catch-up + the new LAURENLIESS.COM

Happy Fall!!  This has got to be one of the prettiest autumns I can remember… we’ve had so many crisp fall days with lots of sunshine and moody, cool ones too (the kind that make you want to light a fire and cuddle up.)  I’ve been enjoying life at our “temporary” house, though with the glacial pace of construction at our next house, this one is feeling less and less temporary.  I’ve been super into foraging at the Meadow (what we call our future/”forever” house… photo of us in the Meadow above taken by Mark Weinberg during our recent photoshoot with Rugs USA.) There are the prettiest wild asters in bloom right now (as seen in the basket in the bottom right of the family photo) and I’ve developed a full-on obsession with asters this year.

the dining room

We’ve been cooking a ton here and I think it’s because we don’t really have any major ongoing house projects. We’ve unpacked, we’ve decorated just about as much as we will, and things are mostly done.  We’ve never lived like this before… so “finished.”  So that means more cooking, eating, and hanging and I’m into it.  (lol is this what it’s like for people who don’t move all the time??! 😉  We were in our last house for almost five years and really only totally finished it just before we sold and that’s how it’s always been for us, but I guess because we already know we plan to sell this one soon-ISH, we wanted to get it entirely ready so we could enjoy it while living here.

a recent yummy foraged watercress mushroom dish we made | get the recipe here | get the hand-forged pan here

I’ve been working from home a lot and have been loving all the big windows and doors we added to the place.  One of my absolute favorite spots here is the front “butterfly” garden… we did a sort of prairie grass-inspired meadow with lots of grasses and flowers that attract butterflies and bees.  (It ALSO HAS ASTERS IN IT!! …The pretty little white flowers on the right side of the photo below… though they’ve turned pinkish this week and I need to share a new pic!!)  It’s always buzzing with something and I’ve loved watching it grow from nothing into this beautiful little spot with plants taller than me in it.

We’ve had a busy past month or so at the house.  I photographed the whole thing with Helen Norman last month and then we photographed it all again a couple of weeks ago with Mark Weinberg for an upcoming new collection I’m launching next week!  I’ve been styling away, stealing flowers and grasses from the property and from the Meadow:

It’s been a while since I’ve posted regularly around here but as I type, a brand new LAURENLIESS.COM is being launched and I am SO. DANG. EXCITED!!!!  Here’s a peek: (if you’re reading this in your email, click here to get to the site and see for yourself.)

a peek at the homepage which has a video I made at one of our recent projects… If you go the actual homepage here, you can turn the volume on in the bottom left corner

For years I’ve been giving Instagram most of my social media time and attention but as IG has shifted and become sort of a faster-paced place with emphasis on videos over photos that makes me feel a little lost sometimes and I’ve felt myself drawn back towards creating a slower, more savored spot again.  It had been bothering me that years and years of videos and reels (and all those memories!!) were stored only on IG so we’ve been working behind-the-scenes for a while now, creating a website (LAURENLIESS.COM) that organizes FOURTEEN years of content (both written and – in more recent years- video) into easy-to-explore categories!!  Although design is our main business, I realized my posts have always been based around my passions: home, gardening, eating, living, plants and family….  I’ve written and photographed over 80-90 recipes throughout the years and felt like it was time to share them and so much more!! I initially set out to do all of this through our APP, but we were limited as to what we could with the formatting, so we set about creating a website that could handle it all. We worked with the AMAZING team at IDCO to get it all up and running and I’m so thrilled to finally share it with you!!!

The website isn’t fully loaded… there is still a lot of content to be added, and we still have some kinks to work out, but we are on our way!!  As you can see above, it’s broken down into categories that I’m passionate about: interiors, garden, food, forage, life & family, music, homework, house projects, and journal.  It basically encompasses all of my loves in 1 organized place!

INTERIORS, GARDEN, FOOD, FORAGE, and LIFE & FAMILY are made up of both written posts and videos and will be in reverse chronological order.  FOOD is filled with recipes and broken down into types of food like soups/ salads/ main dishes etc:

Each recipe has a recipe card with ingredients, photos etc. and you can divide the recipe in half for a smaller portion or multiply it for larger events:

MUSIC has links to playlists filled with my favorite music… there’s something for basically any situation.  Each recipe also has a few suggested playlists to listen to while you’re cooking/ dining!

HOMEWORK is where all 30 of our HOMEWORK episodes live and HOUSE PROJECTS are where the episodes & posts about specific projects of ours are now stored. (For example, you can watch all the episodes from our current house – from the first walk-through and eventually- as soon as we finish loading it- the finished house tour! Posts here will be a mix of videos + written posts to be able to really delve into projects.)

I have so much more to share but at the moment I’m being asked to read a very beautifully creepy-looking version of Little Red Riding Hood so I’m off! Sending you all so much love & I can’t wait to hear what you think of the new site!! We’re so open to suggestions so if you have anything you’re dying for posts on that fit into these categories, leave it in the comments section!

xo,

Lauren