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You loved our hosting episode, so we’re back for the coziest hosting season of the year. No formal dinner parties this time. We’re breaking down four fall gatherings you can steal, from a soup night with a build-your-own toppings spread to a fire pit evening with s’mores and mulled wine, a leisurely harvest brunch, and a Halloween party that’s spooky without getting kitschy. In this episode: Chili with a secret ingredient, cornbread-topped chili cocottes, and why low, wide bowls are a host’s best friendForaged decor: leaf place cards, cored-apple candleholders, and chrome spray-painted pumpkinsHow to do Halloween tastefully, from grazing tables to Southern Gothic vs. Victorian Gothic themesOur hot takes on blow-up lawn decorations, plus a round of fall hosting would-you-ratherGrab a sweater and a glass of red. Which gathering are you hosting this season? Send us your tables and tag us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace. We’ll share our favorites. See you back on the Terrace. Don’t forget the wine. 🍷

This week on the Terrace, we're turning the hosting conversation inward. Instead of how to host beautifully once, we're talking about how to build the little rituals, symbols, and stories that repeat year after year until they simply become who you are. Call it home folklore. The best part? It costs nothing. We break home folklore into three parts: Traditions. The things you do again and again. Sam brings back the legendary Romantic Restaurant, where leftovers night becomes a candlelit menu, plus her signature cold coupe always waiting in the freezer. Caitlin shares Ross Soup on Halloween, Christmas Eve gifts, and pre-dinner dance parties to Celine Dion and Chattahoochee.Tangibles. Crests, monograms, embroidered napkins, custom matchbooks, a signature flower borrowed from Mom's garden, and whether every home deserves a name (spoiler: yes, and you don't need to live in Nantucket).Preservation. Hand-made scrapbooks, pressed wedding bouquets, illustrated venue drawings, digitized home videos, Storyworth, and a custom leather notebook for a little one on the way.Along the way, we swap flea market finds from Brimfield, Paris, and Mexico City, dig into the history of our own houses, and close with a round of Would You Rather: crest on everything or one delightfully strange tradition? The takeaway: you don't need generations of history to have home folklore. Pick one small thing tonight, decide it's a tradition, and let it grow. What's the one piece of folklore that's already yours? Tell us the story on Instagram @thestudio_terrace. Bonus points if it's a little strange. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the wine. 🍷

Pull up a chair, and maybe retire one word before you sit down. This week we're taking on design language fatigue: chic, elevated, curated, light and airy, and the whole overworked vocabulary of the interiors industry. It starts with toast being called chic and becomes a bigger question: is personal taste even possible right now, when the industry needs to sell at scale and the feed rewards whatever performs best? We define discernment (the practice of intentional editing: knowing what to include, what to remove, and why) and explain how a buzzword is born, from trend forecasting to buy plan to giant marketing campaign. Along the way we confess our own crimes, including three straight years of announcing that modern farmhouse was trending and a period of scrambling for new ways to say "rattan everywhere." We ask what a trend forecaster actually brings that Pinterest Predicts doesn't, why AI slop is now as much a buzzword as curated, and why taste may be the one thing the algorithm can't fake. We also defend trends, because a good buzzword can give someone the confidence to start. Then tell us about the piece in your home that nobody would ever put on a mood board but that is completely, unmistakably you. Find us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace and tell us all about it. No filters, no captions required, just the real reason. We want to see it all. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the tea this time, piping hot. ☕ Next week: home folklore. The rituals and traditions our homes carry, and how you can start building your own home lore to feel exactly like you.

Architectural Digest's Open Door has been a YouTube fixture for years and now that it's landed on Netflix, more people are watching it than ever. This is our deep dive on the show that turned house tours into appointment viewing: why it's having this exact moment, what the musician episodes all seem to have in common, and a close read of two of the most talked-about apartments this year — Emma Roberts's Los Angeles “grown-up dollhouse” and Maude Apatow's pink-wallpapered New York escape. We'll use all of it as a jumping-off point for why we love being so nosy when it comes to celebrity homes, and what it means for the future of interior design. Follow us on Instagram @TheStudio_Terrace and tell us your favorite Open Door episode, or which apartment philosophy you're living in — dollhouse, decompression chamber, or curated art gallery.

There is a category of rooms in the home that nobody talks about when they're house shopping, nobody photographs for Instagram, nobody includes in the conversation about interior design — and that have quietly become some of the most interesting, most evolved, and most emotionally charged spaces in the modern home. The mudroom. The laundry room. The butler's pantry. The entryway. The hallway. The pantry. These are the rooms that make daily life either completely manageable or absolutely chaotic. They are the rooms that reveal how a household actually runs — more honestly than any living room vignette ever could. And in the last decade, they have had an extraordinary glow-up: designed, considered, beautiful in their own right, and finally treated as worthy of the same design intention as every other room. This is the finale of the room-by-room series, and Caitlin and Sam are going out with a celebration of the rooms that don't get celebrated enough. They dig into what these rooms used to be, what they've become, and why investing in the spaces most people ignore might be the most transformative thing you can do for your home. We want to see your forgotten rooms. The mudroom you're proud of. The laundry room with the wallpaper. The entryway that finally got a proper light fixture. The pantry you could live in. Come find us on Instagram at TheStudio_Terrace and show us everything!

The home office barely existed in residential design fifteen years ago — then the pandemic forced everyone to improvise one overnight, and it’s only now starting to get done properly. Caitlin and Sam trace the room’s evolution from the men’s study and the kitchen bill-paying desk to the pandemic-era standing-desk boom, and confess that neither of their own ‘offices’ is purely an office — one moonlights as a guest room, the other doubles as pastel-colored therapy. They get into Zoom background etiquette, the enduring ugliness of ergonomic furniture, a Hilary Duff eggplant-office throwback, and where the room goes next as some homes go all-in on a dedicated office and others get crafty with corners and closets. We want to see where you actually work! The real workspace, the improvised, the chaotic. Come find us on Instagram at @thestudio_terrace and show us your setups. We want to see all of it. Next week is our final episode in the Room by Room series — it blew right by, and it’s one we're been really excited about. We’re talking about the rooms nobody thinks about: the mudroom, the laundry room, the butler’s pantry, the entryway, the foyer — the rooms that have quietly had the most interesting glow-up of any room in the house. We'll see you back on the Terrace very soon. Don't forget the wine. xoxo

The bathroom has had the biggest glow-up in recent home design history — from a utility closet with plumbing to the room everyone wants to live in. Caitlin and Sam trace how the primary ensuite exploded during the '80s and '90s McMansion boom, why showers are quietly winning the tub-vs-shower war, and why the guest powder room is still the one room where anyone's allowed to have fun. They get into tile-mixing nostalgia, the unglamorous truth about grout color, the freestanding-tub fantasy versus its real-life function, and the eternal glass-door-vs-shower-curtain debate (verdict: steal a window curtain). Plus: Caitlin's almost-purchase of a milky mint-green pedestal sink, her new house's questionable-but-beloved mauve jacuzzi tub, and a hard-won ranking of Euro bathroom quirks — bidets included. We want to hear your bathroom situation — dream versus reality. The tile you wish you'd chosen. The tub you've actually never used. The upgrade that genuinely changed your life. Come find us on Instagram at @thestudio_terrace and tell us everything.

The Most Personal Room. The Longest Gap Between Reality and the Dream. You know this room. It's the one you think about constantly and somehow always leave for last. The linen duvet situation you haven't resolved. The headboard you've been meaning to change for three years. The nightstand that started as a temporary solution and has now officially outlived two relationships and a move. The bedroom is the most personal room in the house — and somehow the one most people have the widest gap between reality and the dream. This week, Caitlin and Sam head into the room by room series and go somewhere private. They trace the bedroom from its origins as the opulent "bed chamber" through the great beige takeover, into the Gen Z era of full-time bed rotting, and out the other side into the luxury wellness retreat we're all apparently building now. They get into the nightstand as altar, the eternal chase for the hotel bedroom, the great pillow debate, and the wellness routines that have earned a hard yes versus a very firm no. There are sconces. There are Costco sheets. There is a Kindle case that says "Smut Illustrated." This is not a drill. We want to know what your bedroom actually looks like. The real version — not the aspirational one. And we want to know the one change that would make the biggest difference. The nightstand situation. The headboard you've been avoiding. The sheets you've been meaning to upgrade for two years. Come find us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace and tell us. Drop it in the comments or DMs — this is a conversation worth having, and we will read every single one. And if this episode finally gave you permission to invest in the room you spend a third of your life in — good. That's exactly what it was for. Next week we're heading to the bathroom and the glow-up it's had in the last fifteen years. Spa culture, soaking tubs, tile situations. We basically already started. As always — don't forget to bring the wine.

Something is shifting. After more than a decade of homes being optimized for photography — staged for the grid, flattened into aspirational backdrops, stripped of anything too personal or too specific — there is a quiet, growing rebellion underway. Heirlooms are back on the shelf. Travel finds are on the credenza. The things that actually mean something are being put out instead of hidden. The anti-staging movement is not a trend in the traditional sense. It's a values shift — away from the show home and toward the lived-in home, away from the universally photogenic and toward the deeply personal. It is the home as biography rather than the home as brand. Caitlin and Sam dig into what anti-staging actually means, why it's happening now, what it looks like in practice, and — critically — how you tell the difference between a home that is authentically personal and one that is performing authenticity. Because the risk, of course, is that "lived-in" becomes its own aesthetic. Its own stage. Show us the thing you'd never stage — the piece with a story, the corner that's actually yours. Find us on Instagram @thestudio_terrace and show us the real one. We want to see it all. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the wine. 🍷

Pull up a chair — an actual dining chair — because this week we're leaving the kitchen counter behind for the room design quietly gave up on for twenty years: the dining room. We're tracing its slow disappearing act into flex spaces, homework piles, and "we'll figure out what goes there later," and its very dramatic comeback, now armed with wallpaper, a chandelier, and zero interest in being practical. We get into the great China cabinet extinction (RIP the mirrored back and the china you were never allowed to touch), why nobody registered for fine china and nobody regrets it, and the slow handoff from buffet to sideboard. We talk the one dining table measurement everyone forgets to check before they buy — hint, it's the legs — the eternal armless-versus-armchair debate, and why a $1,200 dining chair is somehow not even that unreasonable once you know what goes into making one. We also get into our current dining chair obsessions (one antique, one very expensive and very jewel-toned), the great Ruggable reckoning, chandelier indecision that rivals wedding dress shopping, and a round of Would You Rather that we somehow agree on every single time. Come show us your dining tables on Instagram @thestudio_terrace, the one you use three times a year, the one you eat at every night, and the one you wish you'd bought instead. The more dramatic, the better.

Pull up a chair — make it one near the island, because this week we're staying in the kitchen, the room that's been performing for the camera since the day open shelving was invented. We're tracing how the kitchen went from the colorful, hidden-away, mint-and-avocado workhorse of the 60s and 70s to the resale-value-obsessed, content-optimized stage it is today — and asking who actually benefits from a pot filler. We get into the great galley kitchen extinction (RIP), the rise of the appliance garage as its bougie reincarnation, the all-white-quartz-countertop fantasy that dies the moment you set down a coffee cup, and a proper slandering of marble epoxy countertop hacks. We talk butcher block islands, why your sink needs a window more than your island needs a faucet, and the eternal kitchen island debate: comfort versus aesthetics versus how many people you can actually fit around it. We also get into hosting hacks (pre-poured cocktails, chilled glassware, the importance of a vase that's always ready), the kitchen aesthetics of our favorite sitcoms, and a round of Would You Rather that ends with one of us choosing open shelving for an entire kitchen under duress. Come tell us your kitchen hills on Instagram @thestudio_terrace — the renovation you'd repeat, the one you'd undo, the appliance you're embarrassed to admit you don't use. We want all of it.

Pull up a chair — an actual one you sit in. This week on The Terrace, we're kicking off our room by room series with the space that has gone through more identity crises than any other room in the American home. The living room. The parlor. The family room. It has a lot of names, a complicated history, and apparently some very strong feelings about your TV size. We're tracing how the living room went from a gated-off formal space where the dog wasn't allowed to the casual, come-as-you-are heart of the modern home. We get into the fireplace comeback, the Frame TV conspiracy (why are we pretending we don't have TVs?), Instagram's role in the millennial beige epidemic, and the AI slop situation on Pinterest that has officially gotten out of hand. Caitlin comes fresh off a Euro trip that included the Paris Flea Market, a furniture dealer named Francois, and four days without her luggage that ended with a stranger handing it to her husband out of an unmarked car in Venice. Sam is on the hunt for mantle inspiration and may or may not be attending an estate sale or two this weekend. We also talk cluster seating yearning, the oversized ottoman coffee table moment, and why your living room should feel like somewhere you actually want to come home to — not somewhere you're scared to spill something. Come show us your living room on Instagram @thestudio_terrace — the real one, the honest one, the one with the TV you're pretending isn't there. We want to see it all. See you back on the Terrace. Don't forget the wine. 🍷

Summer hosting season is officially open. In this episode, Caitlin and Sam are pulling up every lawn chair they own to talk about how to throw the ultimate summer soirée — from color-drenched tablescapes and asymmetrical centerpieces to batched cocktails and the case for homemade party favors. They cover what's having a major moment right now (glassware as art, fruit-forward everything, Euro Mediterranean vibes) and the timeless wisdom that never expires (salt your greens, don't be in the kitchen when your guests arrive, and always let someone bring the thing they actually want to bring). Plus: the spritz debate, an oyster plate obsession, and the official announcement of Sam's Summer Soirée. Pull up a chair — or better yet, a lawn chair. Come tell us what you're planning for your summer soirée — or the hosting hack you swear by — in our DMs or the comments on Instagram @thestudio_terrace. And if you have a party theme we didn't cover, drop it below. Sam might just need it for Sam's Summer Soirée. See you back on the terrace. Don't forget the wine, preferably in a beautifully colored glass. 🍷

Look around your home right now. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it looks exactly the same as it did in 1974 and absolutely nobody has done anything about it. This week on The Terrace, we're talking home innovation — the everyday objects that finally got their glow up, the ones still desperately waiting, and the surprisingly logical reason why some things just stay ugly forever. We're covering the full spectrum: from ceiling fans (a personal vendetta, still no good options) to outlet covers and switch plates (criminally underrated, please just buy new ones), to air return vents, which somehow never got the memo that switch plates became a thing. We also get into why smoke detectors, car seats, and mini splits will probably never be cute — compliance is a real buzzkill — and why the true retail disruptors, your Nests, your Tushys, your Scrub Daddies, are genuinely some of the most exciting business stories nobody's talking about. The glow up hall of fame goes to: trash cans (we are not joking, they are beautiful now), KitchenAid mixers in pistachio, Le Creuset's shallot colorway that broke the internet, Dyson vacuums as a full-on status symbol, and the novelty toilet brush — which went from a cherry-shaped cult item to an Amazon staple faster than you can say mold hazard (and yes, there is a mold hazard conversation, and you need to hear it). Caitlin is coveting an almond nougat Breville espresso machine she absolutely does not need, and is desperate for a pebble ice machine that actually works. Come tell us the eyesore in your home that you most wish someone would finally redesign — drop it in our DMs or the comments on Instagram @thestudio_terrace. We're building a list and the best ones might just get their own episode. See you back on the terrace. Don't forget the wine, preferably in a beautifully designed glass. 🍷

Hot takes only. No hedging, no "it depends," no exceptions. This week on The Terrace, we're pulling up a chair (one you'll actually sit in) and finally saying the quiet parts out loud. We're taking on the design myths HGTV built and the industry rules we've been quietly breaking for years — including why barn doors are the real Chip and Joanna crime (not shiplap), why open shelving is a dust trap dressed up as a personality, and why matching bedroom furniture deserves a full defense. We also get into the word "investment piece" and how it's been stretched so thin it basically means nothing anymore, why color drenching is gorgeous and absolutely timestamped, and the dupe culture at High Point that's turning furniture into a race to the bottom. Sam shares her personal confession: a 13-foot sectional sofa that has made the "rug bigger than your sofa" rule basically impossible to follow. We've all been there. We're not judging. We also cover books shelved spine-in (performative and actually kind of insane), the return of rooms with doors, and why the neutral-everything aesthetic isn't a design POV — it's a refusal to make one. We close with a rapid fire agree/disagree and some very revealing would you rathers — including whether we'd rather live in a trend we hate for 10 years or publicly admit we were wrong. (Spoiler: we'll own our crimes.) This is the episode for anyone who's ever renovated something, hated it, and had to go back to Home Depot. You are not alone, and your subway tile is fine. Come tell us your hot takes on Instagram @thestudio_terrace — we want the spicy ones, the ones you've been sitting on for years. Drop them in our DMs or the comments, and don't hold back. Don't forget the wine and an opinion.