booking the hottest table to being part of the right community. We’re moving past the era of dining as a performance. There’s something lovely about the tactile effort of a handwritten place card, or dining at a spot that takes a little longer because the host is telling us the story of the wine pairing before we dive into the first course.

Great hospitality is about finding a state of mind where the noise of the day recedes and you are grounded in a very real place for a few hours. By the second course, as the wine flows and the conversation loosens, the room often comes alive in a new way. The room changes from polite stranger energy to old friend warmth.

These clubs have tapped into a very real hunger for belonging, and the industry is watching.

Featured Supper Clubs

Off the List
Sommelier Ryan – @cellarboss
Chef Matt – @matt_wasson_

The Social Section Supper Club
@thesocialsection
thesocialsection.com

Club Crumbs
Madeline – @crumbsofnyc
crumbsofnyc.com

We all went, we all posted. And truly, there is no judgement from me; I’ll be the first in line to arrange the table to look as aesthetic as possible for my IG followers. But while there was a moment when that felt fun and new and like the whole point of going out, something has shifted in the way we embrace atmosphere and design trends when we dine.

Gone are the days of Instagram walls and neon signs at the chic hotspots. The spaces that are actually packed right now are not designed for our camera roll.

In the 2010s and into the early 2020s, restaurants stopped trusting their own atmosphere and started engineering moments instead. The Instagrammable feature became the lead product. The food, the service, and the design became secondary delivery mechanisms for a grid post.

You paid for a meal and left with a digital souvenir and the vague feeling that something was missing. This orchestrated “Instagrammability” started to feel transactional, and aged about as well as a Snapchat filter. When everyone is lining up to take the same photo in front of a neon sign, you feel like a prop in someone else’s set.

What is replacing it is harder to name, which is probably the point. The rooms winning the 2026 New York dining scene are built around the feeling of being in a space. The restaurants with the waitlists and the word of mouth right now have a gravitational pull that a flower wall never did.

As a frequent diner, a few clear patterns are emerging. Gen Z is quietly rewriting the rules of what a great night out looks like, and the industry is following their lead. Here is what I am seeing:

Sound as a design decision. Listening bars have become one of the most talked about trends in the New York dining scene right now, and honestly, I get it. There is something that happens to you inside a room that was genuinely built around sound. Eavesdrop in Greenpoint, Honeycomb in Park Slope, Tokyo Record Bar in Greenwich Village. These are not bars that happen to have a good playlist running in the background. The acoustics are intentional, the sound systems are serious, and the whole layout of the room is oriented around the experience of actually listening to music the way it was meant to be heard.

The energy in these spaces is slower and more intimate than your average night out, mostly seated, usually reservations only, the kind of place where a two hour sit feels like the entire point of being there. What I find most interesting about the listening bar moment is what it reveals about what people are actually looking for right now. A reason to settle in, pay attention, and be somewhere specific for a few hours without the pull of anything else competing for your attention.

Architectural lighting. This one is a little more specific (and at the same time, vague) but you know it when you see it. The current dining scene relies heavily on indirect, integrated contour lighting that feels like it radiates from the building itself. Places like Eavesdrop utilize warm amber cove lighting tucked seamlessly into wood-paneled curves. The light sources remain intentionally hidden to create a soft, cinematic glow highlighting the organic geometry of the room. This approach pulls from a 70s lounge aesthetic and an Art Deco revival to build a deeply nostalgic atmosphere. The result is a moody, intimate environment that quietly signals your brain to settle in and disconnect from the sterile brightness of the outside world.

I’m not ashamed to admit that restaurant lighting holds nearly the exact same weight for me as the actual food menu. My daily work involves building the visual narrative of hospitality spaces across the city, and I’ve spent countless hours studying how an environment translates visually. This specific brand of integrated architectural glow has easily become my absolute favorite design choice. The soft amber warmth creates a deeply flattering environment for the guests. Hidden light sources build a completely immersive atmosphere, dictating the entire mood of the evening.

Lounge-style furniture that tells you to stay. You can instantly feel when a space is built for lingering. The physical layout does the heavy lifting. Think about the deep living room seating at Skylark or the curved U-shaped bar at Maison Premiere that puts you face-to-face with a stranger. Add in the plush warmth of Dear Irving, which feels like a glamorous uptown apartment from 1928. These venues are completely unconcerned with table turns. Every design element supports the long sit and the inevitable second round. Committing to a layout that absorbs guests for hours is a massive operational choice. In a city governed by strict square footage, giving people the physical space to simply lose track of time is a truly generous move.

The tableside ritual. Caviar service. A martini assembled in front of you. A candy cart. More than just gimmicks, these are performances of craft that require a human being to slow down and do something with care. They cannot be automated or rushed or delivered via app. I find myself increasingly drawn to restaurants where something happens at the table that I did not expect, where a person shows up and does something beautiful and unhurried right in front of me. In a city where you can have almost anything delivered to your door in twenty minutes, watching someone do something slowly and on purpose feels almost transgressive. It is the hospitality equivalent of a handwritten letter.

The physical menu. This one seems small, but it sets the tone for the entire dining experience. No more scan to begin. The return of the physical menu is a ritual of arrival, the first tactile handshake between you and the house. It means someone made decisions about paper weight and typography and how this thing should feel in your hands. It signals that the restaurant believes the experience starts before you order. It says we have something worth holding.

Old World gravity. Stepping into places like Bemelmans Bar or Monkey Bar illustrates this exact shift. These rooms physically pull you back into the era of Frank Sinatra. You’re enveloped by storied walls and tuxedo-clad waiters moving through the room with absolute purpose. They feel genuinely radical in 2026 because the vibe entirely predates the modern conversation about a venue’s digital utility. Spaces like these operate with a deep, historic confidence. That unwavering certainty translates into the ultimate form of luxury today.

All these trends pull us toward slowing down and simply existing inside a space designed for the human experience. We’re moving past the optimization era of dining where transaction speed ruled everything, leaving us in highly efficient rooms filled with tablet ordering and contactless service.

The industry is realizing that a little bit of friction is actually essential. We crave the tactile effort of holding a physical menu and sitting at a curved bar that brings you physically closer to other people. We want to dine at a spot that takes a little longer to get our food because everyone gets to pick their own vinyl soundtrack for the evening. These specific details make a room feel inhabited, ensuring your night out feels like a genuine event.

It is highly ironic that the spaces completely indifferent to the camera are the ones flooding everyone’s feed right now. Places like Maison Premiere and Eavesdrop are packed because genuine atmosphere is incredibly magnetic, and people simply cannot help themselves when they find a really good room.

Great hospitality revolves around finding a state of mind where the noise of the day recedes and you are grounded in a very real place for a few hours. You feel it in the low hum of perfectly tuned acoustics where you hear ice hitting a mixing glass three tables away, and in the drag of a heavy linen napkin across your lap. The smell of wood smoke lingering on your coat the next morning is enough to remind you exactly where you were. The room completely takes care of your memory of the night so you never even have to reach for your phone.

I’ve found that ADHD, above all else, makes it impossible for me to focus on things that don’t interest me. In my corporate career, this manifested in the inability to sit still or pay attention in boring, drawn-out meetings (that could have just been emails). When pouring over spreadsheets, my focus would shift to something else. The reflection of the sun on my office window, a new tab on my computer that had a recipe I wanted to try for dinner that evening, or (the more likely option) something on my phone.

And though this cognitive deviance has caused me an endless amount of struggle in my personal and professional life, I’ve found it to be a hidden superpower in my creative life.

When I am at my most scattered, I feel like a radio seeking a signal. I find myself scanning the horizon for something that resonates. Most people operate on a sense of what they’re supposed to be doing, but my brain operates almost entirely on the fuel of interest. This is the core of the ADHD experience that we rarely talk about. We are not incapable of focus. In fact, we are capable of a level of focus that is almost frightening in its intensity. We just need a reason to turn it on.

The moment I pick up a paintbrush or sit down with my iPad to start a digital illustration, the flickering stops and the thousand television channels go dark. It is the only time in my life that the world feels truly quiet.

This is the “hyperfocus” superpower. It is a physiological shift where the rest of the physical world ceases to exist. I’ve had sessions where I start a painting at noon and look up to find that the sun has set and I haven’t taken a single sip of water. In those hours, I am not just working. I am existing in a state of pure, uninterrupted flow. My brain, which usually struggles to prioritize a single task, suddenly becomes a laser beam.

Some people might consider this a lack of discipline, but I consider it one of my strongest advantages since quitting my corporate career and starting my creative business. When I’m locked in a project, I can produce a week’s worth of high-level work in a single afternoon because I’m not fighting my brain.

There tends to be a misconception that being a jack of all trades is a weakness. We are told to “niche down” and stay in our lane. But for the ADHD creator, the lane is the entire highway. My business is a direct reflection of this polymathic nature. When I pick up a camera for a photography session, I’m seeing the frame through the eyes of a painter. When I’m taking videos at a client event, I’m editing the sequence in my head with the same flow I use in my writing. Because I’m intensely interested in so many things, I’m able to connect dots that others might not even see. I’m cross-pollinating ideas from a dozen different hobbies into one cohesive brand.

It’s my personal belief that a restless, curious mind is the only thing that cannot be replicated by an algorithm. AI can follow a prompt, but it can’t feel the frantic, electric spark of a new obsession. In a time where everything is becoming automated, this human curiosity and passion is what will keep businesses alive.

I’ve stopped trying to force myself into a linear path and feeling guilty for the “shiny object syndrome” that leads me down a new rabbit hole every Tuesday. Instead, I see those rabbit holes as research and development. I see my wandering mind as a scout, sent out to find the next big spark of inspiration. The truth is that I am driven by a recurring cycle of falling in love. Every new interest becomes a passion, and that passion is the only thing that moves the needle.

My inability to sit still is not a flaw. My interests are not too intense or too scattered. When I look at the work I’ve created and the business I have built, I see a different reality. I see a life that is vibrant, multi-dimensional, and deeply felt. I see a career that is fueled by a genuine, child-like wonder that most people lose by the time they hit adulthood.

If you are someone who struggles with inattention, I want you to reconsider the quiet moments. Think about the last time you were so involved in a task that you forgot to check your phone. Think about the last time a new idea made your heart beat a little faster. That is your North Star.

We’re living in an age of distraction, but the ADHD brain is actually built for this chaos. We are the ones who can find the signal in the noise because we have been practicing our whole lives. We are the ones who can pivot when the market shifts because we are used to our interests shifting every month. Our “disorder” is actually a survival mechanism for a rapidly changing world.

Instead of fighting the static, I’m choosing to embrace the fact that my brain needs a high-octane reason to engage. By leaning into the hyperfocus and the endless curiosity, I’ve created a life where work feels like an extension of my own restless energy instead of a chore.

The next time you feel like your mind is a thousand places at once, reach for something that makes you curious. Allow yourself to fall in love with the process and see where the obsession takes you. When you find the thing that makes the world go quiet, you have found your superpower.

I would much rather live a life of high-intensity color and loud passions than a life of boredom. My ADHD is the engine of my creativity, and I’m letting it run at full speed.

Today, being offline is the new flex.

I feel this digital fatigue deeply. My business is built around content & social media, which means my screen time is often higher than I care to admit. On heavy scroll days, my mental fatigue feels like a heavy fog behind my eyes and a pounding in my head.

In those moments, I realize that unplugging truly is a luxury. When your livelihood depends on being “on,” the ability to be “off” feels like a radical act of self-preservation. Moving slowly is a privilege — the privilege of journaling with a fountain pen, writing in cursive, and engaging in activities that don’t require screen time.

This cultural shift is most visible in the “Analog Bag” trend that has taken over my feed. Popularized by creators like Sierra Campbell, it started as a simple hack to stop doomscrolling but has quickly become a staple of the 2026 “it-girl” uniform. These bags are meticulously curated kits designed to replace the smartphone during the day’s inevitable pauses. They are filled with physical books, crossword puzzles, film cameras, and “grandma hobbies” like needlepoint or embroidery.

The irony isn’t lost on me, of course. This is a social media trend, meaning that people are flexing their analog lifestyle while filming it for a digital audience. It’s similar to how film photography has become a popular hobby, all while the resulting photos are primarily shared and consumed digitally. Trends are naturally cyclical, and so it makes sense that the surge of digital media in the 2020s would have an eventual crashout.

We’ve seen these resurgences again and again throughout history. Once upon a time, horses were the only way to get from one place to another. When cars became the standard, horses didn’t just disappear from modern lifestyles. Instead, they became a high-status luxury. Only the wealthy now have the time, the space, and the resources to be equestrians.

I predict that something similar will happen with analog skills. In a world where its not practical to write in cursive over typing on a keyboard, or read a physical map instead of using GPS, having the skill and time to do so will become a status symbol. It will become a display of intellectual independence and autonomy over your own mind. Digital life is designed to be frictionless, but friction is where meaning lives. When everything is instant, nothing feels special. Spending thirty minutes to develop a roll of film or twenty minutes to hand-write a letter signals that you possess the rarest commodity of 2026: uninterrupted time.

Our life choices are increasing made by AI, our reality increasingly filtered through a screen. Our attention is being harvested by algorithms and social media has become the cheapest form of entertainment.

However, we’re starting to see a push in the opposite direction. People are opting out of this cycle. We’re listening to vinyl records for a more active, physical listening experience. We’re embracing the grain of a developed film photo and the smudge of ink on a handwritten page, because these things prove that a human was involved and not a machine.

If AI can do it, it’s a commodity. If a human has to labor over it, it’s a luxury.

When I think about my present moment and how I want to live, I am making a conscious choice to embrace this lifestyle shift, even within my business. I’m starting to integrate analog tools into my creative process and set boundaries that feel like a luxury, such as “no-screen Sundays”, and replacing my morning scroll with a physical book. The difference in my mental clarity has been refreshing. I’m finding that my best business ideas don’t come when I’m staring at a screen, but in the quiet moments when I’m fully unplugged.

My verdict for 2026 is that hot girls are fully present. They sit at coffee shops with a paperback instead of a Kindle. They go to concerts with no phone in sight, absorbing the music with their own eyes rather than through a lens. They understand that in an age of infinite digital copies, the original, physical self is the most valuable thing they own.

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What surprises me when I look back is how slowly the creative thread pulled me forward, even when I didn’t realize I was following it. Before Providence and the early morning alarms, I had been in a tech job I loved. It was my first glimpse of what creativity could feel like inside a corporate space. I was working in talent acquisition, but I found ways to drift into employer brand work. I was able to lead the redesign of our company career site and shape small storytelling moments with the marketing team. It was the first time I felt that mix of curiosity and clarity, like the work I was doing tapped into something I cared about. Then the layoffs came and the path I thought I was walking disappeared in a single afternoon.

It is hard to explain what happens to your sense of direction after a layoff. I kept trying to find another role that felt right, but nothing opened up. Everything that once felt possible started to feel slightly out of reach, like a room I could see through the doorway but couldn’t step into. Eventually, I took a job in Providence because I needed the paycheck, even though a part of me already knew it would take more than it gave.

That time in my life was a loop of early mornings, long commutes, and evenings where I got home too tired to think. The job was structured in a way that left little room for imagination. Every task felt predetermined and every process felt older than the people using it. I kept trying to convince myself that stability mattered more than feeling alive in my work, but underneath everything, I was deeply sad. I missed having time for my hobbies and spending time with my friends. More than anything, I missed feeling connected to something that gave me purpose and fulfillment.

Somewhere in that heaviness, I started making art again. Painting at first, then digital illustration. Small scraps of color and shape that made the days feel less suffocating. It was the only part of my routine that felt like mine. I opened an Etsy shop without thinking too hard about it. I didn’t expect it to grow, but I needed a place where my imagination could exist without being evaluated or approved. It became a small anchor in a life that felt like it was slipping out of my hands.

I kept making art. I kept posting it. It felt like a little pulse running underneath everything else. I didn’t have a name for what I was doing, but I knew it made me feel awake in a way I had missed.

The opportunity to move to New York came, and I longed to make the leap. I wanted to work in marketing — to feel creative on purpose, not just in the small corners of my day. But every job search led nowhere, and the longer I stayed in Providence, the more restless I became.

Eventually something shifted. Not dramatically, but enough that I finally asked myself a question I had avoided for months. Why am I waiting for someone else to give me permission to build the creative life I want? That question echoed through me in a way I couldn’t ignore. It was the moment I realized that the path I kept trying to find might be one I had to create myself.

That is how The City Select began — with the quiet decision to stop shrinking my creativity to fit inside other people’s job descriptions. At first it was just a place to put the things I loved, like the vibe of a restaurant or the feeling of a well-designed space. But what started as a creative outlet grew into a business that carried my work further than I could have ever expected.

I learned how to shoot and edit. I built a website. I started writing on Substack. I created content for restaurants and small brands. I refined my eye for design. I followed the things that made me feel something. I paid attention to what people responded to. I experimented until the experimenting became experience. Slowly, The City Select stopped being an idea and became a world that continued to expand every time I did.

Looking back now, I can see the thread that runs through everything I’ve built. The City Select is the product of every small shift I made long before I knew where I was heading. Sometimes I think about that version of myself sitting on the Providence train at five in the morning, staring out at the dark window, unaware that she was already building the foundation for the life she would have now. She didn’t know that the art she made in the margins would become her work. She didn’t know that the small ideas would grow. She didn’t know that New York would eventually feel like the place her creativity had been reaching toward all along.

I think about her often. I think about how tired she was and how much she wanted her life to feel different. And sometimes I imagine sitting next to her and telling her what I know now. That nothing was wasted, and every moment she felt stuck was a moment that pushed her closer to something better. That the life she wanted was already taking shape in ways she couldn’t see yet.

The City Select exists because I kept following the small things that made me feel more like myself, and noticed what felt good and what didn’t. I learned to trust the quiet pull of creativity even when the rest of my world felt chaotic. And now, when I think about where I’m heading, it feels grounding to remember that everything I’ve built started with a simple truth. The life you want often begins in the smallest moments — from there, everything grows.

There’s comfort that comes from surrounding yourself with things that feel like they care back. I used to chase the next new thing, assuming that luxury meant something that feels unattainable to the average person, or something to be saved for a special occasion. But more recently, I’ve been paying attention to how small shifts can change the rhythm of an entire day; something as small as indulging in a few minutes to drink your coffee sitting down instead of rushing to the subway. These aren’t grand gestures, but they recalibrate how life feels and make ordinary moments feel intentional.

It’s easy to underestimate how much small upgrades matter because they seem too simple to make a difference. But the truth is, the things you touch every day hold quiet power. The feel of your sheets when you climb into bed, the handle of your favorite mug, the soft glow of a lamp you actually like. These are sensory reminders that your life is happening right now, not at some imagined point in the future when everything is perfect. Luxury, in that sense, isn’t about adding more things. It’s about editing your surroundings until what’s left feels good to live inside.

When I started thinking this way, I noticed how certain objects instantly shifted my mood. A heavy glass felt grounding. Linen sheets made me sleep deeper. The right scent changed the way I felt walking into a room. I started asking myself: why am I using mediocre things? Why am I saving the “nice” stuff for later? At some point, it clicked that our lives simply deserve things that make us feel good.

I love the feeling of calm indulgence. I want my home and routines to feel intentional and beautifully lived in. It may seem a little outrageous to spend $50 on handsoap, but what if that one act of washing my hands gives me unapologetic joy? Our senses exist to be used.

And yet, this idea doesn’t need to be exclusive to expensive brands. You can buy a bar from the corner store and still treat the act of using it as something worth paying attention to. The ritual of daily life is always happening, but most of us move through it half-asleep. When you start noticing how things feel, how they sound, how they smell, you begin to rejoin your own life.

We spend so much time optimizing our work, our appearance, our schedules, but how often do we optimize our surroundings? Comfort shouldn’t be considered a reward. It should be considered baseline. If you think about it, a cozy chair can change how long you want to read. A nice towel can change how you feel after a shower (towel heaters, anyone?). The lighting in your home can motivate you to either stay in and sink into your couch or go out for the night. All the things you surround yourself with shape your life, in one way or another. I think we should pay more attention to what holds value in our everyday lives. It doesn’t matter what other people find luxurious. It’s what feels right to you.

There’s also something deeply grounding about turning routine into ritual, like lighting scented candles before watching a movie in your living room. These small acts make ordinary things feel considered, not rushed. They remind you that your existing in the present moment. And that awareness, that moment of slowing down, is one of the few kinds of luxury that can’t be bought.

The heart of this idea is that luxury doesn’t need to mean having the best version of everything. It’s true meaning is surrounding yourself with things that feel good and giving meaning to small moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. When you begin to see luxury as something available in ordinary moments, it stops being an aspiration and becomes a practice.

I still love the fantasy of a designer bag or an extravagant weekend away. But those moments are rare, and they don’t carry the same kind of magic as the quiet ones that happen every day. When your space feels cared for, when the objects around you reflect intention, you begin to realize that attention itself feels like wealth. The smallest details start to feel like their own kind of reward. You stop waiting for something grand to make life feel special because the small moments already do.

Everyday luxury feels like permission to be present. To make things beautiful now, not later. To treat your surroundings as something worth shaping. You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Just start noticing. Replace what frustrates you. Keep what feels right. Let your home evolve into something that holds you, quietly and completely. Over time, those small shifts begin to collect until one day you realize your life feels softer than it used to. And that softness lingers, like a scent you can’t quite place but never want to fade.