Hello! Welcome to “Making Housewarming,” our series on this here blog about how we created our debut book from start to finish—everything from how we decided what we wanted to create to organizing photoshoots to finding the right publisher and a whole lot more. We’ll be covering a different part of the process every week for ten weeks (this is week six!), so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter so you don’t miss anything!

Scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find each post in the series and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!

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The final day of shooting. We were a wreck, in fact everything was!

Matt explaining our wild plan to our assistant stylist and dear friend Morgan. Each of those post it notes represents a different space & photo we had to create!

Planning a photo shoot with a photographer and assistant stylist in the middle of a pandemic (we’re talking December 2020) was probably one of the hardest, most rewarding, and psychotic things we did over the entire two-year process of making Housewarming.

But before we dive face-first into the madness, some background info is in order. We’ve taken pretty much all of our own photos for the entire six or seven years we’ve been doing this blog. Our tripod and Canon EOS 5D have become our closest allies in making all of the imagery you’ve ever seen from us. But for this book, we knew we wanted to outsource a good chunk of the photography to Augusta Sagnelli, who is one of our favorite local photographers with a fantastic eye for interiors and lighting. Also, like, we were not about to shoot this whole book for you on our tripod. That sounded terrible. Do you know how long it takes us to set up a photo and pose on a self-timer?! Too long! Multiply that by 150 or so, and we just didn’t have the time—having someone who could just click click click and change her angles quickly between shutter sounds was going to be key. So we came up with a plan that involved Gus shooting around half of the images for the book, including the cover, and we’d take on the other half, mostly for images that required less intense styling, and less of us in them, like processes for the DIY section and some of the food and drink photos.

When we first started talking about the imagery that would make its way into Housewarming, around June of 2020, we thought for sure that we’d be able to shoot easily in various beautiful homes around New Orleans, styling them to our liking to fit the subject matter of the book in time to deliver all the imagery to our publisher. We figured the current plague situation couldn’t last much longer and would work itself out soon enough. We were already three months into the pandemmy, so it was surely almost over, right? Right?

Hahaha we were so stupid.

As that summer progressed it became pretty clear that asking a dozen or so folks to let us & our photographer & our stylist into their homes for a prolonged bit of touching all of their stuff and getting maskless for photos (pre-vaccine! pre-milder variants!) wasn’t remotely realistic or responsible. And you know what? It kind of forced us to make a better book. We decided that in order to show the large variety of spaces, homes, and styles we wanted to—while not going into anyone’s actual home—we’d have to make the spaces ourselves in a studio. Yep.

We rented a two-bedroom apartment in a new building that was mostly empty and started building out the plan for what would become a whirlwind four-day photoshoot— spanning three different living rooms, a handful of bedrooms, and dozens of other smaller vignettes and styled spaces.

It was such an undertaking. We bought and borrowed furniture, we scoured through our art, we made extra strong coffee, and we planned out four jam-packed days of shooting half of the photos of our book in that one apartment—just us, Gus, and our assistant stylist / best friend Morgan. Oh, and we really only had those four days because of scheduling conflicts (Gus was in the process of moving out of the country, like, that week!) and to keep our budget in check, so there wasn’t really any room for error.

We spent months planning out what the spaces would look like, and in a way it was nice that we had total control over every detail of the spaces that would be featured, making sure they fit whatever context they’d be used in in the book. Once our lease started, we spent nearly two weeks setting up for the first day of shooting, and then for each subsequent day, we had the evenings to break it all down, repaint, install new light fixtures, move in new furniture, and go home for a few hours of sleep just to show up again early the next day to make sure everything was ready to go.

Just some unedited snapshots from day one of shooting :)

It was the most exhausting thing either of us has ever done for work, but it paid off so well. Housewarming is at its heart an intro to homemaking, and we really wanted the vast majority of projects to be renter friendly. By creating the spaces for the photoshoot this (chaotic) way, in a fairly lackluster characterless apartment space, we were inherently limiting ourselves to stuff that could be done with relative ease, without any major demolition or remodeling, and on a budget (making that many spaces at one time ain’t cheap!). The spaces would be beautiful but approachable, which was kind of the entire point—nothing in this book was meant to be out of reach or solely aspirational, it was meant to be easily imitated by folks who had limitations in skill level, budget, or lease policies. So, at the end of the day, while we’d never ever in a million years do all of that again, it made for a better, more appropriate collection of spaces and photos than we would’ve gotten had we been able to execute our original plan of hopping around from gorgeous home to gorgeous home.

We could not be more grateful to Gus and Morgan for helping this unconventional photoshoot happen, and there’s literally no possible way we could’ve done it without them. And we could not be more excited for you to see all of the different images throughout Housewarming!!! Once we wrapped up the photoshoot it was time to plan out the other pretty part of the book, the illustrated artwork that would fill the pages with a bit of whimsy and help express our ideas whenever our words and photos couldn’t fully do so. But the next post in this series is allllll about that, so stay tuned. We hope you’ll join in and follow along as we count down the weeks to our book’s publication! You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing, and preorder Housewarming if you haven’t already! Below you’ll find all of the previous posts in this series, ready for your viewing :)

Xoxo

Beau & Matt

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