We sat down with Kevin Campion, founding principal at Annapolis-based Campion Hruby Landscape Architects, to discuss the inspiration behind his photo-heavy book, Enduring Gardens: The Tame and the Wild, and how his firm approaches new landscaping jobs. Here’s what he had to say:

We like to do very clean lines. We’ll do a clean hedge, or a line of trees, or, like, a beautiful panel of lawn. So, the armature of our gardens is tight, and they’re complementary to the architecture, and they kind of blend inside and out cleanly. But then, when we think about plants, we think about resiliency, we think about native plants. We think about the right plants for the Mid-Atlantic, or wherever we live, and we often end up covering our strong lines with plants that are natural and organic, and a little bit wilder than the hardscapes are.

 

And I think that’s sort of indicative of our work. We have order in our gardens, but then we soften it with our plantings. We’re not trying to create a garden that is in the moment. Instead, we’re trying to create a garden that is enduring, just like an architect is trying to create a house that endures.

 

You know, somebody once told me, these are handmade gardens. They’re gardens that are meticulously crafted for one family, and that’s really meaningful to me. Like some of the greatest moments of my career are when I go back to a garden, and I see how it’s loved and how it’s used. It’s heartwarming to know that you created something meaningful for a family that’s like the backdrop of their lives and the backdrop of important moments.

 

It goes back to the idea of time that when a house is finished—it’s finished. But when a garden is finished, it’s just starting.

Project Name: Fell St., Baltimore
Interior Design: Pascale de Fouchier Interiors
Built-Ins/Banquette: KB&R Home Improvement
Styling: Limonata Creative

The Dock of the Bay: The homeowners had spent a year renting in Baltimore after leaving New York. “When they found their new home-to-be, the house was already in good shape,” says interior designer Pascale de Fouchier. “What it needed was a soul.”

The five-story townhouse overlooked the marina in Fells Point. “The vision was about bringing the outside in,” de Fouchier explains. “We designed around the views, the light, the harbor. Think yacht club, but the kind that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Relaxed, nautical in spirit, quietly sophisticated.”

A Family Heirloom: De Fouchier was tasked with including a Persian rug—a treasure from one of the owner’s parents. She pulled the beige, red, and blue from the rug and let those tones thread throughout the space, quietly connecting the rooms.

“Every project has one thing that makes it click,” she says. “Here it was the tension between that Persian rug and the harbor beyond the windows—old world and new, heirloom and horizon. Once I started designing around it, everything fell into place.”

Living Spaces: The living and dining floor is where the real work happened. The dining room was conceived as a quiet, almost understated landing place—you come up the stairs, and it just settles you in.

“No grand gesture,” says de Fouchier. “Just the right proportions, the right light, the water beyond the windows.”

The family room has a wall-to-wall desk that’s sleek, modern, and completely practical. “The kind of thing that looks like furniture but works like architecture,” she says.

Radebaugh Florist & Greenhouses sits in the same spot it always has for the last century—the corner of Burke and Aigburth in Towson. So when the business turned 100 in 2024, Kaitlin Radebaugh, four years into her tenure as president and the first woman in her family to lead the company, decided it was time for a refresh.

“We had our centennial, which was awesome,” she says on a bright but chilly day in mid-February. “It’s great to have been here for 100 years, but I felt like we just weren’t reflecting exactly what we were doing.”

The Radebaugh campus includes a green-house for selling houseplants, annuals, herbs, and perennials as well as garden tools, fertilizers, and other outdoor accessories. Inside the house, with its new green-and-white striped awning, is the flower shop—don’t even try looking for a parking spot during prom season—and over the decades it’s also turned into a gift boutique stocked with cards, jewelry, candles, housewares, and accessories. There’s also Flowers & Ice, their seasonal snowball stand, which is a neighborhood hit during the summer.

All of these individual parts worked perfectly, but not always in conjunction. So, one of Radebaugh’s main goals for the renovation was to create a better connection between the greenhouse and the gift shop.

“It’s wild because there are shop people and they’re like, ‘You have a greenhouse?’ Or there’s people who shop the greenhouse for years and have never been in the shop. They’re plant people. And I guess they just thought, like, I don’t know, it’s just cut flowers inside. We’re just trying to make it a little bit more fluid.”

The renovation is also out of necessity. The once powerful greenhouse doesn’t hold as much sway anymore. “That’s changed based on generations,” she says. “The younger generation doesn’t quite garden the way the older generation did. Instead, they love indoor plants, which is great—the funkier and weirder the better.”

They also get a lot of Towson University students who are looking less for heirloom tomato plants and more for snake plants and philodendron for their apartments and dorm rooms. That meant a lot of the greenhouse was underutilized, which started Radebaugh thinking about what else she could use the greenhouse for.

“Let’s make this space more available to the public,” she thought. “Let’s have events, let’s do birthday parties, let’s bring people in.”

That’s how the renovation took shape. “We needed bathrooms, we needed to make structural changes to make it more feasible because we’ve been here so long. These are old buildings—so it’s a big endeavor.”

And since they were planning on hosting events, they had to get creative, like a durable check-out station that can double as a bar.

When her great-great-grandfather, George, started Radebaugh, he probably never imagined cocktail parties one day taking place in his greenhouses. The first two greenhouses were constructed in 1928. Next, they were able to purchase the house next door—that’s where Kaitlin Radebaugh’s father grew up. (Her general manager now lives there.) Eventually they would own other houses in and around the area.

“They all lived on the property as the generations grew,” says Radebaugh.

Those continuing the family business were mostly the men in the family. After George came his sons, Carroll and Joe. Carroll was Radebaugh’s grandfather. And then eventually her dad, Steve.

A 48,000-square-foot greenhouse was constructed on the family farm in Freeland in 1985, which allowed the business to meet the demand for potted annuals, Easter lilies, and poinsettias for their retail greenhouse, as well as for all their wholesale customers. In 1988, a 10,000-square-foot flower design center was built just down the street from the original Radebaugh. Still in operation, it houses a processing room, design  area, delivery facilities, and plenty of refrigeration space for flowers needed for weddings, funerals, and other big design purposes.

“I feel like every generation did big things,” says Radebaugh. “Everyone was doing something, whether it was purchasing land or putting up greenhouses or the design center.”

The third-generation owners included not only her dad but her three uncles, Joe Jr., Doug, and Ned, who took over their half of the business from their father, Joe. “And now it’s just me, the fourth,” she says.

Yes, Radebaugh grew up in and around the family business—she remembers making fruit baskets at Christmas—“but it was kind of a boy’s club. It was always run by men, and I think I just couldn’t ever see that I would have a place here.”

She went to college and got a business degree. “I had been out of school for several years before my dad asked me to come back. And he didn’t ask me to come back in the sense that he thought I was going to take over.” Instead, he wanted her help with marketing—her area of expertise. “So that’s when I came back and then it kind of evolved over a series of events. But I’m certainly very happy that it did.”

But it’s a lot to manage, she admits. “There’s definitely a lot of moving parts. The bulk of our business is perishable, right? We’re growing stuff. We’re importing stuff from Ecuador and Canada. So, it’s a lot to watch over.”

The shop renovation was a nice break, a chance for her to mix some feminine energy with the family business. Designer Stephanie Bradshaw, who also oversaw the complete rebrand and greenhouse space renovation, wanted the shop to both feel fresh while also paying homage to the history.

“It’s so fun and welcoming, right?” says Radebaugh. “You walk in and it’s warm and visually beautiful and then you hit the lavender wallpaper,” she says gesturing behind the check-out counter at the Queen’s Lace wallpaper.

“This was the starting point,” says Bradshaw. “I saw this paper, and I was like, ‘It’s so delicate, so lovely, and Kaitlin is so lovely.’ She’s the new female CEO, it was really kind of embodying this sense of a refreshing breath of fresh air, reimagined, soft but still calming.”

The entire space now features six different wallpapers, a spectacular tulip chandelier in a new consultation area, and lots of surprising paint hues including persimmon and Isle of Pines, a moody saturated green.

“We really wanted it to be a space where everybody felt welcome, and the community would continue to come,” says Bradshaw, who felt especially honored to be working with a legacy brand. “It’s like a dream to come in and have all these colors playing joyfully together in one space. It’s a little escape.”

Back inside the greenhouse, Radebaugh is greeted by shop dog Bonnie, a big, gentle yellow Lab. The greenhouse, where you can get mucky and wet by day but can seamlessly transform into a vibrant party room at night, represents the two sides of Radebaugh Florist & Greenhouses—and of Radebaugh herself.

It feels good to walk around and be reminded of all the changes that have occurred under her leadership.

“I don’t think I do a great job of being like, ‘Look at all the things we did,’” says Radebaugh. “I’m usually just in it.”

Project Name: Ivey Trace
House Plan and Interior Design: Julia Longchamps Design
Builder: Benhoff Builders
Architect: Ratcliffe Architecture

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Keeping House: From the beginning, the vision for Ivey Trace was deeply personal. Homeowners Jeff and Jaimie Martell were not simply building a house; they were creating a forever home that marked a fresh chapter for their family.

“The project allowed us to thoughtfully design every detail from the ground up,” says interior designer Julia Longchamps. “The goal was to create a home that felt timeless and collected, yet warm, inviting, and entirely livable. It needed to support the rhythms of daily family life while also feeling special enough for celebrations and gatherings.”

Living Spaces: The kitchen and living room spaces were meant to support everyday family life while also feeling intentional and well crafted. In the kitchen, attention to millwork and architectural detail was essential and the living room continues this approach with a warm, layered palette.

“Together, these rooms set the tone for the home and reflect the balance of beauty, detail, and livability carried throughout the project,” she says.

The Papered Wall: Color and pattern were used thoughtfully to give the home depth, personality, and a sense of history. Wallpaper played a key role throughout, adding moments of surprise and charm while also helping each space feel distinct.

“The overall palette was chosen to feel timeless rather than trend-driven, allowing architectural details and custom elements to shine,” says Longchamps. “The result is a home that feels layered and lived in, as though it has evolved naturally over time.”

Wanderlust: I’m drawn to objects that carry stories—the history major in me—pieces that have lived before and continue their journey in a new space. My style leans bohemian and maximalist, with carefully curated vignettes throughout. Think laid-back West Coast ease and Southwest desert warmth, layered with the richness, vibrancy, and old-world charm of far-flung places like Morocco and Paris, anchored by greenery that blurs the line between indoors and out. Family and friends have described it as warm and welcoming, a compliment that means everything—knowing they feel at home here.

The Country Mouse: My house dates back to 1904 and is in Plat 1 of Roland Park. Having grown up on a farm, I was drawn to a part of the city that still feels green and semi-rural. My childhood home was a historic farmhouse, so I’ve always loved houses with history—the details, the craftsmanship, and the character. I’ve embraced the historic bones of the house—original woodwork, moldings, and built-ins—while layering in objects, textiles, and furniture collected from travels and vintage finds.

Free Range: Growing up, we spent as much time outside as possible. My father always planted a large vegetable garden, and my mother’s flower beds sparked constant wonder. It’s no surprise where my love of plants comes from—or that green is my favorite color. That early connection to nature has shaped the way I approach my home. Plants are woven into my story just as much as vintage pieces, found objects, and collected treasures.

Green Thumb: I love the juxtaposition of city living layered with lush, intentional greenery, where natural elements coexist with pieces that carry history and meaning. Every plant has its own personality, which inspires me to create spaces with distinct moods and rhythms—much like curating a room with art and textiles. When I design spaces in my home, I think about composition and storytelling—how plants interact with light, color, texture, and patina, and how they can shift the feeling of a room.

Travels by Design: Some of my favorite pieces in my home are the ones that feel deeply personal, objects collected over time that carry memory, meaning, and a sense of place. I have held onto the vintage, mismatched china, glassware, and serving pieces that once belonged to my mom. I love using them for dinner parties, mixing  and matching depending on the mood and aesthetic I want to create. One piece I always reach for is the silver Champagne bucket my parents received as a wedding gift in 1968.

Eat, Pray, Love: My home reflects my interests in art, music, fashion, architecture, history, travel, and the natural world. Those influences show up in the layers of books, plants, art, and collected objects throughout the house. I love mixing contemporary and vintage pieces, found objects, and meaningful heirlooms, allowing a space to evolve naturally rather than feel overly designed or static.

Remarkable Rugs: Textiles and rugs from my travels are layered throughout the house, especially pieces from Morocco. I traveled along the coast, through the Atlas Mountains, into the Sahara Desert. The medinas and souks of Fes and Marrakesh were unforgettable—full of color, energy, and craftsmanship. I even brought an extra suitcase just for one-of-a-kind finds.

Art is Art: I’m fortunate to have incredible paintings from local artist friends. In the dining room, I feature “The New World” by Drury Bynum from his Arcana Obscura exhibition. Also in the dining room is a salvaged screen print from Housewerks—a man in a gas mask that makes a powerful statement about freedom of expression and free speech—that I’ve had for years. In the primary bedroom, there is a painting of bees by Julia Niederman, whose work has a dreamlike, narrative quality. Also, an organic wall piece by Kat Jacobs of Feathers and Fibers called “Kota.” One of my most sentimental pieces is a Victor Vasarely print I discovered years ago in a local antique shop. He was a Hungarian French artist and pioneer of the Op Art movement.

Sacred Space: For me, a home with personality feels soulful and welcoming. It invites curiosity, sparks conversation, and reflects a life well-lived. It’s not about perfection, but about intention—creating a space that feels deeply personal, layered with memory and meaning, and connected to the wider world and the quiet moments of everyday life.

As soon as Atara Bernstein opens the front door to her Mt. Washington home, you can smell something aromatic coming from her kitchen. Turns out it’s chicken soup—there’s a whole chicken inside the stock pot—simmering on the stove.

Bernstein—beautiful with her brown locks and cool-but-nice-girl energy—is also making roasted vegetables with Brussels sprouts and cauliflower she picked up from the local farmers market. They’ll roast in the oven with a Golden Milk spice blend (including saffron and cinnamon) and later she’ll add farro, pecans, and goat cheese to create a warm winter salad.

Food has been a throughline in Bernstein’s life. Some of her earliest memories include being in the kitchen with her mom, Dina, in a home that’s less than a mile away from the Colonial she now shares with her husband, Benny Herskovitz, and their three-year-old son, Tal. In 2017, she co-founded the Pineapple Collaborative, a community for women who love food, and was an early angel investor in the tinned fish company Fishwife in 2021.

Her current project, and what feels most like a return to her roots, is the “Shabbat Dinner Chronicles,’’ in which she films herself cooking decadent outside-the-box Shabbat meals to post on her @atarabernstein Instagram and TikTok accounts.

This simple act of demystifying the Shabbat meal sits firmly at the intersection of Bernstein’s childhood and her adult life. For most Jews, the traditional Shabbat dinner—eaten on a Friday night to welcome the weekly time of rest and spiritual rejuvenation—are usually homey, humble affairs, not gourmet, but comforting and familiar. Until now.

Instead of the usual baked chicken and potato kugel commonly found on Friday night tables in Baltimore, her complex, flavorful, one might say “cheffy” dishes include roasted cabbage with anchovies, miso soup with wild mushrooms, chicken confit with tomato and garlic and mint salsa verde, spring panzanella with challah croutons, strawberry vinegar pickled red onions, Japanese sweet potatoes with chili crisp, furikake hummus, and salted olive oil mandel bread.

In her soothing lilt, Bernstein talks through her menu and process with her followers (some 6,000), including the reason she picked up an item or a secret ingredient like fennel seeds in a tomato-braised brisket. Her chronicles kicked off in January 2025 and so far, she’s done 15 episodes with more on the way.

She likes to keep her ingredients mostly fresh and simple but isn’t above using a boxed brownie mix she zhuzhed up with espresso powder and olive oil. Her videos aren’t over-produced or full of cooking techniques. They’re simply a peek into this beautiful, ritualistic 4,000-year-old tradition.

“I was enmeshed from a very young age in Judaism,” says Bernstein, 35, who grew up in a modern Orthodox home. Her parents both worked in the secular world—her mom an accountant, her dad a lawyer—but “our entire weeks really revolved around Shabbat,” she says. “I would say that was sort of the most formative and important experience of my childhood.”

Bernstein attended Yeshivat Rambam Maimonides Academy, an elite Orthodox Jewish dual-curriculum day school in Park Heights. “I knew everyone in my neighborhood, I knew everyone in my school.” And she recognized early on how different and special the Baltimore Jewish community felt.

“It’s a humble, down-to-earth community, which I really appreciated, and I still appreciate now,” she says. “Growing up around a lot of very strong women who were in the workforce and trying to juggle not only raising kids and working, but then also celebrating all the Jewish holidays and embracing that—I mean, it’s a lot of work.”

But Bernstein’s mom, Dina, reveled in the practice. “A lot of people ask me, ‘How did you learn how to cook? Who taught you how to cook?’ I learned through osmosis of just being around my mom,” she says. Every Friday after school, Bernstein and her brothers did chores to get ready for Shabbat. “So, we would be vacuuming or cleaning, but I would always be the sous chef in the kitchen. And I would watch her rolling the meatballs, making chicken soup, cutting vegetables, simple things like that that I picked up because I was around her.”

That consistent weekly act was cemented into her psyche. Many of the Shabbat recipes that her mom used were handed down by her mother, Frances, whom Bernstein never met. “But she is so much a part of the family lore,” she says. “She was such a character. She was a very savvy baker, and she was known in her community for all her special, ritualistic foods around Jewish tradition.”

“I WAS ENMESHED FROM A VERY YOUNG AGE IN JUDAISM. OUR ENTIRE WEEKS REALLY REVOLVED AROUND SHABBAT.”

Frances was a first-generation American whose family came from Poland around 1920. Funnily enough, one of her recipes that has lived on is an Italian meatball which is not a traditional Shabbat food like, say, challah, roast chicken, kugel, or cholent (baked meat and vegetables). “Her meatballs were very famous,” says Bernstein, who still makes them almost weekly for her picky toddler. Dina would serve Frances’ meatballs every Shabbat on a little glass plate under a ton of red sauce with challah for what she called forshpayz, a Yiddish term for appetizers.

Frances was also well-known for her “epic cheesecake”—eaten to commemorate the holiday of Shavuot (which observes the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai and is celebrated by eating dairy foods). “I’m pretty sure if you actually had this, like, Jewish Ashkenazi stomach, you would not be able to tolerate it,” she laughs. It’s made with sour cream, cream cheese, and cream. She says, “I kind of saw cooking as a connection to my Jewish identity, but also my family history in a real kind of unique way.”

But Bernstein was also like a lot of teenagers, especially those who had grown up in an insular community. By high school she was leaning into her rebellion and vowed to leave Baltimore and never come back. (Except to visit her parents, natch—she was a nice Jewish girl, after all.) After graduation in 2009, she headed to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, where she earned a degree in photography and design, and then to the University of Maryland for a second degree in environmental studies.

“I was a little jaded after art school, just really wanting kind of more depth and wanting to make more of an impact than just being in the art world, which is why I was interested in environmental studies.”

It was there she became fascinated with food systems and the social impact around food. (And met her husband.) That led to a job in Washington, D.C., with national salad chain Sweetgreen where she managed the “Sweetgreen in Schools” program, delivering nutritional education to more than 6,000 students across the DMV, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. After Sweetgreen, she began a ticketed dinner series in her apartment called “The Wandering,” where she cooked for 12 to 20 people at a time.

A few months later, she and fellow foodie Ariel Pasternak—they had met through a mutual frien—started the Pineapple Collaborative, a women-focused community which eventually grew to more than 100,000 members and focused on creating connections through a shared passion for food. That included meaningful conversations with industry talent like Alison Roman, Christina Tosi, Julia Sherman, and Jeni Britton Bauer, who would attend events and appear on their podcast outlet, Pineapple Radio.

“It was a privilege to be able to do this,” she says. “Having access to really interesting women inspired me—it was really the stuff of dreams.”

By 2018, Pineapple Collaborative expanded through a partnership with delivery app Caviar to offer a curated list of women-owned restaurants in 16 cities. In November 2019, they debuted their own line of pantry staples, including olive oil, salt, and apple cider vinegar, that soon swelled to 10 items. Everything was female-led down to the olive oil miller. Two years later, they were looking to add a tinned anchovy to their line when Becca Millstein, the founder of Fishwife, pitched her ethically sourced canned fish company. They immediately invested.

“It was a similar thesis to our product line,” says Bernstein. “They really wanted to be sort of the midpoint between, like, a Bumble Bee tuna and a really expensive tinned fish that you get in Portugal or Spain.”

The company, known for its colorful illustrated packaging and smoked rainbow trout, is now earning over $6 million in annual revenue.

“We always used to say I think we were best at trend spotting, trend setting,” says Bernstein.

That includes Roman, now a well-known food personality with multiple cookbooks. “We knew she was going to be a star,” says Bernstein. At the time, “she didn’t have a large following. But we liked her voice and her perspective, and we were able to book her very early, before she blew up. It gave us a lot of cachet.”

Pineapple Collaborative was also among the first of the “trendy olive oil companies”—the kind of olive oil bottle you leave on your kitchen counter instead of tucking away in a cupboard. “We really predicted this New Age pantry revolution,” Bernstein says. “I think it was back in 2016. Our whole thesis was that for so many women, food is how they express themselves, more so than their closets or their beauty cabinets. And we wanted to create a brand that really accessed that. And it was very early. I don’t think anyone else was doing that.”

Her entrepreneurial talents did not go unnoticed—in 2020, she and Pasternak were named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the Food & Drink category for “building a successful community around shared food values and ethical pantry products.”

The company lasted six years, though the products live on, including a half-moon-lid salt pot that was produced in partnership with the women-run co-op Comunidad Salinera de Maras. (The pink salt is harvested by hand from ponds in the Peruvian Andes.) “It was a very interesting journey,” says Bernstein, reaching into the ceramic vessel to sprinkle salt on her vegetables. “It was painful at times, just growing a small business.”

Eventually they made the decision to sell to another food company. By the time the papers went through, it was early 2023. Bernstein worked for the company that acquired Pineapple Collaborative for a few years, and she and Herskovitz made the move to New York’s Hudson Valley. “I had this romantic vision of living in the woods,” says Bernstein. “It was very remote, it was very quiet, it was creatively inspiring, but I was really missing community.” That point was driven home once she was pregnant with Tal. “I was really craving that community support. And you know how isolating motherhood can be, too.”

She and Herskovitz, who grew up in a similar modern Orthodox family in New Jersey, also realized they were seeking a more spiritual con- nection. No one was more surprised than Bernstein when it dawned on her that she wanted to move back to Baltimore.

“I really admire the diversity in Jewish practice here. And you know, you don’t have to be any one way. You can really just show up as you are.”

While she and Herskovitz were house shopping in the summer of 2023, they moved into her parents’ house for six months with their 8-month-old baby. That meant she was immersed again in the “weekly rhythm of Shabbat that I was so missing all these years.”

The quietness of Shabbat, which dictates no TV or electronic devices, soothed her soul. “I was going through a lot at the time with work and identity stuff, being a new mom, and it felt really like what I needed every single week to really unwind and be present with the people around me,” she says. “Just the idea of going 25 hours without a screen is radical, but also so nourishing.”

It felt like a recalibration of sorts and by the time she was in her own home, she decided to see what her creativity looked like in a new space. She created Atara Cooks, a cooking newsletter on Substack, and started a blog called Spiral Eyes, in which she interviews new moms about motherhood, spirituality, wellness, and the challenges of continuing to produce creative work.

She enjoys all her new roles but perhaps finds the “Shabbat Dinner Chronicles” the most meaningful. The simple task of cooking dinner to welcome in the Shabbat, as generations before her have done, has taken on a heavier significance at a time when being Jewish is complicated. It’s a sort of resistance, one brisket at a time.

“Post October 7th, there’s been more of a desire—like an innate need—to be more open about your Judaism,” she says. “The way I see it is that wherever you are in the political spectrum, there’s so many nuances of what to think about what is happening. It’s an uncomfortable time to be Jewish here in America.”

In a way, that discomfort inspired her return to the ritual of cooking Shabbat dinner and “just wanting some positivity around being Jewish.” While she says she has not experienced antisemitism in Baltimore, social media comments (especially TikTok) have been another story. “That’s been jarring, but it just motivates me to be even more open to celebrating this important time every week.”

Bernstein, who also sits on the board of the newly renovated Jewish Museum of Maryland, says she has spent a lot of time thinking about the “recipes that my mother made, that her mother made, that her mother made, where they originate from, how Jews have been spread out across the world, and how that’s influenced Jewish food.”

And Bernstein, now pregnant with her second boy, due this spring, moves around the kitchen with ease. The light-filled room is perfect for her—everything within arms’ reach. Cookbooks, including Najmieh Batmanglij’s Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple and, of course, Roman’s new book Something from Nothing, are scattered on bookshelves, the TV console, the coffee table. A small Julia Child-style peg board holds her most essential cooking tools (wooden spoon, Joyce Chen scissors, microplane).

The kitchen is designed with a clear view of Tal in his playroom, which also means he can clearly see what she’s doing, too. “He likes to cut vegetables and really likes to be involved with whatever I’m doing,” Bernstein says. “I’m trying to get him to be more adventurous about what he’s eating, especially vegetables.”

And boy does Bernstein love a “veg.” Most of her Shabbat menus are inspired by whatever is in season at her local farmers market. That can include hearty greens like kale or Swiss chard and root vegetables like carrots, beets, and parsnips. She loves cooking with leeks and garlic, too. She’ll also have certain ingredients that she fixates on—recently it’s been hojicha, a versatile, low-caffeine Japanese roasted green tea with a distinct nutty, earthy, and slightly smoky flavor. She’ll challenge herself to use that flavor profile in one of her dishes while still trying to please her most discerning critic—her toddler.

Right now, her plate is full of all her creative pursuits and the upcoming baby, but a girl can dream. She often thinks of opening a bagel shop (like Los Angeles’ Courage, with its Montreal-style bagels), a modern deli, or a fish smokery with good pickled vegetables.

But at this exact moment she’s in her kitchen putting together lunch and stirring her soup, tasting, seasoning, and perfecting. She knows exactly how much more of a pinch of salt the soup needs or that sour cherries will take her salad from great to exceptional. She smiles as she spoons the salad into speckled pottery bowls. It’s time to eat.

The great fun of antique shopping is in the unknown. Every booth, table, and display is an opportunity for discovery. (Or even riches if you watch enough Antiques Roadshow.) It takes patience, luck, and a lot of digging to unearth a special find. And if you’re really in the mood to browse? Enter the antique mall.

Antique malls emerged as a popular retail format in the late 20th century, evolving from individual antique shops to centralized, multi-vendor spaces where dealers lease booths to sell vintage items. They became prevalent as a way to consolidate, offering diverse, sometimes high-quality, and often curated finds all in one place.

They have proven to be the perfect place to go on a leisurely, solitary shopping trip, but there’s an exhibitionist element to them as well. Seeing what others are finding. Hearing gasps and delighted chatter, sometimes a hearty laugh. Was the day’s find a treasure or trash? Curious or bizarre? Opulent or meager?

We spent time at several antique malls in the area—or collectives for a more modern verbiage—and here’s what we found.

THE DISTILLERY COLLECTIVE
Cockeysville
Tucked down Beaver Run Lane in Cockeysville, The Distillery Collective started as a warehouse for Gore Dean, the high-end interior design furniture and accessories store. When customers would come to pick up a custom order they would want to “shop” other items (none of which were for sale) and so Deborah Gore Dean had the idea to add other curated booths as an antique collective.

Now about 12 local antique and vintage dealers share the space, occupying the second floor of the Sherwood Rye warehouse. The collective keeps pretty regular hours (they are open Wednesday to Sunday), offers custom curation services by appointment, and can pretty much ship anywhere. Booths are well organized and everyone working is warm and helpful—especially Andrea Nugent (“most of us started as collectors,” she explains) who loves mid-century and keeps a well-appointed booth of beautiful bowls, artwork, and trinkets.

Other standouts include Elise Rulan’s The Sourceress and her handsome vintage furniture, Strega Sano’s tabletops and kitchen accessories, and of course Gore Dean herself, who often pops up on the collective’s up-to-date Instagram account. Some of our favorite finds include vintage postcards, a replica diving helmet, a vintage-y orange graduated bead necklace, and a set of eight hand-painted casserole dishes shaped like turtles from prominent American designer Carole Stupell.

THE ANTIQUE CENTER
Savage Mill
It’s a super rainy Saturday morning, and Savage Mill is mobbed. This historic, re-purposed 19th-century cotton manufacturing complex (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places) houses the Antique Center on the ground floor of the Old Weave Building. It’s a little overwhelming with more than 100 “dealers” (as they call them) and 20,000 square feet of antiques and collectibles. It feels like entering a labyrinth with every turn looking a bit like the one before. (“Have I been here before,” I wondered more than once.) But the selection is impressive—artwork, accessories, furniture, militaria, glass, ceramics, jewelry, and toys. The website also mentions “gas station memorabilia,” although I didn’t see any the day I visited.

The Antique Center is clean and well-lit (despite being in the basement) with a central information desk where you can ask question and pay for all the merchandise. (The Antique Center also provides scheduled appraisals.) We found an impressive selection of glasses (especially gold rimmed coupes), vinyl, a vintage 1970s Mickey Mouse push button phone, sports memorabilia, and plenty of colorful Fiesta dinnerware, old guitars, and stained glass that looked like it came from somewhere important. And The Antique Center had an impressive number of dolls. From Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids to a vintage Shirley Temple doll, a “Teeny Tiny Tears” babydoll, and fancy French antique dolls with the eyes that sort of follow you around (if you’re into that sort of thing).

THE ANTIQUE DEPOT
Ellicott City
If you like to find your antiques in a space a bit more antiquey, The Antique Depot is pretty perfect. This charming 1873 livery stable—just across the street from the B&O Ellicott City Station Museum on Maryland Avenue—houses more than 60 booths selling antiques and vintage items across several floors. Quick history lesson: The Dorsey Livery Stable provided services, primarily offering horses, carriages, and wagons for rent, along with stabling (housing, feeding, watering) for travelers’ own horses, and also delivered ice and coal for 51 years. It became Clark Hardware Store in 1924 and finally the Antique Depot in 1989.

There’s a certain charm here—creaky floors, quiet basement, and a kind of sweet chaos. Some of our favorite finds included a chicken-shaped cookie jar, old campaign buttons (“Mondale Ferraro for America”), copper Jello molds, and Royal Navy rum rations (the daily amount of rum given to sailors aboard naval ships). Here you can discover lots of Lionel train sets, Beanie Babies, license plates, and an eight-piece antique German Lusterware spice jar set. There were loads of books, comics and vintage magazines. Plus, tons of old McCormick spice containers and pharmacy bottles, ecru linens, “wedding hankies,” and patterned napkins. One area even had an assortment of old-school Fisher-Price toys (still in the boxes) and an Easy-Bake Oven. And the Antique Depot has one of the best selections of vintage clothes too.

THE ARTFUL FLEA
Catonsville
In a sweet little house in Catonsville (just a few blocks off Frederick Road), you’ll find The Artful Flea, owned by antique maven Reggie Sajauskas. Objects Found, her bigger antique store, has been closed since May 2025 because of a fire. But this spot and the (other) Objects Found in Arbutus remain open. The Artful Flea tends towards art, antiques, fashion, flora, and furniture, with a healthy nod to local artists. If you like your antiques mixed in with new pieces, this will be right up your alley.

We found timeworn Nancy Drew books, a vintage deviled egg plate, old globes, hand-made (new) birdhouses, and antique glasses turned into pincushions. There’s a room packed with vintage-style clothes on racks. We loved the framed crewel floral bouquet, and the odd assortment of lawn ornaments (R2-D2, Buddah, gargoyle, flamingo). The Arbutus space is small and very, very full of stacks of dishes, glasses, mixing bowls, serving platters, mugs, juicers, and Corningware. There’s tons of costume jewelry including chunky bracelets and clip-on earrings and a gorgeous set of vintage Anchor Hocking floral drinking glasses. (Maybe my favorite find of the day.)

If there’s one thing antique enthusiasts love to talk about, it’s their favorite places to find collectibles. So, here are 11 more shops (nearby or worthy of a road trip—including one with a soda fountain inside) that were suggested for more antique hunting.

MARYLAND

• Beaver Creek Antique Market, Hagerstown
• East Main Antiques, Westminster
• Emmittsburg Antique Mall, Emmitsburg
• Emporium Antiques, Frederick
• Englanders Antiques Grill and Soda
• Fountain, Oakland
• Foxwell’s Antiques & Collectibles, Easton
• Seneca Cannery Antiques, Havre de Grace

PENNSYLVANIA

• The Antique Marketplace of Lemoyne, Lemoyne
• Cackleberry Farm Antique Mall, Paradise
• Renninger’s Antique Market, Adamstown
• Shrewsbury Antique Center, Shrewsbury

It’s hard to miss the mammoth Baltimore Traction Co. building on Druid Hill Avenue—it stretches an entire city block. But the real mystery is what’s inside the 30,000-square-foot space, constructed in 1891 to introduce cable car service to the city powered by underground cables.

Now it holds Keith Kitts’ treasures—the vintage décor, miscellaneous junk, interesting artifacts, and occasional curiosities he’s amassed over the last few decades.

His MD Architectural Rescue is centered on the idea of ephemera—that things exist, are used or enjoyed for only a short period of time, but still have an inherent value. He believes his mission is to be the steward of these wayward items—to make sure that they don’t end up lost, dumped in a landfill, or worse, forgotten.

Kitts, 57, who looks like a salvager out of central casting—flannel-lined shirt jacket, gruff but gentle voice, sturdy shoes—grew up on Kent Island and always fancied himself not only a collector, but a keeper of stories. “I just love old stuff,” he explains.

He came to Baltimore in the late ’90s, despite growing up “being scared of Baltimore.”  He started hanging out with some friends who lived in the city and realized “that I actually liked it and everything I was told about Baltimore was a lie.”

He was hired by a buddy to caretake the National Brewery Stock House, a nine-story brick building on Dillion Street, a major part of the National Brewing Company production facility, in what is now known as Brewers Hill. In exchange for a free rent, he was tasked with clearing out the warehouse. It was a great deal—from that vantage point he could see everything from Ft. McHenry all the way around the skyline.

“But my power bill was $1,600 a month just to heat that damn thing—it had 18-foot ceilings, and I was the only person there.”

Around that same time, Canton was being developed and Kitts would drive around as rowhomes were being demolished or remodeled and pick up fireplace mantels that were leaning against dumpsters. He’d drag them back to the warehouse and, little by little, he started accruing his own collection.

“I was a construction dumpster diver,” he laughs. He would go and talk to the construction team working on houses and convince them to let him inside before the places were gutted so he could strip the old lighting and entry locks.

“Everybody was working in that area, so it was easy to find people,” says Kitts.  “I felt good about what I was doing. It’s all about salvaging the history. If I don’t take them, they’re lost.”

“I felt good about what I was doing. It’s all about salvaging the history. If I don’t take them, they’re lost.”

But don’t call Kitts a hoarder—everything is for sale. “I’m an anti-hoarder,” he says. “I’m an adoption agency.”

It’s a line he says often, because it’s not just about moving something out of his warehouse; it’s about making sure whoever takes the item appreciates it and knows its lineage, too.

After the great Canton salvage tour of the late ’90s, most of Kitts’ items now come from hustling, relationships he’s built, and patience. He’s cleaned out asylums, Bethlehem Steel, The Hershey Company warehouses, colleges, and the Howard Street Business District.

“I work with contractors and demolition companies and also property developers.” He likes when a stand-alone or complex of buildings have been forgotten. “It’s better when it’s been sitting for a long time and nobody knows what’s in there.”

And one of his favorite things is bringing the disregarded items back to relevance. “That’s where the juices get flowing,” he says. “It’s like the sugarplums start dancing.”

He says he often has a vision that other salvagers don’t. Case in point: Around 2013, when The Hershey Company began demolishing a significant portion of its iconic, aging chocolate factory complex on Chocolate Avenue in Pennsylvania, Kitts spoke to a buddy who was running the job site.

“He goes, ‘Man, it’s just a bunch of weird stuff. I don’t think there’s anything you want.’”

In fact, Kitts spent 18 months salvaging the place. That equated to 16 semis filled with items that Kitts felt could be sold, including vintage Hershey’s chocolate factory tubs, circa 1910 (picture a classic bathtub shape), made from a heavy stamped steel. There were 1,500 tubs in the factory. Kitts took 300 and is down to his last 21. (He sells them for $250 each.)

“Some of them were marked ‘cacao,’ some ‘cocoa butter recovery,’ some were marked ‘dark chocolate,’ some ‘milk,’ and some were just ‘cocoa,’” he reports. People have bought them to use as firepits, coolers, and planters.

Sometimes selling items takes the patience of a saint. Memorial Stadium was one of Kitts’ first big jobs. Potts & Callahan, a Baltimore- based construction and demolition company, was the primary contractor for tearing down the stadium, and Kitts was able to get inside before demolition began in 2001. (Kitts still has a trophy case waiting for the right buyer.)

For a similar job at D.C.’s Capital One Arena, he ended up with the flooring that went between the basketball court and the ice for Caps games. And when Towson University’s Smith Hall did its renovations, he found unwanted laboratory equipment, like beakers, flasks, and test tubes.

Kitts is walking around the warehouse showing off his goods like a proud papa. There are boxes filled with cogs, wheels, and spikes.

“Those letters were used to mark Bethlehem Steel telephone poles,” explains Kitts, pointing to a case with small metal letters. He has the brackets that held up the roof to Broadway Pier (a set sells for around $2,500). There are nails and pulls, lithography stones, and massive wrenches. There’s a whole section filled with chairs from classrooms and waiting rooms. And galvanized metal firehouse buckets with strange rounded bottoms.

“They’re probably 100 years old or more,” says Kitts. “They made the bottoms round so if you needed a damn bucket to put out the fire, somebody hadn’t already stolen it and used it for something else.”

If there’s anything to know about Kitts, it’s that he knows a lot about a lot. And he has lived a hundred lives—a true renaissance man. He has a vacation home in Negril, Jamaica. He lives in Annapolis on a 30-acre old mill site. He lived in Prague—“because I was selling lighting to a lady in Spokane, Washington, and she offered me a job to go over and make glass with her in Eastern Europe”—and also spent time in Romania, Latvia, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Eugene, Oregon.

Even his warehouse came about through trade from a job in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, at an old Catholic school. “When I got this, there were probably 50 cars in here, there were boats, there were a few airplanes. It took me a few years just to get rid of all the stuff.”

When he was quoted $300,000 to fix the roof, he decided to do it himself. He already owned one forklift. “I got another lift and [two workers]. Took me eight months, but I got it done for $80,000.” Okay, it took a while, he admits with a chuckle, but “I’m not a builder. I’m a salvage guy. I take stuff apart.”

And he’s still fixing up the building. For example, he’s putting together an official office space made almost entirely of salvaged material. And he says he likes tinkering on the warehouse, as it gives him a chance to really spend time with his inventory.

“Because you go into antique shops, they’ve got the fanciest and the prettiest and the most in-style. Well, you know what? I’ve got the land of misfits.”

And despite the fact that he barely has any presence on social media or the web and that he doesn’t keep traditional business hours his stuff sells. (He hosts an open house on the second Saturday of every month and, in his one concession to e-commerce, puts items on Facebook Marketplace.)

He doesn’t have set prices for his goods, but he has a general idea. “I mean, nothing’s concrete, but it’s not going to be Jell-O either.” He pauses. “I haven’t put my rules up—but rule number one, this is not a damn flea market. This is like, I invited you in. I can invite you out.”

He’s joking—kind of. He’s a fascinating person and he wants other fascinating people in his orbit. “It’s the reason I do what I do: the people that come in here. I get some of the nicest people from all walks of life who identify with my stuff. I do not attract assholes, you know.”

There are still so many historic buildings he’d love to get his hands on. “I want people to know that someone like me exists, so that I can get access to places where things have sat for a long time and people don’t even realize that there’s an option to find homes for these things.”

He doesn’t want to cut in front of the museums or historical societies, but “they don’t have the ability to absorb everything that they see, and everything is not suitable for a museum.”

He stops walking. “They keep the cherries and then they throw out the pits. I’m the Pit King.”

Jessica Henkin and Laura Wexler are sitting at a sun-soaked table in Wexler’s Roland Park dining room on a Sunday afternoon, a binder stuffed with 20 years’ worth of memorabilia scattered around them from Stoop Storytelling.

There are programs, postcards, photographs, articles (including one from The Washington Post, when they hosted all of the Baltimore’s mayoral candidates), and even a neatly folded branded T-shirt that looks like it’s never been worn.

There’s also a thick folder full of consent forms—all storytellers need to sign them. Wexler reaches in, pulls a page out at random, immediately recognizes the name, and remembers the exact story they told. And then she does it again, and again.

That’s especially impressive considering that more than 4,000 people have told a seven-minute, purportedly true tale at one of Stoop’s live shows or workshops, according to Henkin, pictured left above. “Don’t you think that number is low?” presses Wexler, right.

One day, perhaps, they’ll do an official count. So far, though, themes have ranged from “My Nemesis” to “The Seven Deadly Sins” to “Cool Cruel High School” to “Parenthood” and one of Wexler’s most memorable—“Abortion is Autonomy: Stories About Freedom, Challenge, Care, and Joy” in August 2022.

Their very first show took place at the Creative Alliance in February 2006. “We picked the theme ‘failure’ because we thought that would be clever if it was a failure,” jokes Wexler. But they enlisted a stellar group of storytellers, including writer Laura Lippman, TV personality Marty Bass, filmmaker Charles Cohen, and Valerie Perez-Shere, founder of the water-ballet troupe Fluid Movement.

“We sold out that first show by begging people to come,” says Wexler. But it was a hit—even with their first musical guest playing a “man drum” (yes, he played drums on his own body) and providing a really jarring thunderclap sound as an audible cue for storytellers who went over their allotted story time (now they use a bell).

Music has always been an important part of the night, too—they had Caleb Stine & The Brakemen as their house band for years—because “we wanted it to be a show and not a talk or a presentation,” says Wexler. “It was supposed to be a night out. We definitely wanted alcohol. We wanted it just to be a full buffet of things.”

In the years since, they’ve taken the show to Center Stage, the Senator Theatre, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (their biggest crowd ever), and smaller incubators like hospitals, synagogues, board rooms, art spaces—even to the airways with a podcast on WYPR.

Wexler has stepped down as part of the live shows, and Henkin, a specialist with Baltimore County Public School’s Birth to Five Services, has carried on without missing a beat, often tapping her husband, Aaron Henkin, a longtime WYPR producer, as co-host. Wexler, who wrote for season three of Apple TV’s The Morning Show and is now finishing a play about an infamous 1925 annulment case, has taken on the role of Stoop education director, presenting storytelling workshops and collaborating with researchers to investigate how first-person storytelling can be applied in the medical field.

Their 20th year will kick off with two days of shows next month at the Creative Alliance, their old stomping ground—yes, Caleb will be back, too—and it’s brought about lots of reflection on where they’ve been and what’s next.

For now, though, Henkin is mostly just amazed that Stoop continues to exist in the very best way.

“It has been an incredibly loving act to produce this show in Baltimore,” says Henkin. “I am very grateful. And that is what I continue to be—grateful that people still come out for it, that I am still surprised by stories, that I’m still incredibly moved by stories. I definitely think it has made me a better human being.”

Jane Austen never visited Baltimore. Yet, true Janeites know her deep connection to the area. This month marks 250 years since the acclaimed English novelist and social commentator was born, but she remains as noteworthy and popular as ever.

Since her death in 1817 at 41, Austen’s novels have rarely been out of print and her most popular tomes—Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma—are considered timeless classics that continue to be adapted for film, television, and theater. The 2025 French romantic comedy Jane Austen Wrecked My Life was shown at the Charles Theatre this past summer and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion by Sarah Rose Kearns just closed at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.

But even with such an ardent fandom, it’s Goucher College that just might take home the prize for Biggest Jane Austen Devotee.

Goucher, the private, liberal arts college founded in 1885 and tucked into a quiet corner of Towson, is known for its innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum and small class sizes—but did you know it also houses the largest Jane Austen collection in North America?

Due to their age and fragility, the Jane Austen materials at Goucher College Library are not on permanent display. The collection materials are in a climate-controlled, secure stack area within the library’s Special Collections and Archives. But the collection is available via appointment for research requests, classroom visits, and group outings.

“Truly the opportunity to share all of this with Baltimore people—that’s the piece that I hope we will grow in the future,” says Juliette Wells, professor of literary studies at Goucher and one of the country’s foremost experts on all things Austen.

She’s sitting in the Goucher library on a late September morning and looks exactly how you’d picture a Jane Austen scholar should—small oval glasses, a short pixie cut, artsy earrings, bright top, and an easy smile. The first Austen book she read was Emma, in a literature class her junior year at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Annandale, Virginia.

“I had a wonderful AP Lit teacher, and she offered us a choice of readings. And I don’t remember what the other choices were,” she laughs. “I read Emma. I admired it. I wouldn’t say I loved it. I definitely knew I wasn’t understanding everything about it, but I found it really intriguing.”

“THE OPPORTUNITY TO SHARE ALL OF THIS WITH BALTIMORE I HOPE WILL GROW.”

Now Wells teaches at a college that owns a rare copy of Emma, printed in 1816 in Philadelphia. It’s one of only six known copies in existence and the only Austen book published in America during her lifetime.

It’s just one piece of the incredible collection began at the bequest of Alberta Hirshheimer Burke, a 1928 graduate of the college who, according to administrative records, was initially denied entry because the school had reached its unofficial Jewish quota. While a student at Goucher, Burke had read Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Janeites,” about World War I soldiers who bond over their love of Jane Austen, and she was intrigued.

In 1930, after receiving her master’s in literature and marrying her husband, Henry, Burke began what would become her lifetime passion project, building what she called her “Austen archive.”

“In the mid 1930s she wrote to the president of Goucher to say, ‘I am building a Jane Austen collection, and it is important I already have these first editions, I already have these manuscripts, and I would like to have Goucher in mind for the eventual recipient,’” says Wells.

And while Wells doesn’t know precisely what the Goucher president wrote back, she imagines it went something like this: “How perfect—such an important woman author. Here we are a women’s college, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!” (The school became co-ed in 1986.)

Although she wasn’t a native of Baltimore, Burke lived her entire adult life in the city, at one point living in the Broadview apartments on W. University Parkway. She and Henry combined two apartments—one for living and one to house their books.

Over time, Burke built a distinguished private collection of Austen books and manuscripts. Upon her death in 1975 (and in accordance with her will), her collection was divided between Goucher and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (now the Morgan Library & Museum). Goucher received more than a thousand books, including early editions, as well as records of Burke’s collecting: correspondences with book dealers and scholars, as well as invoices and receipts for her acquisitions.

In some ways, the collection is as much about Burke, the intrepid alumna who pursued Austen with a nearly messianic fervor, as it is about Austen herself.

A highlight of Goucher’s collection is a set of 10 of Burke’s notebooks that include “anything which is in any way related to Jane Austen,” as Burke herself described them in a 1940 letter. The black-and-white marbled composition books are all labeled “Pride and Prejudice and Other Material Relating to Jane Austen” and are arranged mostly chronologically. Each item pasted in the notebook is annotated with its origin, the date, and, frequently, a notation from Burke.

In honor of Austen’s 250th birthday and the 50th anniversary of Burke’s bequest to the college, Goucher’s library staff carefully scanned all 10 notebooks and made digital copies available on their website. It’s a rare look inside Burke’s sweet obsession. Other collection highlights include a 1938 original Penguin edition of Pride and Prejudice.

Before his death in 1989, Henry donated more Austen-related material to Goucher and, as word spread of the college’s growing collection, subsequent gifts and donations have come from a variety of Austen enthusiasts, including Barbara Winn Adams, who donated her copy of the first American edition of Persuasion, printed in 1832.

Goucher also has more than 300 translations of Austen’s novels in 27 languages, not just from Burke, but from the likes of Edith Lank, author and former Jane Austen Society of North America board member, who donated her collection of 80 translations to Goucher in 2020, just three years before she passed away. Lank, who was in touch with people all over the world to source her Austen translations, once exchanged a Dolly Parton greatest hits cassette tape with a woman in Iran for a copy of Sense and Sensibility in Farsi.

“SHE TELLS STORIES THAT JUST REALLY CONNECT TO PEOPLE. EVERYBODY KNOWS SOMEBODY THAT IS A LADY CATHERINE OR A MR. COLLINS. EVERYONE WANTS TO FIND THEIR DARCY.”

Wells delights in hearing stories like this. She first arrived in Baltimore as an undergrad at Johns Hopkins, where she considered doing her thesis on Austen, but instead focused on Barbara Pym, the 20th-century British novelist who’s often compared to Austen. Supported by an undergraduate research fellowship, she spent several weeks at Oxford studying Pym’s archives.

“I had no training in archival research. I didn’t even know the term archival research.”

She graduated in 1997 and went on to Yale, where she completed her doctorate in 2003. While teaching at a college in New York, she spent a week doing research at Goucher in 2010 as the Burke Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence.

Hired as a faculty member in 2012, Wells doesn’t just teach about Austen—though she offers plenty of enviable classes with names like “Unexpected Austen” and “Pride and Prejudice, Here and Now” and even conducts a Jane Austen Archives Practicum where students learn how to curate exhibits—but also conducts groundbreaking research and a bit of good old-fashioned detective work to uncover some of the mystery surrounding Austen.

It was back in 2018 when Wells was invited by the Morgan to co-curate an exhibit tied to Austen’s big birthday that would not only mesh their two collections but include special loaned pieces, as well. Seven years later, “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250” opened in Manhattan. The exhibit ran for three months and showcased artifacts, manuscripts, books, a reconstruction of Austen’s sumptuous silk pelisse (a long coat), a reproduction of her writing table, and artwork including Amy Sherald’s painting, “A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune.” (The painting is named for the first line from Pride and Prejudice.)

The exhibit attracted an unprecedented number of visitors—more than 119,000—says Wells, a hint of pride (and maybe some prejudice) in her voice. And Burke’s name, Goucher College, and Baltimore were all over the exhibit.

It’s a few days into the Jane Austen Society of North America’s (JASNA) annual general meeting and 950 Austen fans and scholars are milling about the Marriott Waterfront Hotel. (Baltimore hasn’t hosted since 1980.) There’s a pop-up museum including artifacts dug up from Steventon Rectory (the house where Austen was born), English country dance workshops, and an opportunity to visit the two emporiums—one full of books and the other Regency apparel. But first, Wells is holding the audience captivated inside the large ballroom as one of the plenary speakers. The applause is deafening at the end—they know she’s Austen royalty.

“We don’t care how you arrive at an appreciation for Jane,” says Mary Mintz, president of JASNA, in her sweet North Carolina drawl. She’s sitting in the pop-up museum taking a 10-minute break. “But once you get into the novels, you find out that even though she is the one who originated that romance novel, a story that’s told over and over again today, where you have this woman and she’s not getting along well with this very attractive man who seems to be defective. But it turns out they’re a perfect match, right? Every Harlequin romance, every romance novel is based on Jane Austen.”

But Mintz, associate librarian emerita at American University, says it’s deeper than that. “Once you get past [the romance] you realize that she’s so much more multi dimensional and complex. She’s dealing with philosophical ideas, and she is dealing with women’s issues that still in some ways resonate for us today.”

Having the annual general meeting back in Baltimore was super special, says the Bel Air-based Jenn Jones, who coordinated this year’s annual meeting and is a branch manager at a public library. “There was a lot of synergy to Baltimore,” she says—noting not just all the big anniversaries but the fact that Henry Burke (Alberta’s husband) helped found JASNA.

Jones, who has been with JASNA since 2012, looks around the convention with pride. At the moment, everyone is bombarding her with logistics questions, but she pauses to answer why Austen has endured.

“She tells stories that just really connect to people. Everybody knows somebody that is a Lady Catherine or a Mr. Collins. Everyone wants to find their Darcy,” she says. “The stories are just human nature. You know, she doesn’t describe places. She doesn’t go into all these descriptions that a lot of the writers were doing at that time period. Instead, she’s talking about the stories of the community. And I think that’s what resonates and why she’s so timeless and able to be translated, not just from that time, but continues to be relevant.”

Later that evening guests will attend a banquet—with most dressed in their Regency finest, including hats festooned with feathers and ribbons—and end the night dancing at the ball—thanks to a very patient instructor—until almost midnight.

It truly feels like being at the Netherfield Ball in Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park’s coming-out ball where Fanny is given the honor of leading the first dance.

On a rainy Monday morning, many JASNA members will bus the 14 miles from Harbor East to Goucher to see parts of the collection up close and personal with an attentive Kristen Welzenbach, curator of Goucher’s special collections and archives, answering questions for the dazzled groups. It’s like showing a 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card to a hardcore baseball fan. They get how special it is.

It’s been quite the year for Austen, Burke, and Wells.

“I made a decision for myself that I would say yes to everything for this whole year,” she says. That meant not just the exhibit, but teaching courses through different organizations, finishing her new edition of Austen’s Mansfield Park, and giving almost a talk a week—including a quick trip to Australia—while still working as a professor.

“I do actually have a day job, which I cherish,” says Wells. “I have a sabbatical next spring in which to think new thoughts and possibly catch up on my sleep.”

Even when this big year is over, Wells knows there is still a collection to celebrate.

“I’ve always felt that telling her story, sharing her contributions, making use of her collection, was doing what she wished would be done,” she says of Burke. “And I hope that if she is looking down from ecumenical heaven, I hope she approves.”

‘Tis the season for holiday gifts and, whether you’re buying for your favorite dog walker or your closest friends and family, we have one big suggestion: Shop local. It feels good and it does good.

Shopping local keeps money in the community, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s the absolute best feeling to walk into a store and know exactly who curated everything you’re seeing (and who also happens to remember your best friend’s favorite scent and what book your dad devoured last year). We are lucky to have so many small businesses around us.

Greedy Reads
Fells Point/Remington 
This sweet independent bookshop, owned by powerhouse Julia Fleischaker, is known not only for shop dog Audie but its wide range of books. The super-knowledgeable staff always has excellent suggestions, and there’s a great selection of adorable bookmarks and stickers for stocking stuffers. Might we suggest a doozy of a gift: tickets to the popular Greedy Reads Sunset Cruise & Book Swap.

Also around Fells Point: A Day In June, Fells Point Surf Co., The Sound Garden, Brightside, and The Seasoned Olive.

Found Studio
Hamilton-Lauraville
Look no further than this Lauraville boutique for not only great gifts, but the sweetest interaction with owner Kacey Stafford. Stafford’s shop is like a warm hug, with rows of ornaments, tons of locally made products, pretty packaged soaps, great earrings, Orioles and Ravens sock hats, candles, Hanukkah socks, and crab jammies for littles.

Also around Hamilton-Lauraville: The Margaret Cleveland at Walther Gardens, Snug Bookstore, Wockenfuss Candies, Domesticity, and Zeke’s Coffee.

Becket Hitch
Greenspring/Ruxton
Kohli Flick—the face of this Green Spring Station shop—is a delightful ray of sunshine on IG, talking about new and favorite items and how she uses them in her own home. Flick loves the holiday season and stocks her shop with pretty platters, jewelry (like bangles and gold earrings), key chains, perfume, cookbooks, cute pajamas, funny holiday cards, needlepoint pillows, and really good stocking stuffers.

Also around Greenspring/Ruxton: Wee Chic, Nova Man, Ruxton Mercantile, Gundalow Gourmet, South Moon Under, and Monkee’s of Baltimore.

Currency Studio
Station North
The brainchild of Michael Haskins Jr., this Station North boutique feels like shopping at an art gallery—or in your coolest friend’s closet. Find baseball hats, his famous T-shirts and pullovers, plus items like vintage baseballs, passport covers, and jewelry—all inspired by art and architecture. Shopping here is like a gift in and of itself.

Also around Station North: MICA Store, Artists & Craftsman Supply, Sophomore Coffee, and Ouftur.

Mt. Royal Soaps
Remington
A Remington staple, this bath and body shop—founded by three soap-obsessed friends, Pat Illes, Matt Williams, and Sam Kiffe—is stocked full of sugar scrubs, bath bombs, bubble baths, shower steamers, candles, tea towels, beard balms, and, yes, soaps. All the products are still made small-batch in Baltimore.

Also around Remington: Baltimore Museum of Art gift shop, Bird In the Hand, The Charmers Club, B.Willow, and Baltimore Photo Space.

In Watermelon Sugar
Hampden
This Hampden staple—just steps from Miracle on 34th Street—knocks out perfect storefront windows each season, but especially during the holidays. Owner Leslie Stevenson fills her magical corner boutique with felt ornaments, holiday gift wrap and tags, advent calendars, lotions, jewelry, cookbooks, home furnishings, and sweet kid gifts, including knit dolls. Stevenson and her team are also well-versed in recommending the perfect present for anyone on your list.

Also around Hampden: Balston Mercantile, Bazaar, Atomic Books, The Wine Source 

Paper Herald
Mt. Vernon
Owner Ashleigh Coaxum fills her Mount Vernon stationery shop with everything a papyrophiliac (yup, that means paper lover) dreams about—notebooks, calendars, planners, fancy stationery, and letter-writing sets. Have a friend who swoons at the thought of a really good pen? Look no further. Coaxum is uber-knowledgeable and also gets it when people freak out about writing utensils.

Also around Mt. Vernon: Ceremony Coffee, ReLeaf Shop, The Doll House Boutique, and Paris West.

Doc Taylor’s Toy Emporium
Ellicott City/Catonsville 
Since actual toy stores are getting harder and harder to find, this Ellicott City Main Street shop is a true gem. Overcrowded rows of toys fuel childhood nostalgia—back when days were spent playing with doctor kits, dolls, slime, spy kits, puzzles, games, train sets, Calico Critters, squishy cubes, and tons of cars and trucks. It’s pretty impossible not to find exactly what you need.

Also around Ellicott City: Su Casa, Bohemian House, Backwater Books, Bee Inspired Goods, Sweet Elizabeth Jane, Charm City Links & Co.

Interior Designers: Tessea McCrary and Turner Design Firm
Kitchen & Bath Cabinetry: Ric Guy
Custom Upholstery: Grand York
Hand-Painted Walls: Artstar Custom Paintworks

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An Artful House: Art was at the heart of every design decision for this three-story, 2,600-square-foot home in historic Clipper Mill. The homeowners have an extensive fine art collection, and their love of bold, saturated color became both the inspiration and the boundary lines for the renovation, says Tessea McCrary, principal and lead designer of Tessea McCrary Interior Design. They also introduced new works which created a rhythm throughout the home: Existing art provides continuity, while new acquisitions push the story forward, she says.

Inviting Interiors: “The vision was to create a deeply personal home that honors their professional sensibilities as psychiatrists,” says McCrary. “We tailored their lifestyle spaces by evoking emotion through color, texture, and pattern.” Color was powerful tool that was used as both an emotional and psychological driver. Saturated blues represented depth, calm, and intellect; metallics and charcoals added intensity and drama; and softer neutrals were layered in to provide balance, ensuring the home never tipped into overwhelming.

Defining Style: “Before, the home felt dominated by sameness, with its uniform honey-toned beams and floors,” says McCrary. “Now, it has a confident voice, it speaks of individuality and emotion. Each room tells a story, whether it’s the theatricality of the office or the playful progression of the ombre stair runner.” What makes this project special, she says, is it’s more than a renovation—it’s a portrait of the homeowners.

More is More: My home that I share with my husband, Brian Rohloff, is alternative and eclectic, incorporating both modern and vintage décor. We tend to favor maximalism, and love to surround ourselves with unique pieces that showcase our personality and love for punk music, antiques and oddities, street art, and tattoos.

House Rules: Our home is about 110 years old, having been built around 1915. It is a classic Canton rowhome, featuring a red brick exterior, marble front steps, and a stained-glass window. The window inspired much of our décor. The glass features rich jewel tones in emerald green, sapphire blue, and gold, which we repeated throughout the main floor of our home.

Inspired Workspace: Our favorite room in the house is probably the office. When we first moved in, this room was a plain white box, so it was also one of our biggest transformations. We knew we wanted custom floor-to-ceiling bookcases, which became the focal point. The vision for the design of the room was to lean into Regency-era décor, with lots of velvet and opulent gold accents, such as the antique chandelier.

Where We Live: The main floor of our home is our favorite place to be. Our home is open concept, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen all connecting. It’s a great place to entertain or relax, and it also houses one of our most prized possessions—our vinyl record collection. Music plays a large part in our life, and we have a collection of almost 1,000 vinyl records. Finding adequate storage for this collection in a skinny rowhome with limited space was a challenge, but we found beautiful handcrafted vinyl storage cabinets from a woodworker on Etsy that solved the problem.

Personal Style: I love to dress in bold and bright colors, much like the décor in our home. You can often find me sporting bright pink hair and vintage-inspired glasses. I’m a maximalist, both within my style of décor and dress. Brian is a local tattoo artist, and we find that there are many similarities between the desire to decorate your home and the desire to decorate your skin. Much of his work incorporates bold colors and traditional designs, which you can also find within our home.

Right at Home: We have always liked our spaces to reflect our interests and who we are as people. We are both creative people in general, and we see our home as being another blank canvas where we can showcase our range of creative personalities. Each room within our home tells its own story, with some being more edgy and dark, and others lighter and more feminine.

“I think Jill Andrews’ studio is on fire,” a co-worker called to tell me Monday afternoon.

My whole body went numb. I quickly opened the link she sent and watched in real time as a three-alarm fire engulfed the beautiful Victorian building—a former police station built in 1899, lovingly referred to as “The Castle”—on the corner of Keswick Road and West 34th Street in Hampden.

Thankfully, no injuries were reported. Though the structure remains, the building sustained a collapsed roof and severe water and burn damage. As the firefighters worked to contain the blaze, I thought about all of the studios and small businesses—a mental health practice, an insurance firm, pregnancy and parenthood haven The Womb Room, among others—who call that corner property home, but especially Jill.

As the editor of Baltimore Weddings, I’ve known Jill for at least 15 years. Ours started as a professional relationship, but as anyone—clients, wedding vendors, random people in her building—will tell you, with Jill, friendship blossoms quickly.

Jill is a rare gem these days—a dressmaker who has been crafting custom gowns from her corner in Hampden for 16 years. After graduating from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and living in London for a period, she moved to Baltimore and spent 14 years making costumes for Center Stage before opening her own business in 2009. She loves everything about her profession—the history (she knows everything about everything), the machinery, the textiles, the stories, the lineage of a piece of vintage fabric.

Even more impressive, she’s a party of one. She works closely with all of her brides, sourcing the fabrics, designing, altering, facilitating fittings, and, most importantly, celebrating when they walk down the aisle. Almost every time I’m at Jill’s studio, she pulls out her phone to show me her most recent brides—like a proud mom.

Jill has whipped up custom dresses for almost every single photo shoot I’ve helmed as editor of Baltimore Weddings—all always perfectly on theme. One year she even created a cover dress for us made up of 20 years of Baltimore Bride (as we were called then) magazines. It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen—the delicate workmanship of a two-piece top and ball skirt completely made of paper. (The bustier portion is still in her studio, and somehow still intact after Monday’s fire.)

Beyond wedding looks, she’s also created custom ‘fits for First Lady Dawn Moore, 60 Minutes correspondent Norah O’Donnell, and Hana Scott, the First Lady of Baltimore. When it came time for my daughter, Willa, to pick a look for her Bat Mitzvah, Jill perfectly altered a Betsy Johnson dress and made the most gorgeous red lace jacket for her to pair with it. The three of us dreaming up the outfit together is etched into my mind as being as joyous as the actual celebration. 

And it all happened within the walls of her magical space. It was the closest Baltimore will ever come to a Paris atelier—with tins of bespoke buttons, luxurious fabrics, silk threads, and vintage linen-covered Wolf dress forms. Her workroom was a dreamy place drenched in natural light with hardwood floors, and a row of sewing machines. Her worktable was always littered with muslin, seam rippers, and handmade fabric flowers from the century-old M&S Schmalberg in New York City. (See, here.) Racks of gowns were safely zippered into her signature pink dress bags and tagged with the client’s name and wedding date.

She even got married there. The fireplace in the back room served as the backdrop for exchanging vows with her husband Robert Jones (she affectionately calls him “Mr Jones.”) in Nov. 2023, with her two kids flanking her.

Though her studio eventually felt like home, it took her years to renovate and execute the vision she wanted. As she told me when I interviewed her in 2019, fittingly for a piece we call “Maker Space,” when she first moved in, it wasn’t love at first sight.

“The fireplace looked like [pink] Spam. Everything was green. There were big hideous lights. I cried,” recalled Andrews of the first time she walked around the first-floor location.

In that same piece, I called her space “the atelier version of an open kitchen,” as nothing was tucked away or hidden from clients, so that they could connect the dots of the whole dressmaking process.

“The sewing machines provide a pleasant buzz, but there’s something else reverberating off the walls. It’s the hum of excitement as brides come in for their fittings, their names etched on a giant chalkboard next to their appointment time,” I reported. “During the weeks and months needed to create a dress, the brides, moms, aunts, and grandmas become Andrews’ family.”

When I was last there in mid-October, she was excited that a bulk of her 2025 dresses were now in her brides’ hands, and just a few remained before the end of the year.

On Monday night, I felt like I had to go see the damage with my own eyes. This time I parked across from Rocket to Venus and walked down 34th Street towards the building. Keswick was still blocked with a fire engine parked out front. I was just going to stand at a distance, pay my respects, and leave, when I heard someone call my name. It was Jill.

She was soaking wet from her foray into the building, as water rained down into her studio. Her car was full of everything they managed to let her grab. I hugged her. Words escaping me other than, “I’m so sorry.”

Suffice it to say, her studio—described beautifully in the GoFundMe created by a former client—is irreplaceable. But as Jill herself wrote yesterday on an Instagram post, “I will figure it out. I’ll start over. I always say to myself, don’t worry, beauty is boundless, I’ll just make more.”

When I posted about the fire on Baltimore Weddings’ Instagram Tuesday morning, the local wedding community rallied with messages of support, offers from local bridal shops to assist any of her upcoming brides, and even locals willing to loan their own wedding dresses to Jill’s clients. (She has three getting married this weekend.)

Just last month, I was at a wedding vendor event and walked up to Jill. “Help,” I said pointing to the tie-neck collar on my shirt. Within seconds, she deftly re-tied the bow, so it laid perfectly.

“You always make everything better,” I told her. Now it feels like our chance to do the same for her.

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In 24 hours since launching, the crowd-funding campaign set up for Jill Andrews Gowns raised more than $22,000 of its $75,000 goal. If you’d like to make a donation, you can find the GoFundMe, here. 

It’s hard to miss Hilton Carter. Yes, the plant lover, author, and interior stylist is a big guy (6’5” to be exact) but he also just seems to be everywhere these days. On the Today show bantering with Craig Melvin and Al Roker; recording his podcast, Inside Hilton’s Head; and on Instagram (@hilton-carter) talking plant care, styling tips, and dad life to his 680,000 followers.

The fact that he has a few hours to spend at Artifact Coffee—looking fashion forward and fresh as usual in a philodendron-green terrycloth shirt, baseball cap with an embroidered H, and Birkenstock Boston clogs—almost seems impossible. There’s a calmness to him—and an ease that, yes, comes with age (he’s 45)—as well as a sense that he’s finally letting himself exhale.

This gigantic wave he’s been riding is, in fact, his career and not a passing fad about to crash ashore.

Unfurled: Designing a Living Home is Carter’s sixth book and his most personal one yet. “It’s like a diary,” says Carter. All 208 pages are filled with photos of his family—wife Fiona Vismans and daughters Holland and Vada—and delves into the rooms of their Roland Park house, which Carter has painstakingly renovated, styled, and photographed.

“Creating a home takes time. It can be slow and requires a lot of patience, planning, deliberation, and intentional decision-making. But eventually, given love and thought and care, that home will unfurl to reveal its true beauty,” Carter writes in the foreword, explaining his book title.

Although a majority of Carter’s fans probably don’t have a Baltimore ZIP code—he’s in the big league now—reading Unfurled through a local lens makes it an even cooler experience.

Carter was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1979 and grew up around drugs and violence. “I didn’t see much of an escape from that,” he says. His family moved to Essex when he was 10, which changed the trajectory of his life. Carter played football for the Middle River Renegades and made a lot of friends. The kids liked that he was different (read: artistic). He joined art clubs and took classes at the local community college before enrolling at Carver Center for Arts and Technology’s visual arts program.

He headed to Maryland Institute College of Art (graduating in 2002), then moved to California to attend graduate school at the ArtCenter College of Design for film—an art form he saw as the next natural step in visual storytelling. He learned all the different parts of filmmaking, but what really stuck out for him was production design. He loved the idea that the set was telling a bigger story—an idea that has stuck with him to this day.

In 2011, when work for a freelance film project took him to Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, someone suggested he check out Terrain, a shop and restaurant owned by Anthropologie that blurred the line between home and garden. It was a light-bulb moment for Carter.

“If I ever have the means, I’m going to start bringing plants in,” he thought.

Three years later, when Carter moved to New Orleans for work and his apartment in the French Quarter offered a big, sun-soaked space, he purchased a five-foot-tall fiddle leaf fig tree he named Frank. Carter’s plant knowledge came about gradually over time. He visited greenhouses, asked lots of questions, and, most importantly: He listened. A friend’s mom taught him about propagation—the process of growing new plants from the cuttings of other plant parts. He was hooked.

When Carter moved back to Baltimore in 2015, he schlepped Frank with him. (He now resides in Carter’s Parkdale studio in Woodberry.) Three years later, Carter married Vismans, whom he famously met when she knocked on his door to tell him his loud music was making her next-door apartment vibrate. He apologized with a snake plant.

In the seven years since, they’ve become parents twice and bought their forever dream home. And while working on another book (shelved for now) he and his publishers noticed how much his followers reacted, commented, and “liked” his posts about home-styling.

“Would you ever consider making a styling book?” they asked. He couldn’t say yes fast enough.

For Carter it felt a bit like coming back to his roots of storytelling through design. Each section of the book—broken up by room—is about not just making an area stylish but the “why,” from concept and mood board to plan and layout to furniture and plants (yes, there are still plants, of course).

“We chose this home because we were ready to start a family, so when the time came to design and style it, I thought about how family life might evolve over time,” Carter writes. “That vision has guided many of my decisions, because, for me, the first step in designing a living home is to ensure that the choices made are practical ones, rooted in everyday life.”

This is what makes the book so relatable. Yes, Carter’s home is a designer’s dream—warm, modern, and chic—but it’s also clear that two little girls live there. Carter spends two chapters writing about Vada’s calm nursey and Holland’s toddler room, with its Technicolor mural painted by Carter, with input from his daughter. He’s a big believer in getting kids “involved in the creation and styling” of their rooms, while still being the ultimate decision-maker.

In between dreamy photographs of his kitchen, sunroom, and guest room (swoon) he also talks about the less sexy rooms, like a closet—but with an I-Can’t-Believe-This-Is-My-Life aura that keeps the book from becoming boastful and arrogant.

“I never thought much about the closet, other than its use for storing my clothing or hiding a mess when I was quickly trying to tidy my room,” he says. “But I can’t say the same for my mother. When I was a child, I would often hear her fantasize out loud about having a large closet. Not just one where you could hang your winter coats like those big, puffy winter coats. No, more like a closet that you could walk right into, pirouette, then walk back out. That, my friends, is what my mother would call Special, with a capital ‘S.’ Many people would just call it a walk-in closet, but in her eyes, it epitomized status and success,” he writes in the book.

“I’m very lucky to have the life that I have,” says Carter over coffee. “Look at my house—this is the piece of paradise that I wanted to carve out for myself, and I now have it.”

That’s the message he wants this new book to convey. Home is just about creating a space that makes you feel your best. Carter says it’s more important than ever to create your own paradise at home.

“The chaos that is outside you can’t control. But inside the walls where you live, you can control that space, right? So, all the things that you’re having in there, they should be things that you absolutely love.”

And because this is Carter, he can’t resist a good plant metaphor.

“I always talk about the joys of seeing a new leaf growing. It’s like, ‘Oh shit, this plant is thriving, it’s pushing out, and growing.’” But there’s always that moment when you don’t know how it’s going to unfurl, he says. “You have no idea what you’re about to get when it comes to, like, a Monstera. You never know how many splits you might get. You might get none. You might get a few. You might get holes. You have to just wait and see what’s going to happen.”

This isn’t just a story about his book title, but about putting himself (home and family) out there with his first truly vulnerable book.

“There might be something that disrupts the unfurl, which then alters the shape of that leaf. I’ve had that many times, where I had a leaf get stuck as it’s unfurling,” he says. Sometimes it just needs a little tug or redirecting, he believes. “So, the idea of a home being unfurled just means it’s slowly showing its beauty and its full potential.”

Sounds like he’s talking about his own journey, too.

Home Sweet Home: Our home is a mix of traditional and more contemporary styles. We are drawn more to the design and color of pieces than to particular styles or periods. Each piece we have speaks to us in some way. Our goal is to mix a lot of interesting furniture pieces and art, so it looks like the rooms have evolved over a period of time. We’re also very practical—there’s always a light next to a chair and a small table to rest your glass.

A History Lesson: Our three-story Federal townhouse is one of six brick townhouses built in the Federal style in 1816 by Robert Carey Long Sr. He was the first native-born Baltimore architect who designed several notable buildings, including Davidge Hall at the University of Maryland Medical School and The Peale museum.

Several of the houses were expanded and changed architecturally many years ago, but ours and two others retain their initial footprint and many of the original architectural details. The molding details and stair handrail are very similar to those in The Peale.

Counter Space: It’s always the same in every house we’ve lived in: We hang out in the kitchen. It’s certainly the most transformed room in the house. What we’ve created feels appropriate and respectful of the house and works well for 21st-century living.

The Papered Wall: Powder rooms are follies, and we were searching for a Baltimore toile, something similar to the Harlem toile Sheila Bridges designed for the one off our kitchen. We wanted a very old and traditional form reinterpreted in a thoroughly modern way.

We didn’t discover a toile, but we did discover Elizabeth Graeber’s charming and whimsical wallpaper love letter to Baltimore. It’s very fun and everyone comments on it, whether they’re a local or a transplant.

Sentimental Value: We always seem to be at the head of the line when a family member asks: “Would anyone like this?” We never say no to anything. But, in all seriousness, the stories behind these pieces, and the continuity of a storyline are important to us. The connection and the backstory are often more interesting than the pieces themselves. How do we know where we’re going without knowing where we’ve been?

The Stewards: We bought our home from a man who lived there for over 40 years with his partner. It was important to him that the next owners remain sensitive to the house’s history and architectural integrity. We are trying to live up to these expectations.

Open the door at Bohemian House, an eclectic art gallery and gift shop on Main Street in historic Ellicott City, and you’re bound to see owner Tiffany Brown Averill standing at the till, her signature rockabilly style on full display.

She’ll flash her big smile and before you know it, you’re sharing your life story and she’s helping you pick the right crystal to get your aura back on track or she’s describing each artist in the shop like a proud parent.

“I love people. I love making connections. I love people’s stories,” says Averill, who first opened in 2020 on lower Main Street closer to the railroad tracks. She wanted her store to encompass all the things that made her happy. “I really just wanted to do it for me and do what I’m good at and obviously be part of this awesome street.”

When the opportunity arose, she moved up the hill closer to more high-end boutiques like Su Casa and Sweet Elizabeth Jane. “This is my happy hole,” she says, with her trademark throaty laugh, of her 800-square-foot brick-and-mortar.

Her shop is funky, wide-ranging, and accessible. “I want people to touch the art or pick up a sculpture or something handmade, and I want them to connect to the community,” says Averill, who fills her store with locally sourced original artwork, home décor, oddities, repurposed vintage, candles, jewelry, and healing oils.

“Every artist that I have is local, so I’m not sourcing paintings from, like, an art dealer in L.A.,” she says. “Art should be accessible. It shouldn’t be serious and stuffy.” (Averill herself is a fine-arts painter.)

Her take on art comes from growing up in a culturally rich environment. Averill was raised in Baltimore—the PR powerhouse Edie Brown is her aunt—and attended Garrison Forest before finishing high school at Seton Keough. (“I was the only Jewish girl,” Averill recalls. “Which was interesting.”) Her father was a doctor and her mother a nurse. But both parents also dabbled in sculpting and weaving. Aunt Edie owned a pottery shop when Averill was a kid.

“I used to hang out in there,” she says. “They had this walk-in kiln, and it was filled with pottery at all times, so I’d go in there and look at the glazes.”

Averill was fascinated at how the kiln—a thermally insulated chamber—used heat to alter the finishes through chemical changes. “That really inspired me.”

Her parents also took Averill and her brothers to art museums like The Walters Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art, sketch books in tow. “When I was growing up, my parents were very hell-bent on making sure my brothers and I had culture,” says Averill.

Her natural talent was evident, and she spent time in middle and high school attending young artist studios at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I loved it. I’ve just always been around art.”

But despite her family’s deep love of the arts, plus tons of family friends who were artists, “I think they shit their pants a little bit when I said I wanted to go to art school,” laughs Averill. They were probably worried she’d grow up to be a starving artist. They eventually relented, and Averill headed to MICA to study painting and art history. She lasted a year.

“It just wasn’t my jam,” she admits. She ultimately headed south to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) where she dropped the art history part and dove into painting and fiber arts, textiles, weaving, sculpture, and crocheting—“all the things, but mostly painting.”

She loved the school and the city and spent eight years there before heading back to Baltimore. She spent the next 10 years as a restoration artist and gallery assistant at Renaissance Fine Arts and another eight at Radcliffe Jewelers as a luxury sales manager running the bridal registry.  “I can sell you a Rolex or a Picasso,” she chuckles. And she loved it, but she longed to be part of a community surrounded by the items she wanted to sell.

Growing up, her best friend lived in Catonsville—where Averill lives now with her husband and youngest son—and Ellicott City had always been the “fun backyard” they hung out in. She loved the historic buildings, quirkiness, community, and romance of a main street.

“I love history, which is one thing that drew me to Savannah. So, when I was thinking of opening a store, I knew that it was going to be either in Catonsville or here. Obviously, being in Ellicott City is an absolute privilege, and I don’t take that for granted.” (If you like ghost stories, Averill has plenty of encounters she’s happy to share.)

Even though she became a shop owner after the big floods of 2016 and 2018, she’s well aware of the scar it left on many business owners, but also the resilience that grew out of it.

“We have this motto, community over competition. And we’re a tight group,” she says. “You know, sometimes we close shop in the middle of the day and go have a martini.”

Averill sits on the executive board for the Ellicott City Partnership, which oversees the town, and is part of the Main Streets of America organization. “I really am passionate about bringing people to Ellicott City. I mean, my store is great, but I want other stores to be successful, too, because when you build a strong town and a strong Main Street, everything around it thrives.”

Even with her shop and board commitment, she still finds time to work as an art restorer for a number of historical societies and big estates. “I have a whole side hustle of restoration and conservation work,” she says. She loves relying on her years of learning and problem-solving, and there’s a little bit of chemistry, too. “It’s [figuring out] what paints they were using, what pigments, what solvents during different periods of time. So, it’s a lot of science and a lot of detective work.”

She stops. “I’m a strange bird,” she says. But she’s not. Just an impressive renaissance woman.

“They say it takes three to five years to build a business,” says Averill, who is now in year five. Last year’s goal was to double her business, which she did. So, her goal for this year is to expand her Ritual product line, which includes oils, simmer pots, and candles.

She learned to make candles when she was at SCAD, working at a shop called Kandlestix that did candle demonstrations for all the tourists. Averill would dip and hand-carve and create shapes over and over again. “I just always loved wax.”

She also loves what creating candles and oils represent—the act of doing something as self-care. “I mean, anything you can do, whether it’s having a glass of wine on your porch or lighting a candle, it’s about being present. It’s a constant reminder to just be there.”

She feels that way about art, too. It should give you pause and bring you joy. “There are so many different reasons to buy art, but it should not matter, as long as you have some kind of emotional reaction to it,” she says.

When customers come in, she tells them it doesn’t matter if they are sourcing art from a free cycle site, Goodwill, if it’s passed down, or if they spend thousands of dollars on it.

“It doesn’t matter, as long as you love it, as long as it makes your space feel like home,” she says. “That’s what art is. It’s that feeling of home.”

Nichole Morris is dancing on the corner of York Road and E. Lake Avenue. It’s an overcast, muggy July morning and Morris is getting ready to photograph the Cedarcroft neighborhood. She’s wearing a bright orange tie-dye Harley Davidson T-shirt and oversized headphones, and her movements are innocently joyful.

The only things she’s carrying are an umbrella and her Samsung Galaxy S21 phone.

Of Baltimore City’s 270-ish neighborhoods (this is according to Morris’ own Google research, while Live Baltimore puts that number at “more than 250”), she has shot close to 92, but that number increases almost daily.

It’s a passion project born of a simple desire to be surrounded by others. She’s photographed Blythewood, Bolton Hill, Pigtown, Cameron Village, Canton (“it took the longest to fully explore”), Forest Park, Otterbein, Fells Point, Milton-Montford, Little Italy, Poppleton, Woodbourne-McCabe, the Baltimore Peninsula, Beverly Hills, and Roland Park. She shot every type of home, from petite rowhouses to stately Tudors.

She was shocked to find so many parks, and even deer in the city. There was Abell, Hollins Market, Hoes Heights, Heritage Crossing, Inner Harbor, Lake Walker, Liberty Square, Evergreen, Harwood, and her own neighborhood of Bromo.

And everywhere she walked, she saw beauty—in the cobblestone streets, alleyways, residents, public transportation, abandoned buildings, pets, and the different foliage depending on the season.

Morris, 28, didn’t grow up anywhere. Maybe that’s why she’s so keen on neighborhoods. By the time she was 18, she had moved 15 times. Her mom, who was in banking, changed jobs a lot, she explains.

“I’m very quick to try to make friends and get to know people,” she says of the constant relocation. “But I think it makes it hard to have roots anywhere or really get to know a city.”

She’s fascinated with the concept of being born in a particular place and becoming a permanent part of that neighborhood’s fabric.

“In my life I’ve had to make friends quickly, and kind of get used to losing people here and there,” she says, then blinks. “So that’s a really sad thing.”

But Morris’ persona is the opposite of sad. Her energy is warm and engaging. She’s smart and thoughtful and her voice is so spirited that when she speaks, it almost sounds like she’s laughing. But she also freely talks about her struggles with depression and how one can feel so lonely even in a city of more than 550,000 people.

Having lived her life as a nomad (which has included some stints living in her car, some by choice, others by necessity), it’s hard to say whether she grew up with no community or too many communities. But it’s structures that have always brought her reassurance.

“Architecture was the only thing that gave me comfort when I was homeless and still gives me peace of mind.”

When we talk over the summer, she is newly back in town after spending the last two months in California and Arizona. Before that, she was in downtown Baltimore for five months and before that she was living in Essex for two years. (This was after spending a year here during early COVID living in an Airbnb in Riverside.)

“This is actually the longest I’ve stayed anywhere, if I’m honest,” says Morris. “So, this is kind of new for me.”

The one constant for Morris has always been her love of photography. “I’ve been taking photos since I could hold a camera,” she says. “I got it from my mom—she was always behind the camera, doing family events or outings. And then I started taking pictures myself, and I got really happy. It was my happy place.”

So, when she pushed herself to get to know Baltimore outside of the few places she had visited and lived (Bromo Arts District, Riverside), she turned to some old reliables—photography and mental health walks.

“For kicks and giggles I walked around a few times and then I said, ‘You know what? How many neighborhoods are here? It can’t possibly be a lot.’” (That proved to be far from the truth, but didn’t deter her.) “I’ve never been too good with keeping promises to myself,” she admits.

And this project—photographing every neighborhood in Baltimore—seemed impossible. But she decided she needed impossible and challenged herself.

“I decided to make it a sort of New Year’s resolution.”

Her no-plan plan involved walking around (with lots of dancing) and simply taking photographs. She figured at the very least, she’d improve her mood. And at the very most, she’d make some friends.

At first, she would do research on neighborhoods (mostly via Baltimore Reddit) before heading out, trying to seek the little things that made that place special. But she realized that too much prep was creating preconceptions, so she now goes into most areas completely blind and often picks her next stop based on recommendations from her social media followers.

She also doesn’t have a traditional camera. She simply uses her cell phone to document everything and then posts to Instagram and Threads (@withnichole). Some posts are just her photographs, others have vulnerable words attached, and others push back on what is considered “beautiful” in Baltimore. She says that some of what are deemed the roughest neighborhoods in Baltimore have offered her the friendliest encounters. And other safer areas have made her nervous.

“I really did think that Baltimore was just some rowhomes and people who liked Old Bay,” she confesses.

But now she knows the city better than people who have lived here for decades. We all know we live in a city of neighborhoods, but how many of us have actually taken the time to visit many of those neighborhoods?

Back in Cedarcroft she’s “caught” photographing a home’s front yard, but the homeowner is tickled at her interest and spends almost 45 minutes walking her around the neighborhood, talking about his plants, his own family’s history, and showing her his favorite homes.

Morris has an almost infectious curiosity that makes people want to assist her. It’s interactions like this that keep her going. But she’s also learned that one person is simply a part of a neighborhood, not its entire identity.

“Like if you were to ask me what Riverside is, I wouldn’t know how to describe it to you. When I think of Riverside, there was a guy that was always in a robe first thing in the morning standing outside a coffee shop with his coffee for like 20 minutes, like it’s his front yard or something.

“Or there was a girl who’s always running, and I don’t run but I’d jog with her, and she’d be like, ‘Let’s talk about the gossip of the neighborhood.’ She knew everything. And there was a girl who always has dog treats. She sits on her porch during warmer weather looking for dogs and I think maybe, like me, is like looking for a connection,” says Morris.

All those little things are what made Riverside feel like home to her—but how to explain those special qualities to an outsider? “I wouldn’t know,” she says.

So now, each morning she rises before dawn and decides what neighborhood she’ll try to capture next. She’ll slip on her headphones—she loves musicals like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dear Evan Hansen, but also rap. “I just heard of Doechii, so I’ll listen to her or some Nicki [Minaj]. I have a Disney playlist because I love Hannah Montana”—and look at the bus schedule.

“I don’t mind the weird stares anymore and I’m feeling more comfortable about who I am as a person,” says Morris. Sometimes people look because she’s dancing down the street or lying between two cars to get a photograph.

“I’m starting to understand that places truly are a lot more diverse than expectations, because I really did think it was just rowhomes and then I started thinking a little of The Wire,” she says. “And it’s like, well, a city is not one thing, it’s a multitude of things.”

Her project has had some wonderfully unexpected consequences. She’s booked a few gigs as a photographer (yes, they know she shoots solely on her phone), sold a few prints, and has plenty of social media followers rooting for her success.

She knows there are some incredible photographers who shoot Baltimore—but is learning there is room for her, too.

“It’s all different sides of one place,” she says. She’s had people tell her, “You’re nice, but you don’t really show Baltimore Baltimore.”

In other words, her viewpoint is overly optimistic or unrealistic.

“And I’m like, I’m trying to walk all of it so I can understand Baltimore,” says Morris. “This is just my personal idea of this city.”

This is not Jill Smokler’s obituary.

Yes, the witty founder of Scary Mommy was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive, incurable form of brain cancer, last April. In the past year, she has undergone countless scans, three surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy—which led her to cut her iconic curls—and is heading to Germany this summer to participate in a Hail Mary trial.

“Glioblastoma was not on my 2024 bingo card, alas, here we are. Life changes fast, friends,” Smokler posted on Threads May 3, 2024, outing her diagnosis. “Not saying it’s worth it, but a dire cancer diagnosis is one way to feel loved, and that part is pretty damn nice,” she wrote 12 days later. And: “My gyn keeps trying to book my annual and I’m like, what’s the point. And sunscreen? Done with that.”

That Smokler, 48, is being so frank and funny about her diagnosis isn’t a surprise to those who have been following her since her early blog days. Her brand has always been radical honesty. Her diagnosis has not transformed her into someone who has a renewed appreciation for life. She’s not smelling flowers or running through meadows. She’s still the same old Scary Mommy, maybe just more scared than scary these days.

“I really only talk about it on Threads,” says Smokler. “People sharing their success stories is encouraging to read, and then people just sort of sulking and commiserating is also comforting.”

In November she posted to cancerthreads: “Where are the snarky, dark people who are sick? I need some REAL folks to follow. Sick of optimism and God talk.” More than 65 comments came in.

She explains: “Look, I’m not grateful for this or thanking God I’ve had this experience. I can’t relate to people who feel like that. I don’t know if they were positive before or if this just changes their perspective, but I was not positive before. This has not brought out positivity.”

Smokler—yes, she knows everyone still refers to her as Scary Mommy—started her online blog in 2008, when she had three kids under the age of four. Her posts about motherhood were raw and authentic and mothers everywhere felt seen.

At the height of her popularity, Smokler was speaking at blogging conferences, writing New York Times best-selling books, appearing on talk shows, and establishing the Scary Mommy Thanksgiving Project, which raised money for families who couldn’t afford a Thanksgiving dinner. She won three Webby Awards and was the go-to voice of the imperfect mom.

After seven years, Smokler sold Scary Mommy—which was then averaging about 10 million monthly readers—to a company called Some Spider Studios. She became chief content officer and led a team of video producers and writers to provide parenting advice and tips with an acerbic edge to an audience north of 100 million, according to Forbes magazine. But for Smokler, it just didn’t feel like her brand anymore and she stepped down in 2018. (Scary Mommy is now owned by Bustle Digital Group.)

Other things she’s been open about: Smokler and her husband, Jeff, separated in 2017 after he first revealed to her, then to their kids, and finally in a Scary Mommy post, that he was gay. (They had a rough patch for a while co-parenting, but Smokler’s diagnosis has brought them closer together.) She’s also been open about her bipolar diagnosis in 2018.

That she’s been facing her grim cancer diagnosis with humor, honesty, and forward-facing wit is a surprise to no one.

SHE’S NOT SMELLING FLOWERS OR RUNNING THROUGH MEADOWS. SHE’S STILL THE SAME OLD SCARY MOMMY, MAYBE JUST MORE SCARED THAN SCARY THESE DAYS.

It’s February, a few days before Valentine’s Day, and Smokler is sitting on the couch in her beautiful sun-drenched midcentury rambler in Pikesville. Leo, her Australian labradoodle, is thrilled a playmate has arrived. Smokler doesn’t look sick—but there are signs. Her enviably thick mass of locks is now a pixie cut and she’s wearing glasses.

“My hair was such a huge part of my identity,” she says. She posted a picture of her hand holding a big clump of hair last June and commented, “It’s just hair. It’s just hair. It’s just hair.” She finally cut it last December. “I wish I had done it sooner,” she admits.

The glasses came about after a week-long hospitalization over the winter with the flu. “Everything was blurry. And my neurologist said, if it were tumor related, it would be my peripheral vision. It wouldn’t be my everywhere vision,” she says. It remains a mystery. “The vision has been harder to deal with than the hair.”

That aside, “I’m feeling pretty good at the moment,” she says. “I finished up my chemo last week, so I’m on a break and not currently puking all the time.” She even started driving short distances by herself again, but exhaustion is a constant. “I’m so tired I can’t get through the day without taking a three-hour nap,” she admits.

A good portion of her day is spent dealing with her innumerable medications, which her best friend, Julie Bender, helps her keep track of with pill organizers and a giant whiteboard checklist in her kitchen. “I’m very frustrating, because I just want to do everything myself. And be like, ‘Back off everybody—I got it under control.’ And then Julie comes over, and she’s like, ‘You didn’t take your pills Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. What was up with that? You had a whiteboard!’”

Smokler lives in a constant state of brain fog—rewashing clean clothes, leaving the dog in the backyard for hours, and, yes, sometimes forgetting to take her medication—and it’s frustrating for someone who once led a multimillion-dollar empire.

It came seemingly out of the blue. One minute she was living life as an attractive middle-aged single woman producing her podcast, She’s Got Issues, and dealing with dating and moody teenagers, and the next she was waking up at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the ICU.

She can’t recall one single thing about that week. She only knows what her family has told her. Her youngest son, Evan, was at her ex-husband’s house and called to say hi. He thought she sounded strange, came over to check on her, and immediately called 911.

It turns out she’d had a seizure. Smokler was rushed to Sinai Hospital, where she fell into a coma, and was then transferred to Johns Hopkins, where she remained unconscious for several days. When she woke up, Smokler not only thought it was 2004 but didn’t recognize Evan or her brother.

“I am definitely grateful that I don’t remember the looks on their faces when I didn’t recognize them,” she told today.com. “That must have been gutting.” (Yes, her cancer was national news.)

A neurologist told her she had a brain tumor and would need immediate surgery to get it removed. “At the time, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, a brain tumor means cancer.’” Instead, in her Smokler way, she thought, “That’s so dramatic, Jill. Like, of course you get a fucking brain tumor. Why do you have to be so over-the-top, couldn’t you get breast cancer?”

About 10 days after her operation, Smokler, along with her mom, Kathy Epstein, who had moved into Smokler’s house to help care for her, and Bender returned to see the surgeon.

“I’m not a researcher at all,” says Smokler. “My mom, she’s very research-based, and Julie is, too. And I’m just sort of like la-di-da, I’ll get the information when I get it.”

Smokler was also still recovering from brain surgery, plus there was also a bit of magical thinking and understandable denial. So, she was the only one not pondering the worst-case scenario when they walked into that office.

IN AN INSTANT, HER LIFE STOPPED, CHANGED, PIVOTED. HER FUTURE PLANS WERE SUDDENLY GONE.

According to the Glioblastoma Foundation, glioblastoma is an aggressive stage 4 brain cancer, with limited treatments and a median survival rate of one year after diagnosis. Only five percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis.

In an instant, her life stopped, changed, pivoted. Her future plans—seeing her children grow up, a business rebrand, a new life partner—were suddenly gone. What did the word future even mean?

In the days and weeks that followed, she was pragmatic. “Immediately after, I was just sort of, I don’t know, you hear a [life] expectancy like that,” her voice trails off. “I just sort of felt like, alright, well, this is it, this is over, and I really started mapping out what I wanted my funeral to be like, did I want to be cremated?”

Googling water cremation, where a body is dissolved in a solution of water and alkaline chemicals, was better than thinking about how terrible radiation made her feel. And she turned to a form of gallows humor.

“I was also kind of relieved that I could stop stressing about long-term planning, because that’s always looming over my head. So that’s liberating,” she says. “I think maybe it was easier to do that than get really emotional, which I certainly have since then.”

After the post where she announced her diagnosis, Smokler was surprised and touched by the amount of support—some of it a little too much.

“To have people from junior high reaching out who all of a sudden want to see me—like, I haven’t thought about you since I was 11 or 12? Okay, I don’t really have any interest in my dying days to resurrect [a friendship],” she says in that same brutally honest way that made her famous.

“I think Threads reminds Jill of her early days of blogging,” says Bender, who met Smokler in 2013. In other words, she can share things online to  housands of followers that might be hard to say to a close friend.

“It’s refreshing to hear someone say, ‘I don’t feel like smiling today. This sucks. And I’m too young.’ Her intentions are always so pure and genuine,” says Bender. “And that’s what resonates with people.”

Scroll through the responses to her posts to see the proof is in the pudding.

“Jill, you don’t need to hear my glio story,” @erikaw22 commented on one of Smokler’s entries. “I just want you to know that more people than you will ever know have been positively impacted by your work. You have gotten me thru so many of the ‘mom things,’ I can’t begin to explain. You helped me feel less alone when I was so very alone. I hope the love we are all sending you now and in the future remind you that you are not alone either—sending u all of the love and strength u have given all of us, and then some!”

And Smokler needs it now more than ever. Her most recent MRI was troubling.

“Well, my MRI didn’t come back with the result I was hoping for. They told me to expect a roller coaster when I was diagnosed but this low was unexpected and a punch in the gut. FUCK THIS FUCKING DISEASE,” she posted in April.

“There’s a mass that needs to come out and I’ll need surgery this month,” she says on the phone in early May. A few minutes later, she’s talking about her new podcast It Is What It Is And It’s Not Great.

“I just recorded my first episode,” she says. “I’m in such a weird place—imminent death but trying to plan if I have five, six, seven years. But I’m certainly as negative and snarky as ever,” she says, laughing.

Everyone was worried that after her surgeries, she’d wake up a different person. “But I’m still mean.”

She’s joking, of course, but like anyone else, is learning to navigate the unknown.

“In the beginning, I got so dark, [feeling like] I’m dying any second,” she recalls. “Now I’m living, planning for a couple months from now, a year from now, but I don’t want to plan too long-term.”

She’s hoping the surgery and the trial in Germany will buy her some more time—especially with her kids Lily, 21, Ben, 19, and Evan, 17.

“I spent so much time when they were pre-teens and teenagers longing for the little days again,” she says. “I just really wanted to go back in time, and now thank God they are the ages they are, because my biggest fear when I couldn’t really see a future was that they wouldn’t remember me, they wouldn’t know me, that I would be the dead mother in the background. But now I feel like they really get me.”

Smokler’s daughter is majoring in advertising and viewership, and she can draw a neat line from her own career to that.

“I love seeing that,” she says. “I feel like the kids are—knock on wood—in decent places where I don’t think I would have felt like that five years ago and 10 years ago, which would have been so devastating.”

She’s also been trying to record messages for her kids’ biggest milestones, but it’s brutal. “Hi Lily. Happy wedding day, from beyond the grave,” she intones before getting quiet.

Mostly, she’s living in the moment, as best she can. “I think I just need to focus on the now—which is so hard. I don’t know how people do that.”

There’s relief she can concentrate on the new podcast—a farewell of sorts. A place to air her grievances, fears, and that trademark candor. She has guests lined up and has shelled out money for a studio and an editor.

“I talk about this a little bit on the first episode, but I had an aunt I was very close with,” she says. “She died several years ago and did not leave me anything—not a letter or a conversation. I felt so irrelevant. I don’t want my people to feel like that.”

For Smokler, that means everything from writing heartfelt letters to her loved ones to making sure that a friend who loves her dining-room chairs receives them after her death: “It would make me so happy to think about those living on at her house.”

She wants to leave behind things that make the people in her orbit feel seen and loved.

“I don’t know if that’s my legacy,” she says. “But somehow I’m going to be here even when I’m not.”

Project Name: Sandy Toes, Sun Kissed Nose
House Plan and Interior Design: Pascale de Fouchier Interiors
Stylist: Limonata Creative 

A Family Legacy
The client, Baltimore native Amy Baum, got approval from her father and siblings to bring new life to their family’s summer headquarters in Rehoboth Beach. “They wanted a place easy to live in and easy to take care of, without giving up on the design,” says Baltimore-based interior designer Pascale de Fouchier.

The main request was to reflect the spirit of Baum’s mom, who loved the house but had passed away a few years earlier. “We didn’t keep much of Amy’s mom’s furniture…but what kept coming back to me was an idea of her genuine smile and the impression that she was light and uncluttered,” says de Fouchier. “That’s what I tried to carry into the design: lightness, brightness, clean and welcoming lines.”

Calm and Carefree
“There was really a need for calm throughout the house, so it was important that each space was in harmony with the others,” says de Fouchier. “Like the kitchen and dining room—they are facing each other with open arches, so it felt important to not disrupt the visual flow.”

She treated each room like an extension of the nearby ocean, mixing pastels and neutrals. “Imagine you are walking along the shore—waves, pebbles, fog, clouds, declination of blue and pinkish skies, umbrellas, sailboats decks and sails.”

An Oarsome Idea
“From the start I knew I wanted to have a wall display more than wall art,” says de Fouchier. “When I was visiting an antique shop in Annapolis, there was a pair of oars that just hit my eye, and I knew that was it. They were already sold, but I kept the idea and looked for vintage pieces.”

Since most of the bedrooms are close to each other, she wanted them all to feel similar but different. “Heavy cottons and linens bring a feel of richness, while remaining low-key.”

Scavenger Hunt: It’s hard for me to come up with one word or phrase to describe our home’s style. Maybe Scavenger’s Delight? I asked our son —ages 9 and 12—and they said: unique, vintage, colorful, fun, quirky, and “skibidi.”

Gem of a Neighborhood: Our house is a multi-family-zoned Victorian built in 1915 and is located in the northernmost part of our beloved Lauraville neighborhood. Until we moved in, the house had been stewarded by generations of the same family. We reconfigured the layout so that it functions as a single-family home. We removed an ancient upstairs kitchen and built a staircase to connect what were originally two self-contained apartments.

Rainbow Bright: When I was in my early twenties, I visited the Museo Robert Brady in Cuernavaca in Morelos, Mexico. I was in awe of the bold, vibrant, anything-goes spirit of Brady’s home, and I remember thinking—I want my house to feel like this. So, when we began the process of making our house into a home, I decided that I would simply grab whatever I felt attracted to—regardless of style, color, or era. Somehow, it all works together.

Artist-in-Residence: Our first floor is very open (we knocked down a bunch of walls), so we all kind of float around in that space, which includes our living room, dining room, family room, and kitchen. We spend a lot of time making art and doing sewing and craft projects at the dining room table. It has a glass top, so it’s very easy to clean up, a good thing because there are always paint and permanent marker-based activities happening around here. We also love to cuddle up on our giant couch for movie nights and game nights.

To Market, To Market: I am a big scavenger. I love sourcing things from Buy Nothing groups, estate sales, eBay, Savers, and I even grab stuff from the side of the road. But out of everything, flea markets are my favorite. I’ve organized a few huge community flea markets at “The Lot,” our wonderful community gathering space.

The Kids are Alright: I want the kids to feel like they can have input about the entirety of the house, not just their rooms. So, if they want to grab a piece of furniture from a room and put it somewhere else, or if they want to move their room from one place to another—it’s a big rambling old house, so there are options—I want them to feel empowered to do that. They both have very strong personal aesthetics, and they go to a democratic school (Arts & Ideas Sudbury School), so they are very comfortable calling the shots.

Randi Pupkin leads the charge through the cold and damp garage of Mill No. 1. Upstairs, in the sun-drenched studio and offices, student interns and most of Pupkin’s 20 employees are at work.

But some projects are too big—and messy. Which brings us to this subterranean parking structure, where inside a nondescript white tent tucked in a back corner, she joins a handful of volunteers who are dutifully attaching shards of mosaic tiles to a 12-foot-long horse and jockey.

The piece, designed with sculptor Howard Connelly, will eventually reside in front of a nursing home near the Pimlico racecourse and it’s just so Art with a Heart—collaborative, bright, and creative. It’s also one of the last projects Pupkin will oversee as the executive director of her nonprofit, which helps people enhance their lives through visual arts, before she steps down next month after 25 years.

“I really feel like it’s in the best interest of this organization that it has new, younger leadership,” says Pupkin, 62, pictured right, above. “I’m a different person now, the world is different, and I joke that I don’t speak the same language anymore. As the founder of this organization, it deserves the next.”

That next is Megan Gatto, 31, who started at Art with a Heart as a college intern and, after graduating from the University of Delaware with a BFA in studio art, came on as a full-time staff member in 2016.

“And I haven’t been bored a day since,” she says, pictured left, exchanging a laugh with Pupkin. It seems to be a mutual love fest, as the two sit on a chic midcentury-modern turquoise couch in their shared office. You could say they are on their transition media tour.

“I love her sense of humor, and I think she’s effing smart, and I think being funny and smart is like the perfect combination,” says Pupkin of Gatto. Gatto, who calls herself a reformed reluctant leader, says to Pupkin, “I love that no matter what our day holds, you always live in a ridiculously hopeful ZIP code.”

That hope has propelled Art with a Heart these last two decades. When Pupkin started the organization in 2000, she was working as a construction litigator and living what she called her “beige” era. And what better way to bring color into
her life than art?

“I love the way making art makes you feel,” she says. She knew she wanted to bring that feeling to others, especially those who were underserved.

When she started Art with a Heart out of a shed in her backyard with $6,000 in seed money, the idea was not just to showcase art, but to let people experience what it feels like to make it.

“The first four [project] sites were two group homes for emotionally troubled adolescent boys, House of Ruth, and an Alzheimer’s facility,” recalls Pupkin.

Now, during just the last year alone, Art with a Heart has expanded its reach in ways that Pupkin could once only dream of: It provided nearly 16,000 art classes to children, youth, adults, and families in schools, shelters, community centers, hospitals, and senior facilities around Baltimore, serving some 270,000 people. It completed and installed 16 community art projects with the help of more than 3,900 volunteers. And it opened a satellite location on The Avenue in Hampden for its HeARTwares social enterprise store and workforce development programming.

“I’m leaving my child,” says Pupkin, wistfully. “And she’s taking it over, and we will come out on the other side of the transition strong and healthy, and that’s the goal for both of us.”

You can feel the tinge of sadness in her voice, but also relief in knowing she’s picked the right successor.

“There’s a lot to be proud of in this process, it’s a marriage and they’re work, and this is work,” she says. “And I think you just have to remember—things that are worth having require hard work.”

STUDY HISTORY: My home is located in Butchers Hill. A structural engineer informed me that our house was likely built in the 1870s, based on the joists and beams observed in the basement. We purchased the house in 2008 directly from relatives of the original owners and learned that the house had only ever been owned by that one family.

DESIGN CLASSICS: My interior spaces are inspired by both midcentury modern and Scandinavian design styles, combined with personal, eclectic, and unique objects, art, and furniture. I try to maintain bright, open areas that invite natural light, with warm, neutral tones complemented by pops of color throughout.

A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING: I prefer clean lines, functionality, and order, but not at the expense of creating a warm and welcoming space where friends and family can gather. Since this is not a large home, it’s important to be intentional about what I include, where I place it, and how it functions. I want friends and family to feel comfortable and at home when they visit, surrounded by interesting items to explore, but not so precious that they can’t touch, pick up, or engage with them.

DRAWN TO ART: I am currently the co-executive director of the new Center for Creative Impact at the Maryland Institute College of Art and have been affiliated with MICA for over 20 years. Being part of a school of art and design, surrounded by creative makers and thinkers among the faculty and students, provides me with a constant source of inspiration. My home is filled with art from MICA, including pieces created by former students, faculty colleagues, and even some of my own work from my time as a graduate student.

A VISIONARY: I think your home can be the ultimate expression of your personality. I appreciate artifacts that are unique in their form, function, and history. Personal stories hold great value for me. While I might initially be drawn to a piece of art or an object for its aesthetic qualities and raw beauty, I truly fall in love with it when there’s a unique story or personal connection attached.

FAVORITE PERCH: I particularly enjoy sitting on the couch and looking out the large picture window that faces the street. From this spot, I can see and hear passing cars, people walking their dogs, and kids running around. Sitting here always makes me feel connected to the block, the neighborhood, and Baltimore City—inside the house while remaining connected to the vibrant life outside.

On the busy street corner of Howard and Saratoga in the burgeoning Bromo Arts District sits the striking Dede.shop, the brick-and-mortar home furnishings and accessory arm of interior design studio Décorelle.

Owners Ellen “Elle” Odoi and Yvette Pappoe—technically cousins, though they refer to each other as sisters—moved in this past September as part of the second cohort of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore’s Black-Owned Occupancy Storefront Tenancy (BOOST) program. Mayor Brandon Scott was there to cut the ribbon.

There are still a lot of abandoned buildings to fill on this part of Howard, but for now, the bright murals, hum of the passing light rail, and nearby businesses like Cuples Tea House and Cajou Creamery, feel promising.

The Crook Horner Building—coincidentally, once home to the Pollack-Blum furniture store—was gutted and the renovation included black and white marble checkered floors, tons of natural light pouring in from floor-to-ceiling windows, and a white painted tin ceiling. The space is chic, cheerful, and gorgeous. (Fifteen large apartment lofts fill the upstairs of the building.)

The front of the shop is filled with accessories including vases, pillows, hand-poured candles, and thick, gorgeous, scalloped trays. There are a lot of muted colors with brass, marble, and travertine accents. Plus, big-ticket items like couches, big chunky coffee tables, heavy wooden sideboards, and stylish lamps. The back of the shop is a workspace with fabric and rug samples, and a big table for meeting with clients.

Odoi and Pappoe are Ghanaian immigrants, who moved to Baltimore when they were both young girls. “We were raised together from birth so we don’t like to be called cousins,” says Odoi. Growing up, they always lived less than five minutes from each other, first in Randallstown and later off Security Boulevard.

The first time they were separated was when Odoi headed to Michigan State University. (Pappoe went to UMBC.) There she found a new passion, participating in dorm room decoration competitions and winning “every single time,” she says with a laugh.

But despite always having a love for the process of decorating, styling, and creating, she never felt like it was something she could do as a career. Still, the feeling that something was missing stuck with her while she pursued a master’s in business and contemplated medical school.

“We have that African background where you’re expected to be an engineer, a lawyer…and even with the design background, you’ve still got to have a master’s and a PhD in something,” she says.

To wit, Pappoe is a lawyer and law professor at the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law. Odoi knew she had the talent to pursue design full-time, but didn’t yet trust herself to make the leap.

“I’m risk-adverse,” she admits. So, she continued to work her job in operations.

It was Pappoe who, in 2018, gifted Odoi the official LLC registration of Décorelle, her very part-time side hustle, for Christmas.

“Do what you want with it,” Pappoe told her. “It kind of forced my hand a little bit, but I think it was a good push,” says Odoi. She remembers thinking she was spending all her time managing someone else’s business.

“What would it be like to stop what I’m doing because I’m not happy doing it and put all that effort into building my business?” She gave herself four months. “Five years later, I’m still here.”

Décorelle is run by both Odoi, as the CEO and principal designer, and Pappoe, as co-founder and operations manager (while still working her day job and balancing a brand-new baby). Décorelle is based on the idea that luxury interior design should be within reach.

“That’s our entire mission,” says Pappoe. “To make luxury interior design more accessible. Not cheap, but more accessible.”

When the opportunity came to apply for the BOOST grant, both Odoi and Pappoe thought it felt like a natural transition for the business. With interior design, there’s an intimacy.

“We’re in someone’s home for a year or years,” says Odoi. With retail, it’s more transactional but it also presents more opportunity to create relationships with different people. “We’re hopefully creating products that people love and want to keep buying.”

They hope the range of prices is a selling point, too. “Everyone who comes in here, we want you buy something.” She points to the
pottery—“handmade in Mexico, but they’re like 60 bucks.”

The candles, coasters, canisters, and trays are all curated but affordable. The shop reflects their design style—contemporary with hints of vintage, organic, and the textures, patterns, and earth tones reminiscent of West Africa.

Everything has a clean design but also a warmth. Even the shop’s bathroom, with its fluted marble wall, is paired with wood tones that makes it feel inviting. (The oversized painting that hangs on the wall—“grandmother with a cigar silently judging”—is just the unexpected surprise Odoi loves to use in her designs.)

“We realize that a lot of people just never see our work in person, because they’re all residential,” says Odoi. “It’s really nice to have people walk in and actually physically see the quality of our work and what we do.”

The next step is to finish the workstations for their junior designers and interns who will eventually be working out of the Howard Street building. There will also be the implementation of a program aimed at up-and-coming Black designers.

“A lot of them reach out to me,” says Odoi. “I’ve been very vocal about how it’s a very tough industry to be in and we didn’t get anyone to hold our hand. So, it’s kind of nice to train these young ladies and young men, and just tell them all the secrets that I know.”

Odoi is still constantly learning herself. Just last year, she graduated from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, which helps small businesses grow through education, capital, and support services.

Potential for further growth is exciting, but she and Pappoe never want to abandon their Ghanaian roots. The note card that arrives when someone orders online says “thank you” in Ga, which is their language. And their logo incorporates a Kente cloth, a Ghanaian textile made of hand-woven strips of silk and cotton.

“We’re very intentional about these things,” says Odoi.

Now six months into their shop opening, their main goal is simply to be on people’s radar.  “We just want to make sure people know we’re here,” says Pappoe.

Each time Odoi walks through the door, she still gets butterflies, seeing everything they’ve created and knowing she followed her passion. She smiles, “There’s a lot of love in here.”

It’s a cold day in January as Sol Davis, director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, walks through the newly renovated building just days before it reopens to the public. Sunshine pours into the renovated lobby. Printed signs are taped to the walls. The new podcast studio is stuffed with boxes waiting to be unpacked. One of the galleries hums with construction as sawdust fills the air.

Davis is unhurried—he knows everything will get finished and he’s eager for the empty spaces to be filled with community again: “There’s been a lot of anticipation.”

For centuries, Baltimore has been home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the United States, and to this day, it remains incredibly diverse and active. The museum, the successor to the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland, which was established in 1960, is nestled between two historic synagogues—Lloyd Street, housed in a Greek Revival-style building and the third-oldest synagogue in the United States, and the nearly-as-old B’nai Israel, with its more Gothic look—in historic Jonestown.

The first iteration of the museum came about in the 1980s, when the society opened the Jewish Heritage Center, which officially became a museum in the late ’90s. Over the past two decades, it has hosted countless exhibits, programming for families, and a bris or two, but the building has stayed the same. Meaning this newest makeover—one that finally brings it into the 21st century—is long overdue.

“We’ve been talking about the project as really a big step in our evolution into the museum field,” says Davis, who was director of the Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center in Arizona before coming to Baltimore in 2021. “And also, a once-in-a-generation kind of capital investment in Jewish culture in Baltimore City.”

The space, once dark and dated, now feels fresh and modern. Every inch has been reconfigured and reconstructed—down to the gallery floors, which have transformed into a comfortable terrazzo to encourage lingering. And all throughout, there is an emphasis on participation and engagement, moving away from the model where visitors are passive observers who strictly read placards next to photographs.

“What participatory means to us is really an invitation to Jewish Marylanders to co-narrate the story of the Jewish Maryland experience together,” says Davis.

That will be done through changing exhibits and even a new campaign to collect photographs from Jewish Marylanders of their generational families. And the centerpiece? A state-of-the-art production studio to record as many Jewish oral histories as possible.

“The charge we gave to the architects was, how can we move out of a spectator paradigm and really [offer this space] as an experience and as a partnership between the museum and the community,” says Davis.

For him, that also includes opening the door to those who aren’t part of the Jewish community—especially their neighbors from Jonestown, a predominantly African-American community.

“It’s a huge opportunity for us to think about Jewish and African-American relations historically and how we can nourish those relationships in the present.”

The renovations have been helped along by Baltimore Orioles owner David M. Rubenstein, who announced a gift of $1.5 million to the museum last September. The lobby—now named the David M. Rubenstein Exhibition Arcade—is very orange, something Davis says is mere coincidence.

Its design is inspired by 19th-century Parisian arcades, aka passageways, featuring an arched ceiling lined with skylights. There are display cases for artifacts from the museum’s archives, interactive stations, and a large video screen. The museum refers to them as portals.

Which all goes back to one simple purpose, says Davis: “We want to connect Jewish Marylanders with their roots.”

Despite the early hour and wet September morning, it’s standing room only at Creative Mornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series for local creatives. Shawn Chopra, the creative director and owner of coffee and home goods store Good Neighbor, is the featured speaker and even thought he looks like the coolest person at the party, he seems nervous.

But once Chopra starts talking about “shedding a lifetime of going through the motions,” his voice gets steadier and easily fills the room at Sandtown Furniture in Pigtown. Chopra ends the talk by handing out pieces of papyrus, a thick paper that was used in ancient times. For Chopra, papyrus has come to represent the connection between roots and growth.

Chopra’s parents grew up in Chandigarh, India, the dream city of India’s first prime minister, Sh. Jawaharlal Nehru, and planned by the famous French architect Le Corbusier. It’s known as one of the best experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in the 20th century. But Chopra himself was born in Winnipeg—“the cold middle part of Canada,” he sighs—after his parents immigrated there in 1985.

The family then moved to Vancouver, where Chopra spent his childhood in a city called Richmond. Due to an influx of Indian and Chinese immigrants and a shortage of housing, Chopra’s father, who worked as an engineer and provided the sole income for the family, saw an opportunity to renovate and flip their small childhood home.

Every few years when the market was right, they would rinse and repeat. “I think my dad enjoyed it,” says Chopra. “And I think we as a family enjoyed the renovation process.” Chopra’s parents were also homebodies and much preferred hosting friends at their house to going out. That meant Chopra spent a lot of time in his room, which he filled with sports team pennants his father would pick up on his business trips to the United States.

“I would also constantly rearrange the furniture in my room,” remembers Chopra. “We used to go thrifting—a lot of my clothes were thrifted and also my furniture, like side tables and lamps.”

The cornerstones of his childhood—hospitality, innovation, renovation—ended up being the building blocks that ultimately led to opening Good Neighbor.

By the time his senior year of high school rolled around, Chopra had his eyes set on New York, so he did the most sensible thing he could think of and headed to the “East Coast of Canada”—Ottawa. His parents had hinted he had three career options in their eyes—health care, lawyer, or accountant—so he found himself studying physical therapy at the University of Ottawa.

It was on his first day of college that he met Anne Morgan, herself the child of Egyptian immigrants. They started dating in 2007. Morgan immediately recognized that he was a creative spirit.

“She was able to uncover a lot of these things in my past,” says Chopra, and she would press him: “What are you doing studying medicine?” But at the same time, she understood the immigrant mentality of being expected to do something great. “Meeting Anne was one of the best things that happened to me, because she saw me,” says Chopra.

The two graduated in 2009 and two years later they moved to Baltimore, where Morgan was enrolled in dental school at the University of Maryland.

“We’ll live in Baltimore for four years,” Chopra remembers thinking as they purchased an apartment in Locust Point. (Living in Baltimore also meant he was now only a train ride away from New York City.) Chopra transferred his physical therapy license, but wanted to make a bigger impact in the field, so he began working in public health and visiting seniors around the city who were in recovery from strokes and other ailments.

“I loved it,” says Chopra. “I got to go to every part of Baltimore.” And suddenly a Canadian was visiting neighborhoods that even some homegrowns had never been to—talking to residents and their children, who would occasionally stop by and share stories.

“That’s where I started to fall in love with the city,” says Chopra. “It just needs more people to stay and do something and be a part of it.”

Baltimore is addicting because it’s the kind of place where people believe in your dream, he says. “I think Charm City is the right word for it because it is very charming, and I think people see the potential in it,” he says. “It’s authentic.”

Chopra had also gotten to know a lot of the artists and makers and became immersed in how they created the fabric of the city—but at that point simply as a supportive bystander. Then one day it hit him.

“I was tired of consuming other people’s work,” he says. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate their art; it’s just that he wanted to create, too. He was finally owning up to what Morgan had been telling him all along—there was a piece of him missing and he realized he would actually be honoring his parents by becoming the best version of himself.

So, he decided it was time for a leap of faith. But he still didn’t know exactly what that meant. Should he go back to school? How could he be more involved in the community?

“And then I just came up with the idea of Good Neighbor,” he says. “A place that I thought Baltimore needed, a place that I needed.”

Chopra made a list of all the things that he and Morgan enjoyed—coffee, community, togetherness, sharing meals, beautiful dishware, plants. He decided he would make it a one-stop cool coffee shop where lingering is encouraged.

“You know, you go to these other cities and it’s like, ‘Why can’t Baltimore have this?’” he says. Yeah, it would be that.

He rented the space in 2019. It had been sitting empty for a few years and needed a complete rehaul. Chopra had never worked as a contractor but had helped his father on all those home renovations, so he was able to self-manage the build-out.

“It was the only way we could afford this,” says Chopra. But in the end, it was also “the only way I wanted to do it. This was going be my education this was my grad school,” he says. “That’s actually how my parents framed it.”

Chopra and his builders got to work, with an initial opening date of March 2020. Obviously, the pandemic had other plans and they spent the extra two months adjusting—building an outdoor deck and changing business procedures.

In May of 2020, still in the throes of COVID and with Morgan nine months pregnant, Good Neighbor opened on Falls Road between Hampden and Hoes Heights. It’s a rare space, with a main building, a big outdoor area, and a garage that was turned into a picture-perfect greenhouse and has probably starred in hundreds of Instagram stories.

Even with all that, Chopra wasn’t sure if it would work. Having customers wear masks and socially distance to keep the employees safe made no sense when the whole purpose of Good Neighbor was stranger interaction and closeness. But people came. They utilized the tiered outdoor garden and still felt like they were hanging out with other friends even if they couldn’t sit together.

“It was a dizzying couple of years,” says Chopra. And when customers finally could come inside, they found a light-filled space stocked with Chopra’s curated finds, from furniture to housewares, bottles of wine, magazines, and candles.

In 2023, Chopra launched Guesthouse by Good Neighbor, a seven-room boutique hotel on the two floors above the coffee and retail space, which had previously been used as storage. Meant to recreate the feeling of staying at a friend’s house versus a stuffy hotel, it doubles, like the shop, as an opportunity to showcase the work of Baltimore makers and artists as well as Chopra’s and Morgan’s roots.

In November of 2022, Chopra, Morgan, and their toddler son, Avi, visited Aswan, Egypt, with Chopra’s “baba” (Egyptian for father-in-law), who helped them source more than 2,000 pieces of papyrus that have since been integrated into every room at the hotel. Often, the light hits and dances off the ancient paper as it takes on new life within the most modern spaces.

And while Charm City now gets to claim Chopra as its own, he has also been noticed by the bigger design community, from furniture brands that had never had accounts in Baltimore before to national design magazines. “Baltimore’s Tight-Knit Design Scene Is Thriving,” announces a new piece in Dwell magazine, with an illustration of Chopra and a story proclaiming him as “the city’s beloved design retail resource.”

Locally, the design community has taken note as well. “Shawn has done such a brilliant job of bringing incredible design and a high-end aesthetic to Baltimore in a way that is approachable and for the people,” says Robin Heller, lead designer and founder of Surrounded By Color. “He’s so open to ideas and input from designers and brands and friends and patrons. It’s refreshing.”

Part of Chopra’s genius is also the relationship between his businesses. The success and aesthetic of Good Neighbor led to Guesthouse, which in turn has led to Design Garage, a space for designers, architects, builders, and decorators to work together and innovate, and even a weeklong Good Neighbor Design Camp.

Chopra’s parents still live in Vancouver but come down several times a year—mostly to see their grandson Avi—and “they do love the shop and seeing me in my element and using my talents,” says Chopra. He knows they worried, as parents do, when he took that huge gamble on his future.

“But, as I always tell them, the immigrant sacrifice they made was so that their kids could dream completely free and without constraints, something they could not afford to do.”

That there is now tangible evidence of his success feels good.

“Shawn and his team have imagined Baltimore in a super aesthetically pleasing way,” says Surrounded By Color’s Heller. “It’s so lovely as a designer, and a Baltimorean, to be able to bask in the light of it all and watch everyone else shine in it too.”

Ours was a cookbook club potluck, but when you are the host you can pick any theme. Themes encourage creativity and make it easy to come up with inspired details. (Think: ugly-sweater parties, cookie swaps, a holiday comedy roast, Christmas carol-oke, and latke-eating contests.) It can help tie all the elements of a party together, such as the decor, menu, music, and favors.

Also, a well-executed theme means your friends will be definitely talking about your party for years to come. And especially when gathering guests who don’t always know each other, a theme can be a fantastic conversation starter.

 

Caterer: Linwoods Catering
Floral Design: Simply Beautiful Flowers
All tabletop items a mix of the homeowners’, along with Table Toppers, Wishbone Reserve, and The Turnover Shop.

• Chesapeake Bay Cooking by John Shields
• Bread Baking for Beginners by Bonnie Ohara
• Le Sud by Rebekah Peppler
• What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by Caroline Chambers
• Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables by Joshua McFadden
• Southern Grit by Kelsey Barnard Clark
• Desi Bakes by Hetal Vasavada
• Pie Squared by Cathy Barrow
• What Goes With What by Julia Turshen
• The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten

BUFFET: Roasted chicken with fresh herbs; sliced roast filet of beef; baked dinner rolls; fall arugula salad with peaches, nectarines, candied walnuts, goat cheese, and a citrus vinaigrette; baked French toast topped with fresh berries; artisanal deviled eggs; roasted Brussels sprouts and butternut squash; sun-dried tomato, leek, and goat cheese quiche; and a butternut squash and apple soup. “With Monsters” painting by Katie Pumphrey.

BLOODY MARY BAR: Olives, shrimp, lemons, oysters, celery, tomatoes, peppers, and bacon and brown sugar breadsticks.

DESSERTS: Apple cider doughnuts, blueberry crumble and morning glory muffins, chocolate-dipped macarons, assorted shortbread cookies, sculpted pear mousse, and spiced mixed nuts. Handmade ceramic speckled mugs and cake stands by Kate Rowe Creations.

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN
By Nelle Somerville

Don’t be afraid to use the family silver and integrate family heirloom pieces into modern tablescapes. In fact, the more you use it, the better it stays. Here are some ideas:

• Baby silver cups can be used for florals and are a fantastic conversation starter. This smaller size is a great way to keep your flowers lower to the table, so guests can easily see each other across the table.

• Mix and match your silver napkin rings. These are also great items to collect. Or alternate with a velvet ribbon if you don’t have enough for a large crowd or set every other setting with a bamboo ring to make it more modern.

• Rinse your silver after the big meal and clean more thoroughly later. I put all of our silver in the dishwasher and have lived to tell the tale.

• Keep it polished, once or twice a year with a strong microfiber cloth and Hagerty silversmith polish—I do it to zen out.

THE BEAUTY OF A SHARED MEAL
By Amy Langrehr

Whether it’s with friends or family, big or small, Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because it’s simply about coming together to enjoy good food with people you love. No gifts, no pressure.

When we were kids, our family would gather at our house in Kingsville with all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. We had it there because my dad had multiple sclerosis and getting out and about was not easy. The youngest kids’ main task was to set the table while the big kids watched football or hung out in the backyard.

Aunt Joan’s onion dip (Lipton onion soup mix packet served with Utz potato chips) was always my favorite pre-dinner snack and Aunt Barbara’s coconut cake was the absolute best dessert. The thing I remember most, though, was how everything for the meal came together at the exact right time—it was like magic.

For me, the perfect Thanksgiving plate is dark meat, mashed potatoes with my mom’s homemade gravy, stuffing (Stove Top, a nod to my childhood), green beans, and sauerkraut. To this day, I spoon a little dollop of sauerkraut on the edge of my plate every year as a reminder of my dad.

As much as I treasure those early years, I really like how low-key my Thanksgiving celebrations are now. I am not a huge holiday person, but Thanksgiving with my mom is the best. At 90 years young, she still makes the best crudités plate filled with things like pimento-stuffed olives, radishes with salt, and celery with cream cheese. Sometimes it’s just the two of us and we’ll roast a small bird or maybe just a breast and a couple of thighs that I usually order from Eddie’s to make it easy.

Food memories mean a lot to me. They connect us with our people, especially once they are gone. I love that I can still feel like my dad is there with us with that tiny bit of sauerkraut on my plate. Food memories also take us back to a time or place. Things like picking steamed crabs over newspaper on a picnic table and having a cream cheese and olive sandwich on white bread remind me of my childhood home and the memories my family created there. A super-special treat of a standing rib roast at Christmas, chocolate cream pie on Mother’s Day; those are things that will always remind me of my mom.

One thing I have learned over the years is that the best thing about food isn’t the size of the crowd or how fancy a meal is, it’s about the people we share it with.

A SWEET SOUVENIR: Gather all of the recipes ahead of time and collect them into a book for the perfect favor.

Project Name: Caves Park
Architect: Place Architecture: Design
Interior Design: Redhead Design
Contractor: Owings Brothers Contracting
Landscaping: New World Gardens

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
The firm had two major project challenges. First, they had to create an approach to the house that provided access from the driveway— one story below—to the front door with an exterior makeover that would enhance the ranch. And secondly, to produce a “full interior renovation of the first floor incorporating thoughtful design elements to ensure beauty, comfort, and functionality,” says Laurie JB Stubb, principal of Place Architecture: Design, a women-owned custom residential architectural firm.

HOUSE ON A SLOPE
This house was originally built in the early 1970s on a sloping site. “The client wanted a facelift to the interior and exterior to create a home that was light-filled, fresh, and inviting,” says Stubb. Throughout the home, large windows were installed to flood the interior with natural light, creating an airy, open environment. “The foyer is a focal point, utilizing bold printed grasscloth wallpaper, and it’s where we hung the client’s beloved Keith Haring art,” says Stubb. “That, paired with the custom metal stair railing, completes the introduction to the home.”

A WORK OF ART
The clean, timeless design formed the backdrop for the homeowner’s extensive artwork and sculpture collection. “Each piece was not only a decorative element but a source of inspiration for the color palette,” says Stubb. “We featured the painting ‘Jaguar in the Moonlight’ over the living room sofa and were able to bring in rich colors and textures with velvet, leather, and linen.”

WHAT YOU SEE: A lot of my furniture is from the ’50s and ’60s, or recreated in that style, and I collect random relics from that time period. I’m a nature girl, so lots of fresh flowers and plants spread around the house, mixed with botanical-themed fabrics and art.

HOUSE-TORY: It was built in 1929, and one of the previous owners was a bit of a carpenter and created the built-in shelves and island. A friend of a friend bought it in 2016, and she now lives on the West Coast, so I’ve been delighted to call this home for the past four years. I love sitting in the living room on a sunny afternoon. The west-facing windows let in beautiful light through the dining room and make the plant collection shine. And my couch is exactly the right size for my pit bull, Betty Mae, and me to curl up on and relax.

MAXIMILLION: I’m definitely not a minimalist. I like things neat and orderly, but with color and kitsch. I’ve collected things that reflect my interests over the years, like retro beauty magazines and pinups, weird taxidermies, posters from shows my friends have performed in, and local art from folks in Baltimore.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS: My “Duckvine” taxidermy, a duckling modeled after Divine in Pink Flamingos. I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t even eat animals, but this was a gift and is one of my favorite things. My “Queen of Eggs” sash and tiara; I won the infamous Deviled Egg Pageant in 2022 and it’s basically the pinnacle of success to me. I’ve been riding that high ever since. My “Baltimore Burlesque” collection, including autographed Blaze Starr photos, and entry tickets to the Two O’Clock Club she once owned. And my collection of over 70 plants. They are a labor of time and love and money, but I’m extremely proud of them.

IN THE ART STUDIO: I’ve been making all different kinds of art my entire life, and right now I’m in a dried florals phase. This was originally born out of my inability to waste literally anything, even dead flowers. I like to pick up odd nature bits while walking the dog, too, like dried seed pods or anything that catches my interest. Having this room to rearrange and suit my artistic whims is such a blessing.

GREEN HOUSE: I’ve always been barefoot outside playing with nature; it’s how I was raised. Both my parents are gardeners, and that appreciation of plants never left me. The life and vibrancy they add, their various shapes, colors, really transform a room, making it feel more serene to me. And the act of caring for them is scientifically proven to benefit your brain.

Annie Howe sits at her table, X-Acto knife in hand, working meticulously as little shards of discarded paper scatter around her like confetti. Her cuts are quick, controlled, and accurate—it’s like watching a skilled surgeon—and within a few seconds she’s created a beautiful border around a quickly sketched tree as she demonstrates her papercut technique.

A gallon Mason jar full of razor blades sits on her desk a few inches away from where she works in her sun-filled studio in Lauraville.

“I wanted to do one of those things where you’re like, ‘Guess how many jelly beans are in the jar,’” she says with a laugh in her distinctive voice—a mix of her Rhode Island upbringing and her 27 years in Baltimore. Today, she’s wearing a cat apron, the bow neatly tied at her waist, her arms freckled exactly like you would expect from a strawberry blonde like her. She nods to the jar. “I mean, this is probably years and years, but it’s like that because the blades are so small.”

Those little blades have made a big impact.

A year ago, Howe moved into a new studio upstairs at Found Studio Shop to accommodate all the work she’s doing. Her papercuts are sold downstairs, at Mount Royal Soaps, and on her website, and her work has adorned everything from Eddie’s of Roland Park grocery bags to gift tags sold by Anthropologie.

Her needs for papercutting are simple—a pencil (she prefers Ticonderoga), 70-weight paper, an eraser, a pencil sharpener, her cutting knife, and always Excel branded blades. It starts with a sketch in pencil on the paper—and then she gets to work.

“I tell people in my workshops—this is the way I do papercutting. I don’t know if this is the way everybody else does it,” says Howe. “That’s the thing I love about papercutting, there’s really no right or wrong way to do it. There are no right or wrong materials to use. It’s highly up to you, which is so cool.”

Her pieces are complex, playful, and stunning and often involve woodland creatures, florals, or familiar cityscapes. She can expertly add words that seem to be hanging by a thread—and the fact that all her sketching is done backwards on the back of the page makes it all the more mind-blowing.

“I didn’t realize, when I got into it, the depth and history of papercutting as an art form,” admits Howe.

Papercut art first appeared during the Jin dynasty in 4th century C.E., after Chinese official Cai Lun invented paper in 105 C.E. Papercutting continued to be practiced during the Song and Tang dynasties as a popular form of decorative art. By the eighth or ninth century, papercutting appeared in West Asia and, in the 16th century, Switzerland and Germany established scherenschnitte (“scissor cutting”).

According to the Guild of American Papercutters, located three hours outside of Baltimore in Somerset, Pennsylvania, the “Pennsylvania Germans brought the art of scherenschnitte to America in the 1700s and used the cut work to decorate birth, baptismal, and marriage certificates.”

Howe came into papercutting in kind of a circuitous way. She grew up in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, before moving to Providence as a teenager when her mom got a job in Boston. “I have always loved art from the beginning,” says Howe.

That was solidified when she ended up at a high school with a strong art program that included continuing education classes at the nearby famed Rhode Island School of Design. She knew she wanted to study art in college, but also wanted to get out of Rhode Island—so she headed to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The first time she stepped foot in Baltimore, she was completely smitten.

“I was totally charmed by the architecture of Bolton Hill,” says Howe. “Baltimore seemed really cool.”

Her plan was to be a painting major, but she felt she was “not as talented as many of the other painters”—so she switched to fibers and quickly found her niche.

“I think I was drawn to printmaking and fibers because what I really liked was the processes of doing things,” she says. “I liked fabric dyeing, silk screening—the technique, the physical nature, and the repetitive tasks, which papercutting is sort of in a way too.”

Howe became involved in performance art, including costume and mask making and puppetry. That all came to fruition when MICA’s community art partnership paired Howe with an after-school art program and she, alongside fellow student Kate Cusack, was tasked with creating a big spring festival in Bolton Hill with the kids.

“That was really an exciting experience, because I was like, ‘Oh, this is a way that I can use my interest in giant puppets and street parade and fiber arts and organizing.’”

She also spent summers interning with performance group Big Nazo back home in Providence, where she crafted puppets, did street theater, and was even able to join the troupe on a trip to Scotland. “I always like to be part of a team, which is funny, because now I work mostly on my own; but I’ve always loved collaborations.”

After Howe graduated in 2001, she spent a few years teaching art after school at the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development in Brooklyn and South Baltimore. She was introduced to Molly Ross at a lantern-making workshop. Ross was the director of Nana Projects, a group consisting of self-proclaimed visual alchemists and lanteeners, who were responsible for the design and production of the Creative Alliance’s Great Halloween Lantern Parade.

“I was looking to hire staff for the next Lantern Parade, and she seemed perfect,” remembers Ross. Part of Howe’s job was creating miniature shadow puppets that would be shown on overhead projectors for the finale of the Halloween parade. Howe took the technique and supersized it. “She cut these large-scale papercuts to be decorations for a fundraiser we were having,” says Ross. “And they turned out to be gorgeous.”

Everything about it felt instantly innate to Howe. “I think it came really naturally, and that’s part of the reason why I gravitated to it,” she says.

She started experimenting with different techniques. “I would fold the paper in half—I still mostly do that—fold, draw, and cut what I can,” she says. “That is just part of the fun of it; it’s always a little unpredictable. You never know exactly how it’s going to turn out.”

“THAT IS JUST PART OF THE FUN OF IT…YOU NEVER KNOW EXACTLY HOW IT’S GOING TO TURN OUT.”

For Christmas that year she made paper-cuts for her family. “I think they were like, ‘Okay, that’s cool, I guess. I don’t know, a little weird,’” she says, laughing. Up until that point, it was still just a part-time job and hobby. And then in 2008, Howe’s friends Winston Blick and Cristin Dadant opened the restaurant Clementine in Hamilton and needed artwork for the walls. “I was making a lot of veggie-themed work [for them] and Winston told me I needed some meat.”

Customers loved them. “And that’s part of the thing about Baltimore,” says Howe. “Just from day one I felt like people were so encouraging.”

That included the now-closed Trohv (then Red Tree), which became Howe’s first retail shop. “I emailed them, and they helped me figure out prices and presentation. I just didn’t know any of that stuff.” (In a full-circle moment, she created a stunning full window display for their 10th anniversary in 2016.)

“When we first met Annie, I was stunned by her ability to portray a story with such precision, scale, and with such a kind and visionary spirit,” says Trohv owner Carmen Brock.

Buoyed by the exposure, Howe began doing the craft show circuit and Woodberry Kitchen approached her about creating a T- shirt for their staff. That was her lightbulb moment. “I realized this is something I could do for other people.”

At that time, through a MICA AmeriCorps program, she was working full-time at Nana Projects while also doing more and more papercutting, including commissions. When Nana Projects ended after Ross moved to Florida, Howe took a somewhat mundane part-time sales job with a produce distributor, and soon realized that what she was making there she could easily earn if she dedicated herself to papercutting full-time.

It didn’t hurt that she had some safety nets in place. “I was married at the time. We had a house. I could do my artwork in the basement. I wasn’t totally just going out on my own, so I said, ‘Let me see if I can do this.’”

That was 2012, and she hasn’t stopped creating. That includes partnering with other artists and businesses to make products such as book covers, window displays, ornaments, public artwork, posters—even a “Welcome to Mathias” billboard for a town in West Virginia.

“Annie is one of those artists who is a retailer’s dream—she is focused, creative, fun, open-minded, and thoughtful,” says Brock. “Without a doubt, she played a formative and important role in Trohv’s history and expression of notable artwork.”

Ross says a few years ago she was in an Anthropologie store and saw an advent calendar that looked like Howe’s style. “I picked it up, and it was indeed her work.”

Her collaborative work continues to grow as she finds new ways to take her art to the public, including as Ladew Gardens’ artist-in-residence this past September.

“Annie’s work is so elegant and joyful, and she has been hugely popular with the Ladew community,” says Emily Emerick, executive director of the Gardens. “Her work is both intricate and ageless.”

For Howe, it’s not a matter of wanting all these different partnerships—she does—but making sure she has the bandwidth to do it all.  “The cool thing about having your own business is that the sky’s the limit,” she says. But she also has to be able to keep up with all the work.

For now, she’s bent over her table diligently working away, adding another blade to the jar.  Says Howe, “I just keep cutting and cutting and cutting until it’s ready.”