Hopie Stockman Hill Does This Cool Thing Whenever She Travels
The textile designer on easy dinners, a pattern-filled bedroom, and the earrings she wears every day. Plus, a great thing about dating in your 40s.
Hi! How are you? Today, we’re featuring Hopie Stockman Hill, who founded the textile brand Block Shop, along with three of her four sisters. For years, I’ve loved their weekly dispatch, Notes From the Studio, which they describe as “the best newsletter on the Internet, according to our mom.” Also, do you remember her gloriously colorful house tour?
Hopie has a knack for infusing everyday moments with joy. Case in point: she’s a big fan of Trader Joe’s flowers. “Just stuff a vase with a few bunches of whatever’s in season, and it will be sculptural and fragrant.” She and her husband, Russell, just welcomed a baby, and below Hopie shares photos of his nursery, with a cool rocking chair and alllll the patterns. Let’s go!
Slang: My three sisters and I spend so much time texting that our communication has become a shorthand of meme references and one-liners from our six-year-old niece. Our niece coined ‘scribble-scrabble,’ which she uses to describe chaotic situations. Now we’ll say stuff like, ‘Is this pattern design good in a wild way, or just straight up scribble-scrabble?’
Movie: Maurice, a deliciously patrician gay coming-of-age love story from Merchant Ivory set in Edwardian England, hits all the notes for me. We’ve got late ‘80s Hugh Grant. We’ve got rushing through the halls of Cambridge to get to Latin class. We’ve got landed gentry, we’ve got knee socks and tweed, we’ve got sustained eye contact through the candelabras as the candles melt to nubbins. This E.M. Forster adaptation is serving gay Downtown Abbey and it’s a 10/10.
Dinner: I adore Samin Nosrat as a human, a cook, and THE roast chicken authority. The thing I make most at home is her buttermilk chicken. You brine the whole chicken in buttermilk and salt overnight (it’s so easy; trust!), which somehow yields *the* juiciest chicken that makes everyone happy, and leftovers are perfect in soups and salads.
Music to play when entertaining: My sisters and I like making playlists, and this one is fun for an evening hang. The tunes are upbeat but won’t overpower your conversation. T. Rex always makes me feel like sashaying across the room in a slinky dress (even if my current reality is breastfeeding in leggings while eating a burrito), so Cosmic Dancer is my favorite song on here.
