ENiD + RAD

I’ve dreamed about space creating for a long time.

As a kid I remember making homes on the school playground, methodically sweeping pine needles aside with my feet to create elaborate floor plans. I used to rearrange my bedroom constantly. My mom would send me to clean up and find me an hour later with furniture in disarray as I shifted all my belongings from one side of the room to the other, a habit I’ve carried through to adulthood.

In college in Athens, Georgia, I had an artist landlord who became a dear friend. I lived in two of the houses he’d renovated. They were so quirky and shook all my ideas of how space can be made. Each house was painted in his signature bold yellow, one had bright pink, purple and teal polka dots on the exterior for extra fun. The porch railings were shaped to reflect the house’s particular theme—one mushrooms, another fertility. What a time! He created a DNA strand in the kitchen floor tile of the fertility house with little hand blown glass stones with embryos inside. Space making on psychedelics.

My post college years were spent bouncing from space to space in Atlanta. A few were really cool lofts with expansive space, one quaint little house had a dreamy screened porch tucked right into the canopy of trees in our backyard. I flipped through pages of Dwell magazine and contemplated going back to school for landscape design. I lived half my life in the restaurant spaces I worked in, spaces where energy shifted from quiet moments of preparation to the chaos of a busy service and then back to winding down before the lights went out. In one of these spaces, my view from behind the bar looked west out a giant window over the train tracks and I’d often pause in the middle of making a cocktail to appreciate a sunset.

Our Boston apartments have been good homes (clunky radiators and all) accessible to green spaces that I’ve loved. (Should I get that Frederick Law Olmsted tattoo I’ve been thinking about?) But I’ve been reluctant to call this city home—it’s expensive and far from family. As renters it’s easy not to invest a lot of energy into homemaking, but I continue to long for space, imagining renovations and rearranging my houseplants in the small sunny corner I have.

As Nicole and I stumble through our explorations of what ENiD + RAD will be, there are so many questions to answer. Is this a business? Is this a party? Will we inhabit a physical space someday? How will this space feed our community while centering our values?

There are many spaces I hold fondly in my memories, aspects of which I hope to recreate. Mostly I dream of space that is open, filled with the warmth of light, inspiring but uncluttered, which can support creativity and communal growth. Where meals can be shared, ideas born, skills honed, knickknacks rearranged.