Studio Nick Spain

I'm extremely biased because I am married to him, but Nick is a super talented interiors and garden designer, and writer, too.

Here's a piece I wrote about him that tells the story on my Substack:

Last week, my husband, Nick Spain, was featured in The New York Times Design Finds column – a significant milestone worth celebrating for the second act of his career, which has (literal) roots in an experiment from years ago.

When I first met Nick at a party called Hello Love on Valentine’s Day (the universe was a bit on the nose there), he was working in social media. The work was demanding, uninspiring, and taking a toll on his mental health and sense of self.

Then one day back in early 2016, amidst the misalignment of his day job, something interesting happened.

He came up with an idea, born from his desire to create and get back in regular touch with nature, where he challenged himself to put together an arrangement of flowers and post about it weekly, on a new IG channel he called Flowers on Sunday.

That was it, that was the experiment, not for anyone else but him. Just a commitment to the act of regularly creating beauty. (cue foreshadowing music)

So every Sunday he’d collect flowers and branches. Some were purchased at the store, others clipped from trees in McGolrick Park, or cuttings taken along the side of the road.

A selection of Flowers on Sunday

He kept it up for a full year, and then something shifted.

He discovered that there might be more to this weekly habit, so he decided to take classes at Sprout Home Brooklyn, which then led him to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where he went on to get formal training in horticulture.

From there, he began getting paid to create with plants. First at a company that made botanical installations in all types of urban spaces, and then he founded his own business – Arthur’s – creating backyard gardens and terraces for his own clients throughout the city.

Around that same time, we’d also purchased our house (a falling down 19th century rectory/squirrel hotel) upstate, and were deep into the renovation.

It quickly became clear that his innate talent for creating beauty wasn’t just limited to plants. I remember being shocked, throughout the process, at how innately he was able to visualize the arrangement of what belongs in a space, and see the house as a cohesive single concept made up of distinct, color saturated individual rooms that come together to tell one beautiful story.

When the house was finally completed in 2018, we had the good fortune of catching the eye of an editor at Architectural Digest, and I remember him being excited about how the article’s mention of Arthur’s Plants would be great for exposure for potential garden clients.

But to his surprise, the bulk of the interest he did receive was about his interior design work, and from that point onward he began to mix in more and more interiors and renovations with gardens, eventually rebranding into the multi-disciplinary design company, Studio Nick Spain.

So all that is to say: the experiments we do and the interests we pursue just for fun or for ourselves can often contain hidden insights or directions – and they can lead us somewhere even better, where we didn’t know we were headed.