Alison Piepmeyer's Wallpaper Before-and-After Photos Make Me Swoon
Plus, what she wears in NYC and Paris, and a fun way to watch movies with kids.
Hi!! How’s your week going? I’m SOOO EXCITED to feature my friend Alison Piepmeyer in this week’s issue. She’s like our personal Kristen Wiig, with hilarious expressions, funny dances, and goofy anecdotes. As Mindy Kaling says, “a best friend isn’t a person, it’s a tier,” and I feel so lucky to have Alison firmly on mine.
Alison is a social media strategist and content creator, who writes the newsletter Grid Report about exactly how to crush at social media. (She’s really excellent at what she does.) She lives with her adorable family…
…in a Brooklyn brownstone, in which she painted the dining room black and has the coolest wallpaper (see the before-and-after photos below).
Here, Alison shares 11 favorite things, including a nail polish discovery, the dinner recipe she’s made 100 times, and six style tips…
Family activity: My husband and I LOVE karaoke, and we discovered that YouTube has almost every song as a karaoke version. So, this fall, we've been karaoke-ing with our kids at home. We even invested in a cheap battery-operated microphone to bust out. My go-to song is Miley Cyrus’s Flowers.
Book: A few years ago, I read a poem on the subway (in an ad, lol) and started crying because it was so beautiful. I decided ‘I like poetry now’ and came home and told my husband Zach, who (being the mensch he is) promptly bought me a pile of poetry books so I could figure out my favorite poets. I tried Rumi and E.E. Cummings and a bunch of others, but I especially liked the feelings that Mary Oliver brought up. I read through Devotions after my dad died — he loved nature, so it made me feel close to him.
Burger: For date nights, we just walk in and squeeze up to the bar at Inga’s in Brooklyn Heights. They have the BEST burger in Brooklyn (we’ve tried them all). Sean, the owner, once told me that he imagines that Anna Taylor-Joy is eating his burger at the end of The Menu, and I think of that every time we’re there.
Kitchen tool: My great lemon zester. I’ve realized that being a good cook is mostly just learning to season things well. Lemon zest can elevate almost any meal. It adds zest to a salad, tops off a soup, and brings the perfect punch of acidity to a pasta, without being overbearing.
