Inbar Lee Hyams

I tend to keep my kitchen at exactly enough. Not out of austerity, more like a point of pride. One kilo of rice in the cupboard at a time. A fruit bowl that never quite overflows. And if the plates and cups are a hodgepodge of hand-me-downs and market finds, honestly, they look great together. I've turned making do into an art form. Why would I need anything more when I can make this work? It's also more ecological. In a world drowning in stuff, making do felt like the right answer. And it...

In our old apartment (the one I now call the funk shui place) we couldn't figure out why family time felt so hard. We'd plan a nice dinner. We'd mean well. And then something about being in that kitchen, that living room, that entrance area would contaminate it — chi that felt heavy, unpleasant, almost attacking. That energy crept into our communication, too. It wasn't until I started studying feng shui that I understood what had actually been happening. The communal areas of our home, the...

Photo Credits: Nisim Touitou My daughter celebrated her bat mitzvah last week. That sentence still sounds slightly surreal to me, partly because I've been living inside the logistics of it for weeks. The pajama party, the classroom party, the family party, the party party. Four events, four sets of expectations, four rounds of flowers and food and work and LIFE. My husband and I kept each other upright while our daughter kept us on our toes (and laughing). In what could have been a super...